The country is moving - has moved? - to accept the idea that only testing, usually mass testing, can be used to identify talent, or as they usually say, the gifted student. I know Massachusetts places a lot of faith on the results of student testing. I suspect most states also do. But I don't think that testing is as much of a mania as it is in New York.
We've seen the ridiculous sums people are willing to spend to get their already high-achieving children into the right college. Now we're seeing people spending money to get their kids into the right kindergarten and the right middle school. All of this has made tutoring in NYC a growth industry. But the question of its value to the kids has not been asked. What kind of pressure are we putting on these kids? Is testing the sole criterion for academic excellence? As we know, people grow and mature at different rates. Some kids that were considered dumb when they started school end up as valedictorians when they finish school.
What does all this say about the schools? Most rely solely on the tests to determine whether a child should be admitted to their school. But children are not only testers, they are much more complex than that.
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