Since the passage of No Child Left Behind in 2001, public education across the nation has been dominated by testing.  Ostensibly these tests are supposed to 'hold teachers accountable' for student achievement and give teachers a better understanding of students' strengths and weaknesses.  In reality these tests set unreasonable standards for teachers, make demands without providing schools the funding needed to fulfill them, and cause valuable instructional time to be wasted on excessive testing.

As a middle school teacher I can tell you what the outcome has been for me, for my colleagues, and for my students and their families.  Great teachers have left or are considering leaving the profession because testing data is viewed in a vacuum; teachers are punished if their students don't meet learning goals regardless of whether students come to school regularly, are victims of violence, are living in poverty, have challenging home lives, and so on.  Rather than being rewarded for dedicating our careers to helping children, often in extremely challenging circumstances, we are blamed if children don't perform well on high-stakes tests.

Schools should be places where kids are nurtured.  Instead, students from Kindergarten on up are forced to sacrifice recess and learning time for countless hours, and, usually, days upon days of testing every year.  Students deserve schools in which they can explore their talents and aspirations and grow their skills instead of worrying what score they earned on a standardized test.

That's why Congress needs to remove all teacher evaluation mandates from any reauthorization of ESEA/NCLB that is proposed.  This will not eliminate teacher evaluations and accountability; it will return sanity to the process and shift the measure of quality instruction back to what school administrators actually see in teachers' classrooms.  This will not make all testing in schools disappear, but we can gather data on our students' needs without making everyone suffer through high-stakes testing.  Let's turn the page on NCLB's teacher evaluation mandates and get back to quality instruction.