Now is a perfect time for the change. Let’s just stop. Let’s scrap those spring state tests altogether. If government and educational leaders balk — and the Biden administration recently betrayed us by putting the spring tests back on the schedule — I hope parents will opt their children out of state testing on a national basis.

Here’s the vital number that inspired my retirement and this post: During my final year teaching, all classes were obliged to test for more than 20% of the school year — two benchmark tests, PARCC (the year of two, separate administrations), unit tests prepared by an outside consulting firm, and weekly quizzes designed by departments to prepare students for the unit tests. That left 36 * 0.8 = 28.8 weeks available for instruction, except the number was actually smaller. We had to go over MAP test results with students, devote time to PBIS behavioral support plans, and all those nitty gritty little extras that suck minutes at odd moments.

Instead of trying to stuff 240 days’ (48 school weeks) worth of knowledge into 28 weeks of available time, this nation desperately needs to abandon remotely concocted, utopian master plans and, instead, hand control back to the classroom teacher.

(Let’s be clear: The Common Core standards work poorly in academically-disadvantaged communities. teaching that much content effectively would require more than the full 36 weeks of a school year. In a mere 28 weeks, even the most gifted teachers and students have a snowball’s chance in hell.)

Eduhonesty: Sometimes nobody’s listening. Various school and government leaders keep pushing for testing right now and somehow we have to get their attention. We have to pull the lever that will send this train off the track. Because the train must be derailed. We have been throwing students off the train for decades anyway, straight into ravines off bridges set so high that no one can see the bottom in the mists below. Lost kids? We’ve lost so many as our tests and standards hammered children, children who were sometimes happy to dive out that train window or fill out the high school early exit forms.

I favor channeling Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi. We can be peaceful. We can behave like civilized, sensible parties in this ongoing dispute over the urgent requirement for megatons of data dynamite. Not everyone has to stay home to make opting out work. All we need are ENOUGH students out eating ice cream and watching Netflix. As the numbers of students who opt out grows, the reliability and validity of test results falls. We no longer know if the population we are measuring reflects the population as a whole. We can destroy the usefulness of the data. Once we do, those tests should be relegated back to their old status of a useful exercise in intelligence gathering, rather than the purpose of a whole year’s worth of instruction.

We must do this. I know I sound like a gouged, repeating piece of vinyl on an antique record player, but here’s one more repetition of my driving theme: These tests are clobbering kids psychologically.

Maybe my readers are not having my classroom experience. Not all kids are taking a hard hit. Children who test well tend to do alright, for example. But many children do not test well. Anxious and academically-deficient kids feel especially beaten up by our spring rite of passage. I believe state achievement tests certainly form part of the rising problem of anxiety disorders in children today.

Sobering numbers have been masked by the pandemic. COVID numbers have taken over the news, leaving large issues in footnotes. Here’s one such number: “According to the National Institutes of Health, nearly 1 in 3  of all adolescents ages 13 to 18 will experience an anxiety disorder. These numbers have been rising steadily; between 2007 and 2012, anxiety disorders in children and teens went up 20%.” (Anxiety in Teens is Rising: What’s Going On? – HealthyChildren.org; Anxiety and depression in children: Get the facts | CDC)

These annual tests are also responsible for today’s pie-in-the-sky curricula. In many locations, predetermined curricula demand that kids learn what may be 48 weeks of work in only 28 weeks of school. That’s impossible for all but extraordinarily gifted kids. The result? If the tests themselves don’t put cracks in kids’ psyches, that curriculum death march can do the job all by itself. Schools that try to cover the entire content of the test by spring may simply be moving much too fast for either retention or comprehension.

Please, please, please. Reader, do you have children? Grandchildren? Don’t let them take those annual spring achievement tests.