No more tests! Challenging standardized education. (Ways of Learning).

Publication: Mothering

Publication Date: 01-NOV-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 Mothering Magazine

Take out your number--two pencils, boys and girls--standardized testing season is upon us once again. Children's backpacks will be bursting with test-prep guides and practice exams, classroom calendars will be counting down until the big day, and parents will anxiously await that letter in the mail to find out if their children can advance to the next grade. Thanks to our country's renewed dedication to "high standards and accountability," our children's education has been turned into a stressful marathon of boredom, superficial thinking, and, of course, filling in the blanks.

Few education "experts" seem interested in taking the advice of Albert Einstein, who warned that "Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts." In fact, our nation is busier than ever making sure there is a number attached to every child who walks through the schoolhouse gates. In Massachusetts, the 17-hour MCAS exam is longer than the Massachusetts Bar Exam. California's Stanford 9 exams require children as young as seven to sit through as many as ten days of multiple-choice testing. Recently, a second grader from South San Francisco's Martin Elementary School got so nervous about taking the Stanford 9s that he threw up on his exam.

The Growing Movement against the Tests

Change is on the horizon. The testing takeover of our schools has precipitated a wide variety of spirited actions that are only the beginning of grassroots mobilization for real education. For instance, look at the moms from Scarsdale, New York, who kept two-thirds of their eighth graders home from school last spring to stage a boycott against the state science exams. "We're driving them out of the school and bringing them home or to a house where there's a babysitter," said Debby Rapaport, one of the main parent organizers.

That same spring, more than 1,800 students, teachers, and parents traveled in school buses from New York City to the state capitol in Albany in the biggest demonstration against high-stakes tests to date. Most of the participants came from...

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