The Misplaced Power of the Standardized Test

At the recent Save Our Schools rally, Matt Damon spoke eloquently about the value of teaching, real teaching, and its supremacy over standardized testing. There is no pat answer to the problems our public schools face every day, but one thing is clear—tying funding and evaluation to standardized testing is NOT improving learning. Period. It creates a culture of fear and anxiety rather than a culture of learning and innovation. It sacrifices valuable teaching days to the administration of a battery of tests that have only a meager connection to the learning that is and should be happening in the classroom and beyond. Learning is not memorization or mastering the tricks to the test. It is application, contextual understanding, inspiration, creation. That is what real-world learning asks of us.