When we spent a year in Sweden my oldest child was 8 (would have been in grade 3 in Canada). I was surprised, to put it mildly, that not only was there no testing, there were no report cards until grade 8! I found this silly at the time. My views have come around 180Â° since that time. What mattered to the Swedes was how the child was developing, both psychologically and academically. Three times a year you had an "utvecklings samtal", literally a "developmental conversation" with the teacher.

The result of that year? The 8 year old became fluent in Swedish, and got to the point of reading chapter books in it. She completed the entire Canadian grade 3 math curriculum (in Swedish). It was all done at her own pace (almost nothing was taught as a class activity) in a school day that ran 8:10 to 1 pm!

I have come to see through the experiences of my children how much school time is wasted with testing, both in class and standardized. Why do we need to rank the kids so tightly at this level? Maybe this is important in high school, but seems silly in elementary school. Besides, a huge fraction of the students are getting grades that are higher than the normal range, so these grades are largely meaningless anyway.

I really hope we can pull away from this over testing trend.