The common core standards movement seems to be common sense: Our schools should have similar standards, what students should know at each grade. The movement, however, is based on the false assumption that our schools are broken, that ineffective teaching is the problem and that rigorous standards and tests are necessary to improve things.

The mediocre performance of American students on international tests seems to show that our schools are doing poorly. But students from middle-class homes who attend well-funded schools rank among the best in the world on these tests, which means that teaching is not the problem. The problem is poverty. Our overall scores are unspectacular because so many American children live in poverty (23 percent, ranking us 34th out of 35 “economically advanced countries”).

Poverty means inadequate nutrition and health care, and little access to books, all associated with lower school achievement. Addressing those needs will increase achievement and better the lives of millions of children.

How can we pay for this? Reduce testing. The common core, adopted by 45 states, demands an astonishing increase in testing, far more than needed and far more than the already excessive amount required by No Child Left Behind.

The common core standards movement seems to be common sense: Our schools should have similar standards, what students should know at each grade. The movement, however, is based on the false assumption that our schools are broken, that ineffective teaching is the problem and that rigorous standards and tests are necessary to improve things.

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.

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.