How strange has education become? When I was in high school, I confess I skipped school every so often to go to Point Defiance Park in Tacoma, Washington. Groups of us would stand near the bus stop while the truant officer glared. Truant officers didn’t seem much more effective back then than they are today. But my friends and I would never have taken the bus across town on a day when we had an important test, and our parents were justifiably upset when the school called to tell them what we had done — even outraged in some cases.* Parenting tip: Grounding a reader doesn’t work well if you take her to the library first.

But today skipping school may even be sanctioned by parents. Our irrational tests have spawned opt out movements across the nation as parents attempt to pull their children out of harm’s way. More parents all the time are opting their children out of standardized testing.

I am now recommending opting out in my blog. I feel I have no choice. The years keep passing by, and longer, more complicated, and steadily less appropriate tests continue to come down the pike, despite numerous pleas by educators and others. If COVID could not stop the march of the standardized tests — and even the Biden administration wants testing to go forward — then I support parents taking control and exempting their children from this ritual.

Someone must take control SOON. As it stands now, no one seems able to answer one vital question related to the kids at the bottom of the testing pile-up: How are we going to fix the kids that we are breaking, the ones not lucky enough to stay home or in study halls on test days? Because while many US students are rolling with the US testing regimen, others are taking a volley of regular hits to their self-confidence and self-esteem that will not be easily — if ever — repaired.

We are using kids to get our government data, and “using” is exactly the right word. Then we give them their test scores, showing them exactly where they are in respect to everyone else. We have done this for decades, of course — but that annual test gained orders of magnitude of importance over the last twenty years, a legacy of No Child Left Behind. Meanwhile, electives and vocational/technical education faded or even vanished as school districts threw more and more of their resources toward classes directly designed to improve test scores.

Please, readers, especially older readers who went to school in saner times: Try to imagine being a kid in the 30th percentile on a measure that you have been told is the most important aspect of your whole school year. You can’t help but feel you failed, even if there was no way to succeed, for whatever reason. Because sometimes there is no way to succeed, whether it’s because you speak Spanish at home or because you missed months of school due to a traumatic brain injury or any of the thousands of reasons why different students don’t score well.

Eduhonesty: I am not against testing. We do have to be able to compare Memphis to Chicago to Seattle. We do have to identify at-risk groups. But we don’t need the Godzilla-like MONSTER that today’s testing has become. Testing this spring will be fed by toxic fears and researcher radiation in a time when childhood is struggling and too often losing its fights against electronic and other forces.

Tests can be done without structuring a district’s whole instruction around beating the test — a process that makes education less fun and also devalues learning for its own sake. Districts should not be losing weeks of education to tests — especially since the educational losses from that time hit the most disadvantaged kids the hardest. During my years teaching, I never got a SINGLE, ACTIONABLE piece of information back from a state standardized test in time to be of any use to me in the classroom.

Weeks of lost time — with ZERO to show for it in the classroom itself.

That’s absurd. That’s true. And that’s why we have to pull back, pull our kids out if necessary, and shut this ridiculous data pipeline down.

*I was enough of a nerd that my mother actually felt reassured when I skipped school to walk the beach with friends. When busted I would end up with the special note, “Please excuse my daughter because she was indisposed.” If I was sick, the note read, “Please excuse my daughter because she was ill.” She would explain to me that she was not going to lie for me since lying was unacceptable. But going to the beach obviously was acceptable. Across the years, I remain grateful for my wacky parenting.

Thanks to all my readers, Jocelyn Turner