DeVos to State Ed Chiefs: Don’t Even Think About Testing Waivers This Year.

I have many issues with contemporary American education’s dependence upon standardized testing.

Testing students in order to grade teachers and schools is a misuse of student-completed standardized tests, and the high-stakes nature of this testing makes it a system begging to be gamed.

High-stakes testing narrows the broader curriculum because it wrongly bestows disproportionate value upon “tested subjects.”

Testing– and test prep– and test remediation– and retesting– costs states millions of dollars each year.

Standardized test results are of limited use in understanding student educational needs and pale in comparison to in-the-moment, informal teacher assessment based upon student behavior and performance on class assignments– conducted in classrooms across the nation every day– day to day– in order to understand where students are with mastering particular content and skills and in determining next steps to move those students forward in their learning.

However, in trying to teach during the COVID-19 pandemic…