By Stacey Wells ’15

As many individuals recognize, our country needs a major renovation of its educational system. Unfortunately, the higher powers seem to believe that more testing will solve everything. The federal government has been pushing for an increase in testing for years and it has finally begun in MCPS. The PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of College and Careers) is being implemented at a multitude of schools throughout the spring. At the elementary school level, children will be losing at least three hours of instruction time per day. This learning time has been replaced with mindless filling in answers, eradicating creativity and inspiration completely. And testing in high school does not make the situation any better–students are still not learning anything other than how to beat the test. Education needs to be going in a different direction than just simply more testing for more and more students. Instead, students should be encouraged to learn and think, which will help them solve the bigger issues in our society later on. A change in education needs to happen soon and it must steer clear of more testing. Instead, education should focus more on the teaching of important material and inspiring students to love learning.