Cruel and Unusual Punishment: Testing Kindergartners
 |
| Kindergarten Entrance Exam (image from Flickr, by emrank) |
It is already crazy how much we test high school students. In addition to the usual internal quizzes and exams used by teachers to assess whether their students are grasping the concepts and skills being taught in their classes, there are increasing numbers of high stakes standardized state and federal exams like No Child Left Behind and high school exit exams.
The teacher-initiated exams generally take up less than a class period and are a useful self-check of learning and teaching. The high stakes exams, on the other hand, take up days or weeks of instructional time and have little or no benefit to students or teachers. They are almost entirely a manifestation of right-wing paranoia that teachers are spending instructional time