eliminate high-stakes testing in the American education system.

High-stakes standardized tests are damaging our education system. The tests are an incomplete picture of what a student has learned. As schools across the country are pressured to perform or be punished, curriculums are being narrowed; the arts, sciences, history, even recess are being squeezed out by test prep. The tests cost a lot of money, which puts pressure on less-affluent districts to cut programs to pay for them. Standardized tests should never be used to evaluate teacher performance; many test companies explicitly say so, and yet teachers can be fired when test scores aren't high enough. Students are human beings who respond to many factors beyond teacher control, and they learn in many different ways. We need a valuable and humane system. High-stakes testing is not it!