NYS Testing in Language Arts distorts teaching

I hold quite openly the position that the poorly designed tests that New York State administers in mathematics distort the teaching of math across the state. And I believe that high stakes tests in general have this effect. While I do not agree that we can at this point do away with all of them, we can and should get rid of most of them.

It is not just math. In this post NYC Educator provides evidence of how the high stakes high school test in English denies new immigrants proper instruction. (we don’t test grammar and spelling, so why should we teach them?)