- “For most teachers and students, testing remains the educational equivalent of a root canal. It’s endured and then recalled with relief. It’s not something deeply integrated with teaching that reinforces long-term educational goals like developing students’ ability to engage in thoughtful, reasoned argumentation.” ~ Stephen Sawchuk, Education Week
- “The side effects outweigh the benefits. If you have an illness and try some drugs to ease it, you don’t want the negative side effects to outweigh the benefits. The negative side effects of testing a whole population in any grade are immense. Test results are known to the media and to real estate agents. Some school board administrators put excessive pressure on their schools and teachers in high-poverty areas to hit the numbers. Principals will then do almost anything to get the scores up. The stakes and stress are incredibly high.” ~ Andy Hargreaves, retired Boston College professor
- “No teacher should ever be data-driven. Every teacher should be student-driven. You should base your instruction around what’s best for your students—what motivates them, inspires, them, gets them ready and interested in learning. To be sure, you should be data-informed—you should know what their test scores are and that should factor into your lessons in one way of another—but test scores should not be the driving force behind your instruction, especially since standardized test scores are incredibly poor indicators of student knowledge. “ ~ Steven Singer, educator and blogger
- “This is one ironic story. There is no one and no institution that has done more to set off an international test score competition than Andreas Schleicher of the OECD, which administers the periodic international tests called PISA, the Programme for International Student Assessment. Every nation wants to be first. Every nation waits anxiously to see whether its test scores in reading, mathematics, and science went up or down. In 2010, when the 2009 PISA scores were released, Arne Duncan [Obama’s Secretary of Education] and Barack Obama declared that the U.S. was facing another ‘Sputnik moment,’ and it was time to crack down. Others wrung their hands and wondered how we could toughen up to compete with Shanghai… ” ~ Diane Ravitch, education historian
- “We talk about ‘soft skills’ often as social and emotional skills, and hard skills as about science and maths, but it might be the opposite… The hard skills will be your curiosity, your leadership, your persistence, and your resilience.” ~ Andreas Schleicher, head of the Programme for International Student Assessment
