FREE: The Declaration of Independence from Excessive Test Preparation

by Steve Peha

I don’t exactly know how this happened but a week or two ago I was talking with my colleague Justin Baeder. Both of us were commenting on how so many schools to have gone crazy over test prep. I was evaluating a school last month where it seemed like kids in every classroom were taking multiple choice tests every day.

So instead of just complaining about this sad state of affairs, as we are all wont to do from time to time, Justin and I decided to compose and publish a powerful document about what we feel are the key principles in preparing kids optimally for testing. We’ve captured these simple ideas in the official “Declaration of Independence From Excessive Test Preparation. You can read the official copy of the Declaration and sign it here. You can download your own free PDF copy here.

As Billy Joel sang, “We didn’t start the fire. It was always burnin’ since the world’s been turnin’”. So don’t feel shy about signing the declaration and striking a match for systemic sanity when it comes to test preparation. Justin and I aren’t against testing. We’re in favor of teaching. And, this year at least, in far too many schools, these two things seem to be mutually exclusive.