At Last, Parents Rebel against Standardized Tests
by Nat Hentoff
This article appeared in Cato.org on May 9, 2012.
Around the country, more parents are protesting — and some even boycotting — the standardized collective tests that grade the progress of entire classes and whole schools. In New York City and state, where I live — and elsewhere — the results can cause teachers to lose their jobs and can shut down whole schools.As for the kids, a parent, Coleen Mingo, describes the stress on her sixth-grade son, and on many other students nationally, in “A testing culture out of control,” (NYDailyNews.com, May 2, 2012):
“He worked hard on an unending slew of practice tests. He obsessed over each mistake as if it were proof he was doomed... ”
The Daily News article notes that a 2011 report commissioned by Congress and conducted by the National Academy of Sciences Committee found that America’s test-based accountability systems “have not increased student achievement.”
Moreover, an author of the report charged that “there is widespread teaching to the test and gaming of the systems that reflects a wasteful use of resources and leads to inaccurate or inflated measures of performance.”
And what of the many students who fail — and whose individual problems and backgrounds are not at all known to the test-makers? As I’ve learned from some of them through the years,