Teaching is Not Testing

In today's New York Times, in article entitled, "Dear Teacher, Johnny is Skipping the Test," parents are beginning to stand up to the test taking craze that has taken over this country and has undermined real teaching and learning in our schools. Parents from forty-seven middle and high schools throughout New York City have kept their children from taking the field tests which is administered to students in order to identify questions for future exams. Pearson, the company that designs these exams billed the state over $7 million dollars for testing services, of which 30 percent goes to field testing. So rather than let their children be turned into test-taking drones, parents organized themselves and launched, Parent Voices, New York, an advocacy group working to provide fair and just ways that both schools and teachers can be evaluated. While New York is not the only city that publicizes and ranks teacher performance to test scores, there is reason to believe that the use of tests to evaluate schools, students and teachers is creating an enormous sense of anxiety, pressure and stress on our already over-burden institutions. And the response to these pressures, while in New York parents have organized, in other places such as Georgia and Washington, districts have admittingly cheated on exams and in other places such as Detroit, schools are shut down, or in Chicago entire faculty are fired so that school staff can be reconstituted. No child in the history of standardized testing has ever said or believed that the perfect way for me to demonstrate what I've learned in school is through a state test.