Those Who Can't, Test

Let us have a moment of silence for the eighth-grade unit on hurricanes in Scarsdale, N.Y. "They used to track storms on the computer," says Melanie Spivak, the middle school P.T.A. president. "They don't have time anymore."

Farewell to the Antarctica unit in Ann Chizauskas' fourth-grade science classes in Quincy, Mass. "The kids loved it, because they were doing something other than plants," she said. Plants, Ms. Chizauskas explained, tend to take up more than their fair share of elementary school science, and the students were particularly happy to discover a continent that didn't have any.

The fun side of education has come in for some battering since standardized testing became the rage in public schools. The old world of field trips and colonial fairs is giving way to prep work and teaching the test. If the people who draw up the New York State Science Assessment don't care about hurricanes, we don't care about hurricanes.

"School is not about hands-on learning, it's about how to take tests," complains Ms. Spivak. About a third of the eighth-grade parents in her town are vowing to keep their kids out of school on test day.

Opposition to testing is a phenomenon of the suburbs, where parents believe their schools are fine already. Real estate brokers in some places are convinced the scores affect home prices, and there are tales of buyers waving the latest test results, demanding to be shown houses in only the top-ranked catchment area. Last fall, when Rick Lazio was running against Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Senate, Mr. Lazio visited a high school in his home turf of Syosset, on Long Island, and congratulated the kids for helping to maintain local property values with their Regents Exam scores.

The urban parents are more serene about testing, although even some of them must wonder if school officials are getting a little carried away. New York City takes a back seat to nobody when it comes to number of tests administered Ñ by my count a really energetic eighth grader could wind up taking 12 different assessment exams, one in something called "technology." Our children may not be breaking any records for reading, but they have developed an intimate relationship with the No. 2 pencil.

"Creative teachers hate it," says Schools Chancellor Harold Levy. "And bad teachers need it."

There's the problem. Teachers are retiring in droves, and New York City is going to have to attract about 40,000 new recruits over the next four years. The city is already employing people who aren't capable of passing what seems to be a pretty simple teacher certification exam because there simply aren't enough warm, certified bodies to fill the openings.

Perpetual testing, on one level, is a way of dumbing down the teaching profession, making the job simpler for the instructors who are struggling, and making it simultaneously stressful and boring for the people who are capable of working at a much higher level.

"It's much less pleasant since the tests," says Barbara Wilson, who teaches ninth- and 10th-grade math in Boston. "Much, much less pleasant. Extremely less pleasant. Couldn't be more less pleasant."

If the tests get us more money for better teachers they'll be well worth the lost science fair projects. But during the presidential campaign, George W. Bush often seemed to believe that if you give tests and publicize the results, concerned citizens will march on the bad schools and simply force everybody to perform better.

Next week the Senate will take up Mr. Bush's "No Child Left Behind" program, which Education Secretary Rod Paige says is going to be as revolutionary as putting a man on the moon. Mr. Bush's initiatives include a little more money, particularly for reading, but there's no sense that he regards recruiting a new generation of teachers as a national emergency on a par with building a missile shield over Alaska.

Now that the Senate Education Committee has dropped the voucher part of the Bush program, what's left actually resembles the status quo in New York City Ñ lots and lots of tests, and emergency reorganizations for schools that continually fail.

I am proud to be a resident of a city that's on the cutting edge, although I've yet to hear Mr. Bush say that his great idea in education is to make the rest of the country look like New York.