Far too true

Professor Shaun Johnson's piece on the culture of test prep in elementary school is far too true, as I know firsthand:

Throughout January and beyond, social studies, science, and other expendable subjects stop. That's right, they stop, for months at a time. Schools become mobilized as math and reading academies. And no, it's not this idealized culture of inquiry and intellectual curiosity; students are not reading and discussing literature of their choosing or building mathematical models to simulate concepts. Students as young as eight years old read endless short passages about random topics like dolphin echolocation or volcanoes. They answer multiple choice or short essay questions for just about everything. Any and all pieces of paper are evaluated. Cassette tapes play excerpts of larger texts and are followed by an unyielding stream of worksheets and questions.
What you call math is simply a line-up of procedures and algorithms. Packets and worksheets teach the procedures. Packets and worksheets reinforce and assess the procedures. There is no discovery. There is no modeling, simulation, building, or anything that I can define as solidifying conceptual knowledge of math. No chance that a struggling reader is going to find any solace in math; half the subject now requires almost as much reading as reading itself.

Some, in fact, are doing it year round.