Here comes another standardized testing season with all the administrator anxiety, teacher turmoil and student disaffection. So much of it that, at least in high schools, those mass assessments do as much to measure student alienation and boredom as academic ability.

Yet these instruments of stress and torture have been the lifeblood of educational policy, which is why their worst aspect is the inexplicable emphasis on just two subjects, sometimes at the expense of everything else.

I do not mean to question the importance of math or English (which is the subject I teach). Literacy – numerical and linguistic – are survival skills. Fluency and mastery are paths to professional success in many fields.

Yet how are science and history, government, economics, non-English languages and the arts not equally important to students’ long-term success and well-being and to the well-being – and survival – of the human race?

In an increasingly connected world, don’t we want to ensure that our children can speak more than one language? We actually do a pretty decent job helping children from other countries learn English – for which they are regularly tested – but a shamefully inadequate job helping U.S.-born students to achieve fluency in other languages.

Thanks to a massive pushto improve STEM in our schools, science education, despite not being universally........

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