Flunking the tests?

A 40-year political philosophy professor at Michigan State University has notcied ominous changes in his students in the last six or eight years:

First, more and more of my students, and not just freshmen, can't tie their own shoes. They lose syllabi and can't follow simple instructions; they don't get the right books; they e-mail me to ask when and where the final exam will be held (as if they didn't know when they signed up and don't know how to find out); they forget to bring blue books to exams; they make appointments and don't keep them; and many never come to office hours at all, except perhaps on the day before an exam.

He goes through a laundry list of contributing factors -- helicopter parents who micromanage their kids' lives, the unintended consequences of multiculturalism, self-indulgence and a sense of entitlement. But his main thrust is to question the effects of our increasing reliance on standardized tests:

I discussed the matter with a young colleague who specializes in urban policy and knows a lot about education reform, and what she had to say was eye-opening: credible research suggests that preparation for standardized tests is crowding out history, science, and literature and that even high test scores don't mean that students can say anything about something they've read for the first time.

It's a though-provoking and disturbing pieces