This shift to high-stakes testing has not happened without controversy.

High-stakes testing creates incentives for schools to keep these people out of their classrooms.

Its emphasis on high-stakes testing is intended to raise standards and improve accountability.

But high-stakes testing has so radically changed the incentives for teachers that they too now have added reason to cheat.

Some even suggest that high-stakes testing may lead school personnel to intentionally manipulate student test scores.

High-stakes testing locates trust in an external, impersonal force - the test - rather than in teachers and other education officials.

High-stakes testing is not synonymous with high-pressure testing.

"He is hellbent on seeing that high-stakes testing dominates the school curriculum, and that is not the way to go."

The first is that they are obviously in terrible academic shape, which makes them the very children whom high-stakes testing is promoted as helping the most.

Portfolio assessment is just as unfair to transient students as high-stakes testing is to English language learners.

An article in the Education Life section last Sunday about problems with high-stakes testing referred incorrectly to a test used by the Philadelphia school district.

"What's very clear is that the study challenges the conventional wisdom that high-stakes testing improves academic achievement and does not have unwanted consequences beyond that."

Critics say that high-stakes testing is unreliable, that charter schools weaken public education, or that the federal government should not influence local schools.

HIGH-STAKES testing has contributed to the trend, with some parents seeing an advantage in being older in the grade.

If high-stakes testing was supposed to change that, we have seen little indication of it so far in New York, where the arcane state aid formula keeps the existing inequities intact.

A group calling itself Advocates for Education and based in the Milwaukee suburb of Whitefish Bay, insisted, "High-stakes testing will be detrimental to education and unfair to children."

A recent national study by Brian Jacob, a doctoral student at the University of Chicago, shows that high-stakes testing increases the odds that students with very low scores will drop out.

As Wayne Au says in High-Stakes Testing and Curricular Control: A Qualitative Metasynthesis, these tests are known as high-stakes testing.

Impact of High-Stakes Testing on Student Proficiency in Low-Stakes Subjects: Evidence from Florida's Elementary Science Exam", Marcus Winters, Julie Trivitt, and Jay P. Greene.

One consequence of this kind of high-stakes testing is that teaching and learning can be weakened rather than strengthened as teachers and students feel pressured to focus on passing the test rather than on achieving a full understanding of the subject matter.

Mr. Mills, flanked by Carl T. Hayden, the chancellor of the Board of Regents, contended that the results signaled that students could meet the state's tough new standards, despite warnings by critics that moving to high-stakes testing would be calamitous.

To the Editor: Re "The 'Ready to Work' Test" (editorial, March 6): High-stakes testing has trickled down to every grade level in America's public schools, thanks to No Child Left Behind legislation and, in New York's case, State Regents action.

Nichols, Sharon L. & Berliner, David C. "The Inevitable Corruption of Indicators and Educators Through High-Stakes Testing" The Great Lakes Center for Education Research & Practice, East Lansing, MI, March 2005.