Reblogged from The Washington Post’s Answer Sheet

Dawn Neely-Randall, who just started her 25th year of teaching, is sick and tired of the effects that obsessive standardized testing is having on her students. She is a member of the Badass Teachers Association,  a national group of more than 51,000 educators who came together to organize resistance to school reform that focuses on using standardized test scores for high-stakes accountability purposes and that ignores the role that poverty plays in student achievement.

In this powerful post she explains how her work as a teacher has been skewed by mandated standardized testing and how students are reacting. One child, she wrote, “sobbed” because she cared so much about her test score, and “it became blatantly obvious how one high-stakes standardized test had just negated the year’s worth of reading confidence and motivation she had worked so hard to attain.”  And, she wrote, “I can no longer be a teacher who tries to build these 10-year-olds up on one hand, but then throws them to the testing wolves with the other.” Read the post>>