Is It Time to Kill Annual Testing?

“Ask anyone from a school accountability expert to a parent of a school-age child, and you will get near universal agreement that we have a dysfunctional standardized-testing system in the United States.  Educators do not like the annual statewide tests: They inform school penalties, not learning, because the results come so late in the school year.  They fail to match any specific curriculum, and generally don’t deeply measure students’ analytical capabilities or the dispositions employers and colleges value.  Our nearly 20-year experiment with yearly federally required exams has boosted math scores, research indicates, but those gains have petered out as accountability pressures have grown more acute.  And efforts over the last decade to produce better tests have been met with tepid enthusiasm.”  This quote serves as the introduction to a recent article in Education Week titled,  “Is It Time to Kill Annual Testing?  It is well written and worth reading.