The New York Times' Elissa Gootman reports today on an unannounced initiative in NYC schools to assess children academically starting as early as kindergarten. Schools are not required to participate but the district is encouraging them to do so. Those who sign on can choose among five assessment options, including one in which children are asked to take timed paper and pencil tests. The story is predictable, warning as it does in the first paragraph about "standardized tests of children as young as kindergartners." All tests are "standardized," in the sense that there is some measure or scale to evaluate responses. But reporters and anti-testing folks love to use the word "standardized" to apply to any test, because it implies that children are being forced into a single mold. There's little about the program itself in the article. But it does provide the author a chance to recap a number of controversies related to assessment, and to make sweeping statements about "a Bloomberg penchant for quantifying."

There are legitimate concerns about testing, how to do it well, and the use and misuse of results. But given the small scale of this program and its exploratory purpose the "outrage" the reporter turned up in calling around and asking for reaction seems overblown. A thoughtful discussion of the assessment of young children was done last fall by a committee headed up by Sharon Lynn Kagan of Teachers College. The report of the task force she headed can be found here.