Deborah Abramson Brooks, a parent activist and lawyer in Port Washington, New York, wrote this excellent overview of the testing movement and the backlash to it. She originally wrote it in 2014, but updated it to the present.
Brooks is a co-founder of Port Washington Advocates for Public Education; and a member of the board of New York State Allies for Public Education and the National Parent Coalition for Student Privacy.
You will find this interesting and informative.
Read the entire document here.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thank you, Deborah Abramsom Brooks! You sure covered the bases. Good for YOU. I am sharing it.
And thank you, Diane, for posting this.
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I will pray that all parents can reach out to read what Deborah Abramsom Brooks’ heartfelt expression about #WhyIRefuse.
I would NOT be sarcastic if grade 3-8 can be taught how the corrupted politicians and corporate unite through legal system in order to bully the poor and to amass their wealth = increase rental, outsource labor force, deregulation in banking business, destroy working class through disregard for workers’ safety in industrial environment, unreasonable wages, healthcare benefits and pension…Back2basic
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Hopefully this reaches as many parents as possible. Schools should not be test prep factories — they should be places where, as Brooks stated, authentic learning takes place. Such high-stakes testing creates an environment where every day is seen as an opportunity for test preparation, where anything that is not on the all-important test is not worth teaching or learning. Although these tests were put in place, supposedly, to improve the quality of education, I can only imagine the detriment to education that this “teach to the test” mentality has caused as the curriculum focus becomes narrower and narrower.
In addition, the use of test scores to punish students, teachers, and principals is a terrible idea. If a student is having a bad day on the day of the test, simply does not care, or is otherwise dealing with circumstances that are far beyond the teacher’s control, it is completely unfair that a teacher’s employment is at the mercy of these students. Secondly, this policy only reinforces the “teach to the test” model of “education” that has become so pervasive in our public schools. As Brooks mentioned, these so-called accountability measures have proven to be an abject failure, so when bureaucrats double down on testing, it becomes more and more apparent that they may not have the best interests of students in mind.
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