No rhyme or reason to testing

Childhood is like a poem.

Like many of the best examples of American verse, childhood has a sweet beginning, mellow middle and wistful end and contains an inarticulable essence that makes our early years somewhat magical.

Of course, it is possible to bring the force of our critical thinking to bear on any given poem, reducing lines to iambs and anapests, hunting down obscure allusions and mulling over whether the rhymes are any good.

Judicious analysis of a poem can enhance our appreciation of the work. But an inelegant and pseudo-analytical approach can leave the thing a shambles.

So it is with childhood. The widespread mania for quantifying every aspect of the early years threatens to drain them of much of their joy. Whether it is tear-inducing testing or harsh metrics for health, we have gone way too far in trying to grade seemingly every aspect of youth.

The madness has to stop. While policy makers cannot help themselves from endlessly modifying curriculums and exams, there are some basic steps they should take to make sure the means of evaluating education do not eclipse its ends.

With a new school year approaching, the city Department of Education should impose limits on how much time teachers may spend on preparing students for tests. Since the city intensified its focus on Common Core-based exams, a steady stream of news stories has documented the long hours teachers are spending on test prep. Given the pressure on educators, the sense of panic that compels them to drill answers to sometimes illogical questions is understandable. But the city should rein in the practice by telling teachers to spend no more than a few hours per month on getting ready for tests.

Another aspect of childhood is also under attack: the growing body. School systems around the country, including ours, administer obesity testing, the idea being that parents should know whether their children are healthy or not. That’s a sound premise, but it is not the school system’s business. A recent study in The Journal of Adolescent Health suggested the reports on body mass index are totally ineffective, anyway, with many teenagers ill disposed to have authorities make them even more self-conscious about their bodies. The body report cards have to go.

A tone of crisis has come to dominate much of the discussion about education, and major problems are indeed ingrained in our schools. For instance, the outrageous level of segregation in the city and other parts of the country needs drastic remediation.

But when it comes to the ongoing craze for quantifying children’s development, policy makers need to ease up. To find perspective, they might consult some poetry. Our youth suffer for lack of what is found there.