I can't believe I missed this: The New Yorker picked up on the Garfield High School teachers' boycott of the MAP standardized test last week, and among the wordy meandering on pineapples (a former testing controversy), they come down hard:

In sum, students are taking an exam that doesn’t really count, on material that may or may not be relevant, and producing results that may have nothing to say about them or their future. If you subscribe to the notion that education is preparation for life, then these students have received their first primer on the soul-crushing routines of bureaucracy.

And:

And so the MAP brings us to the very point at which teaching and testing have diverged. When students are forced to take an exam like the MAP two or three times a year so that they can be better prepared for other, more important exams, the assessment is no longer a partner to curriculum. The assessment has become the curriculum.

Preach!

h/t Melissa Westbrook at Seattle Schools Community Forum.