Massachusetts: Stop over-testing our children. It's time for a moratorium on high-stakes state-wide testing to reassess the direction our schools are moving in.
Why is this important?
Our children in public K-12 schools are suffering from the unintended consequences of high-stakes testing, such as curriculum narrowing to focus more exclusively on tested subjects and content (English and Math, at the expense of other subjects like science, social studies, and the arts), more test prep and drilling in early elementary (despite going against the advice of early education experts and developmental psychologists for more play-based experiential learning), loss of instructional time due to school wide testing days and test prep activities (and even more days of testing if we move to PARCC), loss of computer lab opportunities for actual learning due to new computerized PARCC tests. It's time to end this trend.
