Christie Plickert’s twin fourth-graders Luke and Rachel have been through a good amount of standardized testing at Norwich Elementary School this year.
“No matter how many times I try to tell them, ‘Just do your best, you’ll do fine,’ they still get some anxiety,” Plickert said, adding that they’ve “handled it pretty well.”
That anxiety led Plickert to stand with other teachers and students of the Hilliard City School District to support Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, at a Tuesday news conference as he called for more effective and reliable standardized testing through the re-authorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act — also known as No Child Left Behind.
“We need to work on and fix a piece of legislation that is over a decade old,” Hilliard City Schools Superintendent John Marschhausen said about No Child Left Behind, which was approved in 2001.
In the library at Alton Darby Elementary School, Brown outlined the Support Making Assessments Reliable and Timely (SMART) Act, which would reevaluate or eliminate redundant and outdated tests.