"[T]oday's schools are driven by assessment to a degree that surprised us....[T]ests [are being] used as ends in themselves, rather than as one means to assist in intellectual development of the individual student, or even as a reasonable method of public accountability.
"Tests -- usually standardized tests, but even including tests that teachers devise to monitor and judge week-to-week progress -- are omnipresent and constantly on everyone's minds. Teachers, administrators and students are preoccupied with scores and grades -- often against their better judgment, and often against the values that parents, students and they themselves say that the schools should reflect....
"More than one researcher returned from the school sites with stories about how schools elsewhere had boosted their scores by encouraging low-performing students not to attend school on the day of the [state-developed] examinations.
"In another unnamed school, according to another rumor, twelfth-graders took revenge on the school's administrators, who had cancelled the traditional Senior Skip Day, by deliberately scoring poorly on the tests....
"[T]hese [standardized] tests have encroached powerfully on the schools and on teaching....
"Many teachers and school administrators agree that the emphasis on and uses of testing reflect an educational practice out of control. Points, credits and scores are pursued and accumulated as if they represented the core values of the high school....
"[T]eachers have articulate, idealistic educational goals for their students, but amidst the pressures they face, they proceed to test in predictable ways, often modeling their approaches on the externally developed examinations they see most often, the standardized achievement test....
"In many cases, review for a test meant the teacher coaching the youngsters about the specific pieces of information to be included on the exam, along with the appropriate answer."
[Source: Inside Schools: A Collaborative Approach, by J. Myron Atkin, Donald Kennedy, and Cynthia L. Patrick (Falmer Press) -- published 20 years ago, in 1989.]
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