We as a nation have devoted enormous amounts of time and money to the focused goal of increasing test scores, and we have almost nothing to show for it. Just as importantly, there is no evidence that any test score increases represent the broader learning increases that were the true goals of the policy—goals such as critical thinking; the creation of lifelong learners; and more students graduating high school ready for college, career, and civic participation. Kevin Welner and William J. Mathis, National Education Policy Center; Reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act: Time to Move Beyond Test-Focused Policies

The number of standardized tests U.S. public school students take has exploded in the past decade, with most schools requiring too many tests of dubious value, according to the first comprehensive survey of the nation’s largest school districts. A typical student takes 112 mandated standardized tests between pre-kindergarten classes and 12th grade, a new Council of the Great City Schools study found. By contrast, most countries that outperform the U.S. on international exams test students three times during their school careers.

It portrays a chock-a-block jumble, where tests have been layered upon tests under mandates from Congress, the U.S. Department of Education and state and local governments, many of which the study argues have questionable value to teachers and students. Testing companies that aggressively market new exams also share the blame, the study said.

Jeffrey Cipriani teaches second grade at Orchard Gardens K-8 Pilot School in Boston. Even though his students are not in a grade that is required by federal law to be tested, the Boston Public Schools has him administer reading tests to his students three times a year. Because the tests are individual and can be as long as 90 minutes, it takes Cipriani about three weeks to test the whole class. “It’s a colossal amount of time,” he said. “I probably spend about 60 hours not teaching reading but just sort of giving those assessments. They’re valuable but not that valuable.”

The first comprehensive study of its kind --of the nation's largest school districts--confirms what many parents already know--public schools are imposing largely pointless standardized testing upon our children to an insane degree in order to comply with ill-conceived political notions of what education is supposed to accomplish:The study, of 66 urban school districts, portrays a near-smothering test mentality running completely amok in our public schools:Significantly, the study didn't even count teacher-created quizzes or tests, which are also employed ad nauseum, as anyone with elementary-school age children in public school can attest. After all, you have to take a lot of little tests to be prepared for the really important test. Don't even bother challenging the policy--the teacher's job is on the line so he/she truly has no choice. If the school's scores fall both the principal and teachers can and will be replaced. Meanwhile, the preparation alone for these tests (also not measured in the study) takes an enormous amount of time out of the school year, eating up hundreds of hours that could be spent on actual "teaching." Children as young as 8 years old are given lengthy instructions on how to "cope emotionally" with the testing, to "get a good night's sleep" and "eat a good breakfast," prior to taking tests that in many cases have absolutely no bearing on their personal education:And that's for second-graders.

As someone who attended public school in the late 60's and 70's I can barely remember having any homework, let alone taking 112 standardized tests. One of the few standardized tests I even remember was the SAT, which actually had a legitimate purpose -- to allow colleges to evaluate my likelihood of college success. The testing being implemented today is not for evaluative purposes, but designed to satisfy artificial "standards" placed by politicians on something as broad and unfathomable as "knowledge."

Testing, or "preparation" for testing, now begins in kindergarten in the public school system. At parent-teacher "back-to school nights" the focus is incessantly on preparation for these tests, because the school's Federal funding is now inextricably tied to and dependent upon repeated testing of its student body. In some states teacher's pay has been tied to test scores. No one wants to be labelled a "failing school." As a result, more and more so-called "homework," all geared toward the state testing, is dumped on these (younger and younger) kids.

The residual fallout from George Bush's disastrous "No Child Left Behind Act," a piece of feel-good social engineering shoved down Americans' throats in January 2002 is now doing for American children what the Iraq war did for the Middle East--it's ruining an entire generation. By tying teachers' and principals' jobs to the test scores of their students, this pernicious piece of legislation did exactly what you might expect. It turned our public schools into onerous test mills, forcing teachers to teach the test and only the test, filling kids' heads with rote methodology and memorized, often useless garbage while simultaneously destroying their love of learning forever:



Today’s 21-year-olds were in third grade in 2002, when the No Child Left Behind Act became law. For them and their younger siblings and neighbors, test-driven accountability policies are all they’ve known. The federal government entrusted their educations to an unproven but ambitious belief that if we test children and hold educators responsible for improving test scores, we would have almost everyone scoring as “proficient” by 2014. Thus, we would achieve “equality.” This approach has not worked.

Faced with mounting and bipartisan opposition to increased and often high-stakes testing in the nation’s public schools, the Obama administration declared Saturday that the push had gone too far, acknowledged its own role in the proliferation of tests, and urged schools to step back and make exams less onerous and more purposeful. Specifically, the administration called for a cap on assessment so that no child would spend more than 2 percent of classroom instruction time taking tests. It called on Congress to “reduce over-testing” as it reauthorizes the federal legislation governing the nation’s public elementary and secondary schools.

“At the federal, state and local level, we have all supported policies that have contributed to the problem in implementation,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a statement. “We can and will work with states, districts and educators to help solve it.”

Of course one of the effects of this incessant focus on testing has been to drive affluent parents to remove their children from the public school system altogether and put them in private schools where this mind-numbing testing is not the "norm." Which may have been its intent all along. Reacting to the public backlash against NCLB, President Obama permitted waivers affecting several states in 2010. However the core of the legislation remains in place, with the Obama Administration continuing to emphasize standardized testing. That is why the timing of this study is critical. In an amazing coincidence, this very morning the President began backpedaling on his test mania in a big way:And in a startling admission of his own incompetence, the Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, one of the the Administration's most avid promoters of standardized testing, acknowledged that the process "has not worked" and that kids are taking too many tests.A good start would be Duncan's removal. If he only views this as a "problem in implementation," then he has no ability to "solve" anything. The "implementation"the problem. How many more kids' educational lives do we have to ruin before admitting this was all a terrible mistake?