Submitted by Gregory Alderete.
If you wanted to design a system to crush intellectual curiosity, stifle creativity, and reward mindless conformity, you’d invent standardized testing. And we did. What began as a well-intentioned effort to measure academic progress has metastasized into a rigid, joyless sorting mechanism that punishes nuance, discourages deep thinking, and reduces students to data points.
Testing doesn’t educate—it drills. It doesn’t challenge students to understand—it trains them to regurgitate. We’ve built an entire educational culture around the shallow pursuit of correct answers, where success is measured not by insight, but by how well you fill in bubbles. Real learning—the kind that transforms, that sticks, that ignites a student’s mind—has been sacrificed on the altar of test prep.
The fallout is everywhere. Teachers are stripped of autonomy, forced to “teach to the test” instead of adapting to the needs of their students. Creativity and critical thinking are treated as luxuries. Subjects not easily measured—art, music, philosophy—are marginalized. Meanwhile, anxiety, burnout, and disengagement skyrocket, especially among young students who internalize failure as identity.
Certification is different—it asks whether you’ve mastered something meaningful. But testing as we use it now is a charade: it reinforces obedience, punishes complexity, and rewards those best at playing the game. In a world that desperately needs innovators, problem-solvers, and empathetic thinkers, we are churning out test-takers.
It’s not just a broken system. It’s a betrayal of what education is supposed to be. And it’s long past time we tore it down.
Should a child be able to spell and read the word “elephant” before 2nd grade? Should a child be able to discern the difference in plough, cough, and though before 3rd grade? How about simple addition, subtraction and multiplication tables? 5th grade?
These questions are brought to bear when funding for public education is derived at taxpayer expense. The taxpayer (certainly the taxpaying parent with young children in public education) must have a mechanism to know if their child is receiving an education that prepares them for life. Presently, standardized testing is the means by which we reveal the effectiveness of education as our children progress from elementary through middle and high school education.
In public education, standardized tests reveal how well a certain school or school district performs as compared to those around them. It is the means by which a community learns if their public education system is succeeding or failing our students. A school may be able to pass along a struggling child and graduate them without the child knowing the basics of reading or math. It is happening around the country. Standardized testing shows us the extent to which it is happening. As taxpayers, we have a right to know how effectively our tax dollars are being spent at our local school district.
When I was consciously preparing for the PSAT/SAT, my teachers were not “teaching a test”. In fact, my preparation for these tests came by purchasing preparation manuals with practice tests to assist me in recognizing the various formats presented within the SAT. All of my preparation was on my own. My intellectual curiosity and creativity were never stifled. Yes, I had to conform and take the SAT in order to enter college…but so did all the other kids who wished a college education.
To be honest, it is truly disheartening to see the decline of once great public education States in our nation. Washington and California once were enviable and parents knew their kids would achieve and flourish in their public education systems. The reason they knew this…standardized testing. Taxpayers are not getting a return on their investment today. We know this because standardized tests show a decline. If educators are crushing intellectual curiosity, stifling creativity, and rewarding mindless conformity the current results of standardized test scores reveal they are not doing a good job!
You’ve raised legitimate concerns, but the issue isn’t as black and white as standardized testing advocates often present it.
Yes, it’s reasonable to expect that by second grade a child should be reading basic words like elephant, and by fifth grade, know their multiplication tables. Those are foundational skills. And yes, taxpayers absolutely deserve transparency and accountability for how their dollars are used in public education. No argument there.
But standardized testing, as it’s currently structured, is a flawed tool. It offers a snapshot, not a full picture. It can show where some students or schools are struggling, but it often fails to measure creativity, critical thinking, or real-world problem-solving—the very things we claim to want in an educated citizenry. Worse, it narrows curricula, punishes schools in struggling communities, and pressures teachers to “teach to the test” just to keep funding or avoid closure. That’s not education—it’s triage.
The decline in educational outcomes isn’t just about testing; it’s about underfunding, systemic inequality, lack of support for teachers, and a society that’s quick to blame but slow to invest. If we truly want results, we need both rigorous standards and the resources to meet them—not just data points that mask deeper problems.
“Underfunding?” Really?
Here are the facts.
Washington State teachers annual median salary is $88530 behind New York at $91290 and California at $92960. #3 in the Nation.
Clover Park School District (CPSD) average teacher salary is $71349 which is 34% above the national average.
In 2019/20 the CPSD per student expenditure was $15747. In 2023/24 it had risen to $21613, and increase of $5866 (+37.25%) in just 5 years. That’s an increase of 6.4% annually.
In 2019/20 the percentage of CPSD budget spent on instruction was 69% with 31% spent on non-instruction. In 2023/24the percentage of CPSD budget spent on instruction dropped to 63% while non-instruction increased 6% to 37%.
In 2019 CPSD was academically ranked at 34.4 percentile: 65.6 percent of Washington school districts outperformed CPSD academically. In 2024 CPSD was academically ranked a 25.9 percentile: 74.1 percent of Washington school districts outperformed CPSD academically.
So Washington and CPSD have some of the highest teacher salaries in the Nation, while CPSD budget has significantly increased but a smaller percentage is spent on instruction and CPSD continues its downward academic trend over the last 5 years.
