Will This Be on the Test?
One Parent Studies the
History of Virginia’s SOLs
By MERIWETHER DELANO GILMORE
We started to hear rumblings about the Standards of Learning when our
first daughter started preschool. Friends with older children warned us that
our precious, only-one-in-the-world baby would go off to kindergarten,
become a percentage point and learn to fill in an oval with a #2 pencil.
As a parent, it became my job to figure it all out, or at least figure it
out enough so that I was satisfied with the answers.
My love of history has always taught me that if I want to understand
something, I need to go back to the beginning. What tests did I remember
taking in elementary school in Warsaw, Virginia, in the ’70s? I remember
worn, wooden floors and the tall, tall windows that sometimes birds would
fly through. But I do not remember bubble sheets and the stress of an
assessment. So when did they appear in schools? read
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