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Standardized testing is at cross purposes with many of the most important purposes of public education. It doesn't measure big-picture learning, critical thinking, perseverance, problem solving, creativity or curiosity, yet those are the qualities great teaching brings out in a student.

Now the problem with standardized tests is that it's based on the mistake that we can simply scale up the education of children like you would scale up making carburetors. And we can't, because human beings are very different from motorcars, and they have feelings about what they do and motivations in doing it, or not.

I hate tests. It's a really lousy way to judge a person's ability.

Elite private-school educations leave students unprepared for a standardized test with which their public school counterparts are innately familiar.

Beginning with the No Child Left Behind law and continuing today with Race to the Top, the federal emphasis on standardized assessments has become so excessive that it has modified state and district behavior in troubling ways.

It's important that kids learn, but I really don't like all the testing, testing, testing.

Every single major push in education has made it worse and right now it's really bad because everything we've done is de-humanizing education. It's destroying the possibility of the teacher and the student having a warm, friendly, intellectual relationship.

I do believe that when your child does poorly on a test, your first step should not necessarily be to attack the teacher or the school's curriculum. It should be to look at the idea that, maybe, the child didn't work hard enough.

I think there's so much negative influence on children in school settings. It becomes learning by rote to pass a test. It's not contextualized.

President Obama still places far too much emphasis on relentless testing with standardized exams.