Anya Kamenetz
Education journalist, author, and advisor to the Aspen Institute
The Test: Why Our Schools Are Obsessed With Standardized Testing, But You Don’t Have To Be
A dozen years after No Child Left Behind, our schools, districts, and states are being held accountable for weak, limited, and standardized measures of math and reading skills only. Standardized test scores are being used in an unprecedented way to decide the fates of states, districts, students, schools, teachers and principals. Tests and test prep are increasingly coming to define school for millions of students, with the most intense consequences falling on schools that serve the most vulnerable. Anya Kamenetz is the lead digital education reporter for NPR, and previously covered technology, innovation, sustainability and social entrepreneurship for five years as a staff writer for Fast Company. Her latest book, The Test: Why Our Schools Are Obsessed with Standardized Testing, But You Don’t Have To Be posits a debate is raging over whether students take too many tests, the quality of the tests themselves, and whether the stakes are too high. How do we fix this and build a future of better tests and real accountability? To answer that question, we need to think deeply about what all children really need to be happy and successful.

Upcoming Events
Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart
Nicholas Carr
Author of The Shallows, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and other acclaimed books. Former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review.
Christine Rosen
Senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, columnist for Commentary magazine, and a cohost of The Commentary Magazine podcast
ON ZOOM
John Lewis: A Life
David Greenberg, Ph.D.
Professor of history and of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University
David Blight, Ph.D.
Sterling Professor of History and African American Studies and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, Yale University
ON ZOOM
The Grieving Body: How the Stress of Loss Can Be an Opportunity for Healing
Mary-Frances O’Connor, Ph.D.
Professor of psychology and director of the Grief, Loss and Social Stress (GLASS) Lab, University of Arizona
Meghan Riordan Jarvis, MA, LICSW
Psychotherapist, author, and podcast host
ON ZOOM