Those are the facts.
Testing has less to do with the current state of education than does the education system’s (in)ability to educate children.
What’s your alternative to testing?
Bravo. Thank you for putting into words what many of us think but can’t articulate as well as you.
Since I am new to Surburban Times I wonder if this is the only place letters such as these appear? What I mean is, was this letter submitted somewhere else, for example, the Seattle Times and a copy is in this newsletter or is it only in the Suburban Times? I ask only because many of the letters are great and deserve as wide an audience as possible.
Different subjects should perhaps require different testing methods, but the outcomes have to be logical, and have some sort of common understanding. Otherwise one might be led to believe something so ridiculous as unlimited genders.
“Creativity” without a firm understanding of the basics is chaos. There are certain subjects for which there is no substitute but for memorization, math for instance, being one of them. Testing is a way to determine to what extent those subjects have been learned. Other countries understand this especially in Asia where those countries are outstripping the US educational system.
There has to be a blend of understanding of capability and creativity. Testing has its place given that those who rail against testing have little or no alternative. Indeed, in Washington State there are several tests that access knowledge of English, math and science over a student’s K-12 career. They may not measure the student’s ability to write poetry, solve quadratic equations or design the next life saving vaccine but they should be able to write a letter, balance a check book and understand what makes their food nutritious. Only with a firm foundation in the basics can an individual truly become creative.
What do genders have to do with my article? Absolutely nothing. I was talking about testing methods and logical outcomes—and somehow you swerved into a rant about unlimited genders like that was the point all along. It wasn’t.
Honestly, it sounds like the real issue here isn’t logic or education—it’s that you’ve got some unresolved discomfort with equality, fairness, and maybe just a little compassion for people who don’t fit into your narrow definition of what’s acceptable. If I wanted to write about gender identity, I would have. But I didn’t—you did.
So if you’re trying to make a point about academic standards, stick to it. But don’t hijack the conversation just to air out your issues with people living their lives differently than you. That’s not logic. That’s fear dressed up as an opinion.
No, it’s simply an example of unchecked fantasy where logic belongs, especially in youth education where foundational knowledge should be the focus – nothing more.
Standardized testing is the easy way out for measuring mastery. We have different modalities of learning that can’t be addressed by the “one test fits all” mentality. We aren’t all good at every subject we must “master”. I, being partially deaf, had a terrible time with foreign language. I am also not a mathematician, but was forced to memorize algebraic formulae for which I have no use. My time would have been better spent in areas in which i excel. Memorizing and regurgitation are not mastery. Mastery is through application.
I spent 30 years working with children with ” learning disabilities “. No two children learned the same way. We ALL have learning disabilities whether academically, social, or otherwise.
Gregory, It is revealing at the ways people object to being told testing isn’t the substitute for teaching. The alternative for testing is having time to know the student. A teacher can tell you, without testing, which are the students learning the material and which are not. Then if the schools are funded well enough and the teachers given the freedom to nuance the teaching materials and methods, each student will learn better. It doesn’t happen with 25 students in each class. A number of years ago the Dean of a Medical School studied the correlation between grades in medical school and success in the practice of medicine. The doctors with the most A’s in testing were NOT the best at the practice of medicine. High results on Standardized Testing is a false guide and terrible goal.
Yet another myth, along with “underfunding”, that class size is the reason the US education system is unsuccessful in educating our children. “We need smaller class size…and that requires more teachers!”
Think for a moment about your experience in college where lectures can have over 100 in a class. How are we preparing our K-12 students to survive in such a rarified atmosphere where there isn’t the kind of individualized attention they had prior? It’s not just about academics but also reality of life after graduation that these students must be educated to deal with.
Have you looked at Asia where class size can be as large as 70 students? How can they educate their students while US classroom sizes less than 15 can’t? It’s the philosophical difference between the two. The “woke” view of diversity is that each child is unique in their learning modality and thus the teacher must tailor how and what they teach each student based upon “cultural competence”. You have to “know” your students! That level of involvement ultimately results in smaller class sizes yet who has the “cultural competence” to pull this off? Not teachers. When your premise is false, even with perfect logic, you conclusion must be false.
In Asia there is a realization that most all children learn in much the same manner, a unity of process, and with the emphasis on basic knowledge most all can be reach competency without the level of involvement now required in the US educational system.
Yes this approach involves a lot of rote memorization initially but that serves as a basic level of education from which competence and creativity can spring. For those who can’t cope within that approach there is the possibility of individualized education (special ed., alternative schools).
The proof is in the results. US is ranked #31 academically behind South Korea #1, Japan #6, China #13, Hong Kong #14 and a host of other European countries which have the advantage of homogenous societies. I am not advocating adapting their education philosophy but rather a “blend” that makes our education system both efficient and effective.
So who is the prime beneficiary of small classes in the US? It’s not the students as academic achievement has been declining for decades. It’s not even the teachers. No, the teachers unions are the prime beneficiary by claiming “poverty” at the same time more and more teachers are required, at increasing expense, to teach smaller and smaller class size.