Someday, this could all be ours

Sure, we know that an undue obsession with standardized testing leads to incentives for administrators and teachers to cheat in order to give the impression of improvement. But that's nothing compared to the impact on other parts of a child's eduction which get shoved aside in the name of test scores:

At Public School 10 on the edge of Park Slope, Brooklyn, parents begged the principal to postpone the lower school science fair, insisting it was going to add too much pressure while they were preparing their children for the coming state tests.

On Staten Island, a community meeting devolved into a series of student stress stories, with one parent recounting how his son had woken up from a bad dream, mumbling that he had forgotten to fill in a bubble answer.

And at Public School 24 in the Riverdale neighborhood in the Bronx, a fifth-grade teacher, Walter Rendon, has found himself soothing tense 10- and 11-year-olds as they pore over test prep exercises. “Sometimes, I say: ‘Just breathe.’ ”

But in fairness, I'm sure gratuitous stress at the school level will only help to prepare students prepare for a workforce similarly built on random burdens imposed from on high with no consideration for the interests of the rabble. So we at least can't say the Saskatchewan Party's plans are anything less than internally consistent.

(H/t to Kay at Balloon Juice.)