As California continues to operate in fiscal peril, we must seek to be innovators. But there seems to be no will to look at testing as a place to cut expenditures. So why not save hundreds of millions of dollars statewide and millions locally by permanently invalidating the highly disruptive state testing process?

What would happen if parents voluntarily withdrew their kids from the state- mandated tests given in public schools? Let's begin by taking back that which is ours: access to our children's minds. This year, second graders taking the California Standards Tests and California Achievement Tests, Sixth Edition (CAT/6) will take 440 minutes of state tests. That's 7-year-olds taking 440 minutes of tests. The numbers are 450 minutes for third grade, 560 minutes for fourth grade, leading up to a whopping 625 by eighth grade. It only gets worse in high school with an unbelievable 755 minutes for juniors. That number does not include college entrance exams, preparatory tests, or specialized content area tests such as the ACT or Advanced Placement.

I would argue that the state gets far more out of these tests than any test- taker. Skewed scores caused by large numbers of students remaining untested may bring important attention to the lock-step attachment of society to a single printed score as an indicator of a student, school, or district's relative level of achievement. The real issue is what to do with a single test score for a student, school, or district besides making a tempting conclusion that student achievement is easily measured and computed into a number that is comparable across children and schools. It is up to parents to cut off this data flow immediately.

Parents do not have to have their children tested by the state. Section 60615 of the California Education Code states that parents may provide a written request to exclude their children from state testing. As a credentialed public school teacher, I question whether these tests affect instruction. How can they when the results don't arrive until the following year and no item analysis is provided by test publishers?

Sadly, students, teachers and administrators are never informed which kids missed which specific test questions. We are given percentile scores to compare our child to another child, and numbers to assess the "quality" of our school compared with others.

Such comparisons are ill-advised. Until conditions at each school and in the lives of each learner can be duplicated, comparing schools by comparing student test scores opens the door for false assumptions. In fact, no assumption should be made from any test score if, as test defenders say, they are meant to be used to design more effective instruction.

Incredibly, no direct instructional feedback is available for any student taking the CAT/6. How can it be that we tolerate a system in which no parent or teacher ever knows which test questions a child missed?

For a standards-based approach to learning to have any integrity, item analysis is critical to parents and educators working to improve learning. Inexplicably, these are precisely the data that are withheld from us by publishers who fear corruption of the test if items are allowed to be revealed to the community. Is the logic on withholding score analysis from second grade tests that we are going to give too much test preparation that will pollute the results when other learners take the test next year? Are we satisfied paying big bucks to companies that withhold data about our children? Would we tolerate a medical firm holding back crucial information on a blood test?

Parents already have the legal standing to bring testing to a halt. Why don't we? There would be drama if an administrator told the district office and community that they could not compute a number for their school's achievement. It would be interesting to see what new threats or penalties the compassionate conservatives in Washington would impose on states with large numbers of untested kids. What would each school site do during testing? How about teach instead?

Aha! Parents with a potential solution to the huge budget problem that kills two birds with one stone: With one action we cut into our deficit while reaffirming our preference that kids have meaningful instructional experiences over meaningless testing experiences.

You want parent choice in schools? You got it.

David Rapaport, who teaches eighth-grade social studies in the San Jose Public schools, serves on the site council of his children's elementary school in Palo Alto.