My sophomore came home from school the other day and declared that he was sick and tired of working on the same practice paragraphs over and over for the English Regents exam. He was bored of test prep and annoyed by constant conversation about test scores and student performance. And he decided to voice his concerns aloud, in class.

The ability to question authority may be admirable, but it’s not necessarily welcomed by teachers who may be judged, compensated and evaluated on how well their students score on standardized tests.  Teachers at his school are even offering extra credit for sitting through two-hour practice sessions for the English Regents, which I gather is not students’ first choice of activity on these stunningly beautiful June afternoons.

I strongly urged him to get the extra credit, but not because I defend this new testing culture. Discussing some of the great books and plays he’s been reading in high school is a lot more fun. If I have time, I’ve enjoyed reading, or re-reading in many cases, some of the texts his class is discussing from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar to Richard Wright’s Native Son, as well as one of my all-time favorites, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

Apparently those in-class conversations have ceased, replaced by non-stop discussions of the "critical lens” essay portion of the exam – not exactly dinner-table conversation. Nonetheless, I decided to poke around and find out more about what these essays ask students to do. Here’s what I learned.<!--more-->

Students are given a quotation to read and are then asked to interpret it. They write an essay using two works they’ve studied to show how the work is true or untrue, making mention of literary elements like irony, symbolism or foreshadowing, for example.  They must avoid plot summary, establish criteria for analysis, organize their ideas clearly, specify details (title, author) and follow the conventions of standard written English.

I have no problem with asking students to master these tasks. It all seems quite reasonable. However, like my son, I am questioning a testing culture that has “sapped so much of the joy from the classroom and pushed so many teachers to replace creative, imaginative lessons with timid and defensive ones,” according to my sage colleague, Insideschools.org founder Clara Hemphill.

Her comments and some other fascinating ones around testing – including much passionate defense of it can be found in an excellent Room For Debate conversation that appeared in the New York Times last week. The debate comes at a time when the city is developing new “performance tasks” that administrators believe will help students learn—and help teachers judge what students have learned.

Kevin Carey of Education Sector, an independent think tank in Washington D.C,  says “the city should be cautious in using initial test results for high-stakes personnel decisions,’’ but he calls the new  approach “a welcome development for students who deserve to be taught by educators with a demonstrated ability to help children learn.”

Carey, however, does not have a 15-year-old son in a New York City public high school who is bored to rebellion by test prep, or a middle-schooler so anxious about the fact that his teachers may be judged on his results that he can’t sleep the night before standardized tests.

There is no shortage of opinion about test prep, and no consensus either. Marcus Winter, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, believes the tests “provide important information about teacher quality that we should use to improve our terribly flawed system for evaluating teachers.”

On the other side, PBS News Hour correspondent and Learning Matters president John Merrow deeply probes assumptions about standardized tests in a column reproduced on the Washington Post’s “Answer Sheet” blog.

“We don’t respect students’ intelligence; hence we focus on the lowest common denominator in skills,’’ writes Merrow, author of The Influence of Teachers: Reflections on Teaching and Leadership. “We don’t respect teachers, which is why we turn to standardized testing as the be-all and end-all of evaluation.”

Insideschools.org would like to hear from parents on how their children are faring in this new test culture. Any other rebels at home? Are there parents who believe more tests and an increased focus on testing will actually improve teaching and learning? We welcome your thoughts.