School Children Should Spend More Time Learning, Less Time Testing

From Daniel Cody at Left on the Lake:
The cover story in the latest edition of Newsweek asks the question, "The New First Grade: Too Much Too Soon?" and leads with this paragraph:

But by November, Ashlyn, then 5, wasn't measuring up. No matter how many times she was tested, she couldn't read the 130-word list her teacher gave her: words like "our," "house" and "there." She became so exhausted and distraught over homework, including a weekly essay on "my favorite animal" or "my family vacation", that she would put her head down on the dining-room table and sob. "She would tell me, 'I can't write a story, Mama. I just can't do it'," recalls Tiffany, a stay-at-home mom
This is what happens when you turn schools into nothing more than factories where districts are measured only in terms of test scores and how many children they pass on to the next grade instead of things like overall student achievement and the number of well-rounded students that graduate.

But our society and federal government are addicted to testing and meaningless 'standards' even for first graders.

Personally, I don't remember being able to write my own complete name in the first grade, and yet as the Newsweek article points out, there are 5 year olds who are being labeled as 'failures' because they can't write an essay. It's the sad result of a meaningless mandate set out by the federal government and an overzealous desire by conservative school districts to try to fix everything by throwing a test at it.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for accountability and measuring student success. But not at the expense of labeling 5 year olds as 'failures' because they're so busy testing on the 130 words in the example above, that they don't spend any time actually learning what the words mean.

I'm thinking many of us agree!