My name is Dr. Trudy Jermanovich

“How did we get education so backwards?

We place enormous academic pressure on five-year-olds. Kindergarten children face benchmarks, assessments, data meetings, interventions, academic comparisons, and expectations once reserved for much older students. Some are labeled behind before they have even had time to develop.

Then, at eighteen, we suddenly become concerned about the anxiety created by grades.

So an eighteen-year-old deserves time to adjust without the pressure of letter grades, but a five-year-old must be assessed, compared, and placed on a performance track almost immediately.
We place children under years of testing pressure and then treat their scores as though they summarize their education and predict their future.

Plenty of students graduated without impressive test scores and became wildly successful entrepreneurs, artists, tradespeople, educators, leaders, innovators, and community builders. Others earned exceptional scores and academic honors, yet struggled later to find purpose, direction, or success.

And yes, the opposite is also true. Some high-scoring students become enormously successful, while some low-scoring students continue to struggle. That reinforces the point. Test scores do not determine a person’s future. They record how someone performed on a particular test.

Only 24 percent of employed Americans even hold a professional certification or license, and holding one does not mean taking standardized tests regularly. The percentage of adults routinely taking these tests is clearly much smaller.
If most Americans will never routinely take a standardized test after leaving school, why has high-stakes testing become the standard by which we measure success in school?

We have built an education system around a form of evaluation that most people will rarely, if ever, encounter in adult life.”

H/T - Dr. Brad Johnson
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Let’s give teachers the ability to choose what is needed for their classroom.