It is now the start of a new school year here in New Jersey and the state still has students taking a test to graduate high school. There are many problems with this, the biggest to me is the fact that many teachers are forced to only teach their students what will be on the test and thus neglecting other very important subjects.

I wrote about the PARRC Test way back in January 2015 and yet we still have it. My thinking is that it is time to get rid of standardized tests, like the PARRC, SAT, etc. All they serve to do is insure that some subjects are covered while leaving other ones sitting on the sidelines.

What we should be teaching our young needs to be more fluidic and thus changes with what our society needs are.

Christopher Tienken, an associate professor at Seton Hall University told the Joint Committee on Public Schools that “Standardized test results do not capture accurately what or how well students learn or how much they know about a specific topic. They tell us more about the social condition in which they live and grow up than what they know and can do.

It should never be used as a sole determination of educational quality, but we are still here today to debate whether to use a test score as a measure for graduation.”

So an expert agrees that this sort of testing should cease and I totally agree with him. In an article by NorthJersey.com, ““Andre Green, executive director of the Center for Fair and Open Testing, a national group that promotes testing reforms, said students who do not pass are discouraged and more likely to drop out. The tests, he said, do not measure skills needed to succeed in life, such as teamwork, communication and research. 

“Making a decision based on one test score is bad policy,” he said.” Again another group is chiming in and saying this type of testing is just wrong.

Even the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA), the teacher’s union, has called for an end to these tests as they do not reflect the true knowledge of our children.

So stop with the hearings already and just change the law back to what it was before. Our children were going out into the world and doing just fine before the law was changed.

That is my opinion- Jumpin Jersey Mike