Standardized testing is at cross purposes with many of the most important purposes of public education. It doe... — Randi Weingarten

Standardized testing is at cross purposes with many of the most important purposes of public education. It doesn't measure big-picture learning, critical thinking, perseverance, problem solving, creativity or curiosity, yet those are the qualities great teaching brings out in a student.

Author: Randi Weingarten

Insight: There's a real tension here that most of us sense without quite naming it. We want our kids—or we remember wanting, as students—to develop the kind of thinking that actually matters in life. The ability to wrestle with a messy problem, to keep going when something's hard, to ask questions nobody's asked before. Those are the skills that lead to actual breakthroughs, whether in science or relationships or figuring out how to solve something at work. But then testing season arrives, and suddenly the focus narrows to what can be bubbled in or typed into a box. The system starts optimizing for measurability rather than meaning, which seems reasonable until you realize it crowds out the very things that make learning feel alive. A teacher who's passionate about igniting curiosity gets pressured to drill test-taking strategies instead. The irony is sharp: we've created a system to measure educational progress that actually works against the deeper kind of learning it's supposedly protecting. The sticking point isn't that some assessment exists—it's that when one narrow metric becomes the primary way we evaluate schools and students, it inevitably reshapes what actually happens in classrooms. Teachers are smart and well-meaning, but they're also human and responding to what they're measured on. The question worth asking isn't whether testing itself is bad, but whether we've let it squeeze out space for the learning that's hardest to quantify and easiest to lose sight of.