It's a grim time of year--a time when the anticipation of testing ramps up my son's anxiety, a time when my wife risks losing her teaching license if she should make the mistake of comforting a weeping student overcome by a barrage of questions that, because of a learning disability, he can't answer.
My son, who's in the fourth grade, is in his second year of it. My wife, who has a Master's Degree in Special Education, has been dealing with it every year since she started teaching special ed in the public schools. My daughter, in the first grade, doesn't start taking tests for a few more years--but her curriculum is already being changed to accommodate the demands of state testing.
This last concern may be the most serious of all. If the problems with testing could be sequestered to a couple of weeks in late spring, that would be one thing. But the testing mania that has overtaken American public schools casts a very long shadow, one that darkens the lives of all public school students.
