In her February 1st editorial, Susan Engel had it exactly right when she
observed: "Our current educational approach—and the testing that is
driving it...has led to a curriculum that is strangling children and
teachers alike."

But what Ms. Engel did not quite say is that better curricula of the kind
she advocates will inevitably be corrupted to resemble the narrow,
skill-and-drill curricula that now prevail—as long as we continue to use
multiple-choice achievement tests as the primary means of assessing school
(or teacher) effectiveness. This is because multiple-choice tests are
especially vulnerable to “teaching to the test” and to various forms of
“test prep.” So, as pressures mount for test score gains, test prep
curricula inexorably drive out the richer, much more useful kinds of
teaching and learning that Ms. Engel describes so well.

Donald T. Campbell, the brilliant evaluation theorist, explained this
process of degradation long ago: "(W)hen test scores become the goal of the
teaching process, they both lose their value as indicators of educational
status and distort the educational process in undesirable ways" (Campbell,
1976).