-- Albert Einstein (from the opening page of the Web site of Parents Across Virginia United to Reform Standards of Learning)

In the familiar arc of a typical school year, May used to be a merry, merry month of giddiness and anticipation. Warm weather, tube tops, the proximity of summer -- it was the pixilating curtain raiser to liberation in June. Now, however, it is a mean season of standardized testing in which the stakes are high and the feelings of dread and resentment are pervasive. And this year, as students, parents and school administrators across the country take a stand against academic brinkmanship, May has become a month of rebellion.

In just the past two weeks, protests against high-stakes testing have sprung up in Marin County and Oakland, Calif., and in Scarsdale, N.Y., where an impressive SWAT team of parents managed to get 67 percent of the 290 eighth graders in the district to boycott the state's standardized tests. (More than 35 percent of students at one Marin high school and more than 22 percent at another boycotted tests last week.)

More demonstrations are planned for this month at schools in Seattle, Boston, Detroit, Los Angeles, Albany, N.Y., and Tucson, Ariz. -- just the latest round of rebellion to follow a pioneering spate of protest in states like Massachusetts, Ohio, Wisconsin and Florida over the past three years. Using old-fashioned strategies of grass-roots organizing, along with recently acquired savvy about the media, parents, teachers and students are joining forces to publicly oppose the use of standardized tests to make important decisions about the fate of students, the future of school funding and the direction of curriculum from kindergarten to 12th grade.

While there are those among the anti-testing rebels who oppose all standardized tests on the grounds that they fail to measure creative intelligence and discriminate against low-income, urban and minority students, many of today's protesters, including teachers who believe in the value of standardized tests, specifically oppose the use of student scores as the sole criterion for "high-stakes" decisions such as whether to promote children to the next grade, allow them to graduate or put them on a tracking system in their schools.

Says Michele Forman, a Middlebury, Vt., teacher who was named the country's "Teacher of the Year 2001, "It's like doing brain surgery with a jackknife. Learning and teaching is messy stuff. Students just don't fit into bubbles."

School administrators -- most of whom support standardized testing as a diagnostic tool -- also are fighting such testing, the scores of which are used more and more frequently to cut school funding, redefine curriculum or make wholesale changes in administrative staffing.

Chief among the demands of the protesters against high-stakes testing is that lawmakers reject President Bush's proposal to test "every child, every year" from Grade 3 to the end of high school as a way to evaluate school performance and assign funding. Not only does the constant tallying of test scores obscure the finer points of student and teacher achievement, say critics of the plan, it creates an intolerably stressful learning environment for children.

Late last month, a group called the Alliance for Childhood, which includes four of the country's most highly regarded child and adolescent psychiatrists, issued a statement warning the federal government to "rethink the current rush to make American children take even more standardized tests." Signed by Robert Coles, Alvin Poussaint, Stanley Greenspan and Marilyn Benoit, among others, the statement cited evidence that "test-related stress is literally making many children sick."

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