In your editorial against requiring high school juniors to take the ACT two months earlier than they do now, you neglected to ask an important question: Why do they need to take it at all (“Don’t mess with the ACT,” March 7)?
Standardized testing is the kudzu of education, overtaking and strangling the life out of any program that doesn’t allow for efficient and “measurable” results. Ignorant politicians claim that testing results can provide accountability for schools, but, as stories in the Tribune have shown, standardized testing has actually driven out substantive and interesting subjects like history, physics and dinosaurs in favor of sterile test prep courses. This isn’t just sad, it’s criminal.
We are raising generations of children to think that being educated means filling in ovals and getting the right answers. We are forcing teachers to become assembly-line supervisors instead of creative inspirations for their students.
And after all this we wonder why students grow bored and restless in school and why good teachers are leaving the profession in droves. Truly putting students first would mean assessing them in more meaningful and complex ways than standardized testing can provide.
