WEST HARTFORD–Friday is assessment day in Room 111 at Braeburn Elementary School. Nancy Wildt, the school’s literacy tutor, spends the day handing out worksheets full of reading passages with blanks in them, having students answer open-ended questions and timing students as they read paragraphs out loud, marking down mistakes. Usually, Wildt works with multiple students […]

WEST HARTFORD–Braeburn Elementary School’s fifth-grade teachers commandeered the brick conference room off Principal Natalie Simpson’s office the week before winter break. Graded papers full of circles partially colored in and open-ended problems like ’23/3=?’ spilled out of manila folders and littered the table. Shannon Mlodzinski, the statistician of the group, announced the results of the […]

First of three parts WEST HARTFORD–Xavier Rosa is stuck. The fourth-grader at Braeburn Elementary School knows that five is not a factor of 57-he got the question right on his homework assignment. And he knows that any number that ends in five is divisible by five. But his teacher, Michele Cashman, presses him to remember […]