Please go to the website and endorse the resolution yourself. And ask your school board members to join the many other school districts around the country that have endorsed this important resolution.
It's time to get a large grassroots movement together to fight "data-driven," standardized test-best "accountability" -- to recognize that poor-quality quantitative data that bubble-in tests produce is too crude a tool to tell us about what is really important in school. Teachers need to be free to teach, rather than forced to drill. Districts need to develop analytic skills and nurture creativity in their students, not produce high test scores. The two are incompatible.
Take a stand. And urge your elected representatives to do the same. Our children's education depends on it. As education historian Diane Ravitch, one of the resolution's drafters, has so nicely put it:
Tests are a tool, not a goal. We should use them as needed, not let them use us. Their misuse has turned them into a weapon to narrow the curriculum, incentivize cheating, promote gaming the system, and control teachers. The more we rely on high-stakes standardized tests, the more we destroy students' creativity, ingenuity, and willingness to think differently, and the more we demoralize teachers. The important decisions that each of us will face in our lives cannot be narrowed to one of four bubbles. We must prepare students to live in the world, not to comply on command.The National Testing Resolution calls on all those who are concerned about the future of our society and the well-being of children to stop this mad obsession with test scores.I hope the revolt grows until it consumes the terrible cult of measurement that has now so distorted the means and ends of education.
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