When testing overwhelms learning

and students are the losers

May 24, 2025

The KidsLearn Substack is written by Suki Wessling, known as “Prof.” Suki to her students. Scroll to the bottom for links to Suki’s work and more information.

I don’t hate standardized tests. In fact, when I was young I sorta loved them.1 So did one of my kids. They’re like the huge puzzles my family did over the dark winter holidays in the pre-digital days: there was a place for every piece, if only you searched hard enough.

I remember taking standardized tests a few times during my primary education, and I didn’t mind them. As a teacher of adults, then a parent, then a teacher of kids, I have always believed that such tests have a place in a well-functioning educational system. But somewhere along the way, we went from using tests a one of many measures of our educational system to believing that tests were, themselves, the education.

Good reasons for standardized testing

Like it or not, we don’t live in a world where every child has adults dedicated to their well-being. We live in a complex modern world that can easily form cracks large enough to swallow children whole. I think it’s important to be clear on the contract we make with others in the modern world:

One part of modern life is the essential trust we put in others: we outsource almost all of our vital life-maintaining functions to others.
The flip side of that trust is our need for verification: yes, we eat packaged food, but we want to make sure that no one is dumping rat poison into it.

The fact that we have a mass education system for our children necessitates standardized testing. When I was homeschooling my kids (who were enrolled in a public school program) I made a game of guessing their scores on various sections of the test. I was always right within a reasonable margin of error, not because I’m some sort of clairvoyant, but because I worked with my kids every day and didn’t need standardized tests to tell me how they were doing.

But not every parent knows their children’s skills so intimately. They outsource to their school with the trust that the school will properly educate their child. And not even every teacher can know each student so intimately. Even the best teacher in the best-equipped school with the most willing students won’t be able to assess all their needs.

So these are good arguments for reasonable amounts of standardized testing, perhaps multi-day national standardized testing two to three times during their schooling and locally supervised, subject-level testing yearly. But here’s the key: All of the “high stakes” must be removed. The tests are built to test our system, not to punish our children, our teachers, and our schools.

The progression from bad to worst to worstest ever

No Child Left Behind happened when my kids were just entering their elementary years. It was an unmitigated disaster for several reasons that I don’t feel I need to elaborate on:

Trying to get “all” children to achieve above the 50th percentile is… uh... impossible?
Punishing schools and teachers for the complex issues students present didn’t help the situation.
Sucking money out of the direct education of children into standardized testing only makes sense if your country already spends “too much” money educating children.
(^^^Joke Alert)

To be honest, I would be inclined to give Obama a pass, but I can’t. He and his education secretary, the execrable Arne Duncan, took the coffin that W. built and nailed it shut. I’m too dispirited to go into more detail than that.

American education has been in a tug-of-war, with students losing. Original photo by Anna Samoylova on Unsplash; toonified by Suki Wessling.

Buy me a coffee

A hyperfocus on health leads to illness

Here’s an analogy that I think is apt: Mammograms were a life-changing technology for women. But at some point, our medical establishment decided that “more is always better” and mandated an unnecessary focus on mammograms for younger, healthier women. It’s not surprising that they found “cancer” that never would have turned into anything and subjected the women to horrible treatment that they didn’t need.2

In the case of education, national testing a few times during their school years will result in enough data to get an idea of how the system as a whole is doing. But a hyperfocus on testing has led to illness in our educational system:

Teachers are forced to “teach to the test” to prove their worthiness.
Kids have come to think of tests as meaningless, when in fact testing can be a valuable tool in the learning process.
Communities have come to distrust their public schools, which are identified by numbers rather than faces and names.

Share KidsLearn with Prof. Suki

A few different ways to spend that money

Yes, this is a throw-money-at-it solution! Our schools are underfunded and malfunded. First of all, we have to do away with a tax structure that gives schools that serve wealthy kids more money than schools that serve poor kids. In fact, we could flip that equation and immediately our education system would perform better. But I’ll settle for equity.

We need to invest more in teacher education and training, and pay teachers more. Make teaching an attractive job like it used to be for people who love learning and want an important, community-oriented job. The fact is, we are now attracting people who don’t actually want to be teachers into teaching, while people who would love to teach feel they can’t afford to (I can speak to that) and don’t want the stress (which is part of why I never worked in the public schools). There is nothing more effective than a teacher who loves learning and loves teaching and loves children.

We can make sure that our school buildings themselves are healthy, pleasant places to be. We can integrate our schools back into our communities, welcoming retired older adults as volunteers (or heck, pay them so they don’t have to get a job as a greeter at Walmart) and giving everyone in the community, whether they have kids or not, a sense of the importance of this shared resource.

Our schools are an important shared resource

In this modern world, we place great trust in each other and in our systems so that each of us can do our individual life’s work without worrying about milking the cow or teaching the child their letters. We have to trust that our schools are valued and valuable, that they are a shared community resource that function to improve the lives of the students they serve as well as the future of our country.

The destruction of our trust in education will lead to a destruction of democracy itself. This is not a time to retreat into our separate camps on social media. This is a time to remind each other how much we depend on each other, and how much we value each other.