‘The Test,’ by Anya Kamenetz

Anya Kamenetz's book The Test was reviewed in the New York Times.

Teachers and their unions have resisted standardized testing since the early 20th century. Their critics have claimed they do so because they fear being held accountable for how much children learn. But over the past few years, on both the right and the left, in scattered suburbs and in urban neighborhoods, a small yet growing group of parents have begun to join teachers in denouncing standardized testing. They complain about the narrowing of the school curriculum to the questions asked on high-stakes exams, the many hours and days — sometimes up to a quarter of the school year — spent testing and prepping for tests, and the stress that testing imposes on children. Some parents even have their children opt out of standardized testing altogether.

That movement now has a guidebook, Anya Kamenetz’s The Test: Why Our Schools Are Obsessed With Standardized Testing — But You Don’t Have to Be. Its publication could hardly have been better timed. A 2014 poll by Phi Delta Kappa and Gallup found that only 31 percent of parents, and 38 percent of the general public, support the federal policy incentive driving all this testing: using children’s test scores to evaluate teachers. And there is evidence that policy makers are finally taking this discontent seriously. In August, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, whose department is responsible for the testing push of the past five years, acknowledged that testing is “sucking the oxygen out of the room in a lot of schools.”