A colleague of mine, who recently moved to Virginia and enrolled her daughter in the fourth grade, tells me that her daughter has begun having trouble in school. Her bright and curious child has come to hate science and dread going to school. She finds the material uninteresting and unchallenging. Yet when my colleague met with her child's teacher to ask whether some accommodations might be made in the curriculum, she was told that this was simply not possible: "We must cover a fixed sequence of material so that our students perform well on the state-mandated tests. We're frustrated too, but there's nothing we can do about it," she was told.

According to James Popham, author of The Truth About Testing, "American teachers are feeling enormous pressure these days to raise their students' scores on tests." Consequently, many are teaching to the test, closely aligning curricula with material likely to appear on tests. Advocates of standards and accountability hope to use this pressure to ensure that all children receive a quality education. Ironically, however, teaching to the test may work against student learning. The pressure to produce results has led many districts to adopt prescribed curricula that dictate precisely what will be taught and when, with little or no room for variation or individualization. To cover this curriculum and produce the desired test scores, educators are often forced to ignore what they know about how students learn. As any teacher will tell you, students are unique individuals with differing talents, interests, and needs. A lock-step curriculum that treats all students the same serves none of our students well.

The standards and accountability movement has other unintended consequences. Rather than act in contradiction to what they know about how students learn, some excellent teachers have chosen to leave the classroom. Another colleague, a well-respected teacher with many years of experience in Virginia schools who wholeheartedly believes in high expectations and a rigorous curriculum for all students, recently chose to take early retirement—in part because of the constraints that the standards and accountability movement has placed on teachers. He reports that he and many of his fellow-teachers have been forced to give up the innovative and interesting lessons that challenge and engage students in order to adhere to the scope and sequence of a prescribed curriculum and teach to the test.

In our efforts to create common standards for all students, we run the risk of stifling student interest and engagement. In the attempt to ensure that all students are mastering these standards, we run the risk of reducing students and the education process itself to test scores. In the process of holding teachers accountable, we are in danger of pushing our most committed and talented educators out of the classroom.

These ironies illustrate that the standards and accountability movement is not a straightforward cure-all for our education system. Should we then abandon the movement altogether? Certainly not. At ASCD, we believe that its emphasis on providing all children with a quality education has served to improve the educational opportunities of many of our nation's children. Yet as the examples above illustrate, it has also led to changes that are not in the best interests of our children.

There are no easy or quick answers here. Many of the problems facing our public schools are complex, and we should expect that their solutions will be equally so. However, we at ASCD know that one thing is absolutely certain: the voices of educators, professionals who bear daily witness to the consequences of educational policies on the lives of real children, must be heard if our policies are to serve all children well.

Excerpts from Popham's book can be viewed at /framebooks.html.

Visit ASCD's Web site for resources you can use to make your voice heard: http://www .ascd.org/advocacykit/index.html.