Progress-report guru James Liebman made front-page news today with an email proposal to bring standardized testing to the kindergarten classroom. These test scores, the DOE says, wouldn't affect student progress or promotion. Vocal opponents decry the plan (and the late-summer timing), but it seems more than a few schools are interested in participating. It's important to realize that student progress, as measured by standardized test scores and mandated by No Child Left Behind, is the key to school survival. So whether the planned testing will actually help kids (in terms of shaping instruction) or help schools anticipate testing outcomes is an open question. It's also important to note that kids in many of the city's charter schools take tons of tests, many standardized, every week. In some charters, one day of the week is a designated testing day -- regular testing is a frequent, accepted school-wide norm.

Buried inside the Times' first section, though, is a story on SAT scoresthat reinforces every progressive educator's worst fears: Test scores show dramatic, persistent gaps between rich and poor, black and white, and children born to more- and less-educated families -- chasms that have long been part of the pre-college testing landscape. With average student scores in the 1500 range (of a total of 2400), gaps of 303-383 points separate the races and the classes. One expert calls the class gap the "Achilles' heel of the SAT. Kids from higher-income families uniformly do better than those from disadvantaged backgrounds."

From one education pole to the other -- kindergarten to pre-college -- testing dominates the conversation. It's true, our kids will be taking tests for years, until (with good luck and persistence) they're out of college. But as more tests creep into the academic calendar, it's worth asking out loud what's lost when room is made for yet another measurement -- and what benefits test-prep confers on the same kids who are advantaged by birth, race, or economic class. (For another take on test-prep, see Jeremy Miller's chronicle of his a year as a Kaplan tutor in a NYC high school in the September issue of Harper's.)