"I will not divulge the contents of the tests to any other person through verbal, written or any other means of communication."

This is a pledge on the "Security Affidavit" signed by everyone who helps administer the high-stakes California STAR Tests to public school students.

Hopefully, the test officials, resplendent in their majesty, do not consider this document part of the test -- I just divulged a bit about divulging. The affidavit helps to ensure that test proctors (formerly known as "teachers") do not permit test-takers (once known as "students") to have prior knowledge of the questions.

I suspect there's another reason for secrecy. If the questions were revealed, the public might understand how tragically lame these standardized tests are.

"Lame," in this context, is a concept used by educational professionals to mean utterly dreary, brain-numbing, disconnected, bogus, draconian nonsense that sucks the last morsels of joy from the learning experience. But let's not get technical.

Did I mention that the unrelenting barrage of standardized tests is bad for children? Drill-and-grill test preparation is worse. Even the most obsequious teachers and administrators know that test mania has reached absurd levels; they just won't say it out loud. Meanwhile, students suffer.

Conservative policy-makers used to promote local control and decentralized decision-making; now, they're for some kind of Soviet-style mandated system. Master bureaucrats push prepackaged, trickle-down, paint-by-number curricula followed by a battery of standardized tests and punitive sanctions. How did this happen?

The American public does not want lockstep pedagogic uniformity. A new poll by the National PTA shows that parents consider school funding, teacher quality, parental involvement and class size to be significantly more important than state-mandated testing. The parents are right. So why all this high-stakes pressure?

Compounding the testing mess are the sanctions set by the No Child Left Behind Act. Five years running, Mark Twain Junior High in west Modesto has achieved a 9 or 10 in similar-schools rankings. This score is as high or higher than any other junior high in Stanislaus County.

But wait -- under NCLB, similar-schools rankings don't matter. It doesn't matter that we're located in a poor neighborhood where nearly all of our students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. It doesn't matter that a huge chunk of our students come from homes where English isn't spoken. It doesn't matter that our school has an overflow of special-needs students.

Despite the hard work of students and staff, and consistently good test scores, our school faces sanctions. The convoluted system of measuring "Adequate Yearly Progress" has rigged our school (and hundreds of others) for failure. This system is flagrantly unrealistic and outrageously unfair.

Schools don't need more fill-in-the-bubble testing. They need good teachers, supported by parents and administrators who are given the autonomy to engage students in positive and creative ways. Standards should include higher-level thinking skills, and student progress should be measured with a variety of assessment tools.

If we don't fix this testing mess, the stakes become stratospherically high.

Barker is the librarian at Mark Twain Junior High School.