This is a link to  Standardized Testing: Modern Bloodletting at the Cool Cat Teacher Blog.

If you have been reading about banning high-stakes testing, and my criticism of the Common Core State Standards, and more recently the Next Generation of Science Standards, then you will find Vicki Davis’ blog post very pertinent and important.  It is an important post in the conversation about high-stakes testing and the standards movement.

She finishes her blog article with this statement that I think embodies her thinking on testing and standards:

Perhaps I should go back and restate. I think that perhaps standardized testing is the modern bloodletting of education. We are zapping our resources, our time, and our energy on something that is not truly measuring what our kids are learning. We are bringing all of the kids to the middle and bringing down our gifted and we are missing a valuable opportunity to really personalize learning for students.

The fact is that we are falling behind in international test scores. Is it because we’re so busy testing that we’ve hurt learning? Is our desire to improve our test scores actually having the opposite effect because we’re focusing on the wrong thing? We have to get better, but how.

If you improve every student in the country then the entire country will improve.

I also recommend that you add Cool Cat Teacher Blog to your blog roll, and visit her site frequently.