The Overuse of Standardized Tests

In her newly published book, These Schools Belong to You and Me: Why We Can’t Afford to Abandon Our Public Schools, co-author Emily Gasoi contends that the continued overuse of standardized tests lowers the quality of education and misrepresents the hard work of students, teachers and their schools.  She believes that “test-based accountability encourages schools to emphasize outmoded instructional practices, such as prioritizing rote learning and correct answers over inquiry, holding all students to a one-size-fits-all benchmark, discouraging collaboration, undervaluing creative and critical thinking, and assessing discrete, decontextualized skills, all of which runs counter to what is now being touted as twenty-first century teaching and learning.”