School Testing

This post from Kevin Drum is right on target and I want to get the point out to all my readers too:

...the sheer magnitude of our test-taking culture has become breathtaking over the past couple of decades. Standardized tests should be a modest part of the school curriculum, not a frantic, neverending race that engulfs the entire culture of teaching.
 

Here in Massachusetts, school testing started out as just science and math, and just every couple of years.  Now it covers grades 3-10 with multiple full days of testing each year.  Twenty years ago there was no standardized testing at all; now we have a week or two taken out of each school year, and there are still only 180 days of school, same as there ever was.

I understand why testing is important; it allows for objective measurement of how students and schools are doing.  But every hour we spend testing is an hour we're not instructing.  Some of that is obviously worth it, but it seems to me we've gone overboard.  Educational testing doesn't come for free, and I think we've overdone testing to the detriment of our children.