LET'S MOVE away from high-stakes testing!

Here's what I'm writing to Michelle Obama as part of this weekend's postcard campaign:

You are a strong advocate for our children's physical health, and for that we thank you. Today we are asking you to be a strong advocate for their mental, emotional and intellectual health, too – to promote the fitness of their minds as well as their bodies.

You planted a garden at the White House to give children a hands-on experience that would help them begin to think about nutrition. Our children need a garden of learning, too, where we plant great ideas, get children excited about education, and harvest academic success for every student. You've asked children to get active, to move, play, and get involved in sports. Children also need to be freed from bubble sheet learning-- to get up off of their desk chairs in class to create, demonstrate, and integrate!

We'd like you to join us in a new campaign – “Let's Move Away from High-Stakes Testing.” The goal of this campaign is to make sure that children grow up with healthy minds, learning a full, enriched curriculum nurtured by a variety of healthy, active, hands-on instructional and assessment methods.

It's important that the whole country get behind healthy learning, and this includes everyone understanding more about what can happen when schools depend too much on standardized tests.

Because, unfortunately, high-stakes testing is an invasive weed in our healthy garden of learning. Teaching to the test has choked out critical areas like the arts, science, history and civics along with physical activity and sports.

Like fast food, high-stakes tests are easy, cheap, quick – and potentially unsafe when overused. Yet they have become the main dish of schooling despite the warnings of scientists that they should be used only sparingly, in a balanced "assessment diet."

High-stakes testing seems to have a disproportionately negative impact on low-income children whose schools can be the educational equivalent of the urban “food desert.” Unlike more upscale areas, these neighborhoods don't offer a lot of fresh produce or wide varieties of foods, and their schools tend to focus more on the empty calories of test drill than on an enriched, varied curriculum.

It's not by choice that this situation has developed. Schools across the U. S. have been force-fed this testing regime under the harsh test-and-punish policies of the No Child Left Behind Act.

As Congress begins to rewrite this law, we are asking for your help to phase out the bad, unhealthy aspects of testing in our schools and help us replace them with an educational diet and exercise program of enriched curricula, diverse instruction, and appropriate, high-quality assessments.