Sunday Dialogue - Improving Our Schools - NYTimes.com Will a new set of standards and more tests help students? The idea that reducing spending on educational testing could help alleviate poverty is naïve. Testing actually costs less, on a per-pupil basis, than a new textbook, a year's worth of school supplies or almost any other educational expenditure, according to a 2010 report by the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education. It's been estimated that as little as 1 percent of total educational spending is spent on assessment. It is true that schools will likely have to spend more money on digital technology to accommodate new assessments to monitor students" mastery of the new common core standards. But that technology will be used throughout the school day, not just for assessments. Moreover, the return on the investment will be far greater than the cost. Assessments will be embedded in engaging digital environments that make it possible to measure not just what students know but how they apply what they know to solve problems and communicate their ideas. That won't happen unless policy makers are willing to spend more, not less, on high-quality tests that provide information that is much more valuable instructionally than the tests in use today. The writer is a visiting fellow at the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. Another tremendous cost of the increased testing to students will be the increased loss of time for actual teaching and learning. With pretests in the fall, end-of-the-year tests in the spring and regular "formative" tests throughout the school year, students will lose weeks of instructional time. The writer is an English as a second language coordinator at the Bavarian International School. Our blind adherence to the regimen of testing has yielded a cultural perspective that could fairly be termed pathological. Even our most test-successful children seem bent on improving their test scores by any means necessary, as witnessed recently by the testing scandal at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan (my alma mater), where more than 80 students are being investigated for cheating on tests that they knew would have no significant impact on their academic futures. Further, many of these very same "gifted" and privileged children around the country are habitual abusers of prescription amphetamines to enhance their test performances. Illegal cheating on this scale is dwarfed only by the legal cheating that supports the multibillion-dollar testing and test-prep industry, as families of means further distance themselves from the underprivileged by spending tens of thousands of dollars buying points on high-stakes tests for their children. The real test is the test of life - where taking risks and failing gloriously is rewarded far more richly than meaningless numbers on a piece of paper. Let us re-evaluate the principles our education system currently embraces and focus again on the skills and values that have made our society profoundly successful. The writer is an educator and documentary filmmaker. Poverty is indeed the root cause of student achievement gaps, but urban schools serving predominantly low-income students like mine show that you can overcome these gaps if you use testing data during the course of the year to match students with extra tutoring, literacy interventions and other supports. My colleagues and I can't afford to wait until the end of the year to find out that our teaching methods are working for only some of our students.