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Among the defenders of standardized testing, there are the true believers. With the best of intentions, they sincerely believe that standardized tests, or, to use the now popular buzzwords, "assessments and accountability", are the key to improving educational quality. In fact, leading educational journals, magazines, newsletters, and conferences today all play up the idea that testing is the best way to "align" local curriculum with state standards, to hold schools "accountable", and to make decisions based on hard data instead of fuzzy interpretations. What is more, commercial interests who sell tests, who sell software to analyze tests, who offer polls and reviews of test results, and who offer means to improve test scores have all contributed to the momentum of the testing machine. The true believers even have proof--hard evidence--that the assessment and accountability movement is making real progress improving the quality of our schools.

What is the proof? Test scores. Yes, you read that correctly. The proof for the true believers that testing is making a difference is higher test scores on further tests. In any article you care to read claiming progress due to testing, you will find that the bottom line for the true believers is higher scores on still more tests. Alice in Wonderland, by comparison, seems to make perfect sense.

Never mind that norm-referenced standardized testing can narrow the focus of subject matter in a curriculum, never mind that the testing encourages rote memory over higher-order thinking, never mind that testing glosses over differences between learning styles, level of development or social background, never mind that our younger students are asked to just "do their best" when they clearly cannot understand the meaning of a particular test question and their teacher must turn them away, never mind that our older students have learned to "strategize" on tests and "find" the "most correct answer" instead of evaluating for themselves what is truth, what is fabricated, and what cannot be supported by the premises beneath. If the test scores are rising, so must the quality of the instruction, they believe.

In the world of business today, decisions are driven by data and by numbers. From marketing polling, to computer-aided design, to production line speed; from share prices, to profit analysis, to long term employee pension plans: everything in the modern business world revolves around numbers, data and analysis. In the world of science, too, precision data is the basis for advances in medicine, environmental science, exploration and more. Perhaps educators can be forgiven for thinking that the same sort of data-driven decisions could apply in schools. However, schools are not production lines, and children are not science experiments or numbers. Public schools do not have a profit motive and there is no computer-aided design for the development of human beings.

Rising test scores do not equate with rising quality of instruction. Actually, a strong case can be made that rising test scores equate with a lower quality of learning, assuming the goal is to give students the widest possible exposure to knowledge and to have them learn to think for themselves. There is only one real way to judge the quality of learning in our public schools, and that is to painstakingly evaluate each individual student over the course of each school year and over their school career for personal progress and common milestones. That means teachers who rigorously assess students one-on-one, that means parents who track and reinforce their child's progress every step of the way, and that means principals and administrators who observe, encourage and correct their staff based on one rule: the individual child comes first.

The fall-back position of the true believers is this: standardized testing, or "accountability and assessment" is just one piece of the puzzle. They claim that testing is a valuable addition to the toolbox that already contains individual student assessments, parent and teacher input, and other tools. What is the harm in having some hard numbers on student performance to evaluate? Yet, there can never be a compromise with poison. Testing programs such as those introduced in Readington schools this year can only lead to the same old horserace of comparing often meaningless percentile scores at the expense of time for the child-centered assessments and enriched learning that, admittedly, is much more difficult to implement but far more effective at producing happy, self-reliant adults. It is time for the true believers to change their religion.