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end. But as anyone who's ever been a kid or had a kid knows in their hearts: human beings are unique, unpredictable, and irrational creatures. Standardized testing ignores this basic fact. And by doing that, we all pay.

To me, the greatest educational cost of standardized testing is drop-out rates. Students who can't pass one test on one day, regardless of their performance in class, aren't allowed to move on to other grades or to graduate. If you're a minority student who is the first one in your family to be within range of graduating high school (the majority of my students), how will you motivate yourself to keep going to school when it seems like the game is rigged against you? You don't, if you're like many drop-outs. You give up because your value to the school and to the real-estate values around you is only your test score. And even if we can keep them in school, they're learning nothing more than "test-taking strategies," not how to think, how to function as a citizen, or how to serve society with their talents.

But instead we're continuing to have faith that somehow the Ford factory model will work. But instead of driveable cars, we're creating driveable students. Students who are being driven from education, from citizenship, from mentoring pushes them toward crime, violence, and addiction. This is a cost that will only get higher and sadder the more we allow the failed "accountability movement" to drive educational policy.

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