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Sometimes a simple analogy can make clear what would otherwise take hours of study, although most analogies can be taken too far. This analogy will strike home with many fathers who have children in the Readington schools:

Suppose you are in the market for a used minivan for use on weekend trips for your family. You want something inexpensive, but reliability is key because your family will be belted into this vehicle. You have located two minivans for consideration. Both are the same brand, the same year and both have about the same mileage.

Minivan "A" has just been through a NJ State inspection and passed with a sticker good for two years. That is all you know about this vehicle, however. Minivan "B" has not recently been through NJ State Inspection. However, the owner has an extensive history on the vehicle, backed up by receipts and records. The oil was changed every 3000 miles. The brakes were replaced 5000 miles ago. The tires are one year old. The exhaust system is original and getting a little ragged, but a mechanic has been through it and the owner has the estimate to fix it. You have these records and more, plus the phone number of the owner's mechanic.

Which minivan will you purchase for your family? For many the answer is obvious. The NJ State Inspection merely measures a series of safety and environmental factors at one point in time. Nearly everyone knows a story about someone who went through inspection successfully only to have the vehicle brakes or lights or some other item fail the next week. The State inspection is merely a standardized production line that gives inspectors a cursory look at the vehicle. The results are questionable at best. Minivan "A" is really an unknown. It passed inspection, but who really knows what is under the hood?

Minivan "B", on the other hand, is a known quantity. The records are there for examination and the mechanic is available for questioning. The vehicle history gives a much more accurate and much more complete picture of the vehicle condition. A recent State inspection would really add nothing to the picture.

Standardized tests, which are not objective measures of knowledge, are the equivalent of minivan "A". They take a static snapshot of the performance of a child on a test at one point in time. That performance is then "normed"  or compared against many other test-takers and a percentile score is produced.  You know how your child compared to other children taking the test, but you don't know if those other children are high performers or low performers. In short, you really know nothing meaningful.  What is going through your child's head before, during or after the test is anybody's guess based on a percentile test score. Some children, like some cars, may take tests very well. Some may not.

Child-centered, developmentally appropriate measurements are Minivan "B". The student portfolio system, a rigorous and continuing series of individual evaluations kept by teachers over time, show progress right there in black and white. Running records and individualized assessments made by teachers over the course of a school year indicate strengths and weaknesses of student development. Quizzes and tests of objective facts over the course of a school year indicate growth in knowledge. Notes and comments recorded by parents and teachers point out the specific concerns of those who feed and care for the child. With such information in front of a parent or teacher, what more would a standardized test normed against many thousands of strangers really add to the picture?

Probably nothing. Standardized testing can, however, add significant costs to the school budget, detract from available teaching and individualized assessment time, cause younger children to become upset, cause older children to become despondent, cause the tracking of students into inappropriate programs based on a couple hours of filling in bubbles, and cause parents and teachers to miss the entire forest for the one single test-score tree in front of them. Which car will you purchase?