As a high school teacher for 10 years, I felt firsthand the frenzy that takes over during testing season. I also witnessed how testing infected the wider school culture. But I never expected it to affect me on a personal level. Now, as a parent, I’ve learned I cannot save my own children from an educational experience dominated by test prep, and a curriculum that puts testing at its foundation.

When I was a teacher, my students felt the pressure of the Regents exams from the start of ninth grade. The curriculum narrowed for the tests and then it narrowed some more. The Department of Education funded after-school test-prep classes. Every formative and summative assessment had to model a part of the Regents exam for our subject areas. Testing became the norm and – as teachers – our hands were tied.

And I let it be that way. Testing was stronger than I was and, quite honestly, I wanted my students to pass because I saw the joy and pride they felt when they were successful. I learned to be a test-prep expert, a cog in the machine of testing. But I always assumed the testing culture was a result of our student body which was overwhelmingly poor and filled with students who entered high school performing far below grade level, a population the system deemed “at risk.”

Surely it would be different at my local high-performing elementary school in a neighborhood I could barely afford to live in. I thought my class privilege would save my own children from an education dominated by testing. How wrong I was.

Last spring the principal of my daughter’s elementary school notified parents about a change in the schedule. Regular classes would end earlier so that there could targeted instruction in small groups focused on reading, writing, and math.

As an educator, I immediately suspected this was about test preparation. You can’t play a player. When I asked non-educator parents about the changes they only expressed frustration about the early pick-up time while all my educator friends replied in a skinny second: “testing.” This was all about testing.

And I know how it works: it begins with the after-school tutoring, then the test prep seeps into the curriculum and soon the entire school experience is about testing and only testing. And this is at a high-performing school in a neighborhood of over-educated parents who own million-dollar apartments and brownstones. High-stakes testing is everywhere in the public school system.

I did not expect this for my own children.

I went to my first PTA meeting two months ago. The P.S. 39 principal, Anita de Paz, spoke eloquently about her personal journey with high-stakes testing. She defined what the term “high-stakes” means and how she has wrestled with it and its shape-shifting manifestations.

She was very honest: she told us that she gets a $10,000 bonus if the school test scores are good. She emphasized that she is not against testing, nor against teachers being assessed. She told us that this year it was mandated that the school’s Comprehensive Educational Plan (CEP), a list of goals that drive the school during the academic year, be exclusively about test scores. Still, she reassured us, she and the teachers at P.S. 39 saw our children as whole people, not as test scores.

She concluded that she cannot do much to retaliate against this testing culture. But we can. The power is in the parents, she said. The revolution has to start with us.