the 79 participating countries and regions, which was below the international average. Throughout the high-stakes accountability era, standardized test scores in the United States have remained flat. (8) Even before the COVID–19 pandemic began, progress had stalled on the main measure of academic well-being in the United States, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (in this Act referred to as NAEP ). According to the 2019 NAEP, the average performance of American fourth-and eighth-graders in math and reading has declined since the 2017 NAEP. (9) According to the National Center for Education Statistics, students demonstrating the lowest performance in reading have made no progress since the first NAEP was conducted almost 30 years ago. (10) According to the 2015 survey from the Council of the Great City Schools titled Student Testing in America’s Great City Schools: An Inventory and Preliminary Analysis , there is no correlation between the amount of mandated testing time and the reading and mathematics scores in grades four and eight on the NAEP. (11) In the same survey from the Council of the Great City Schools, 39 percent of school districts reported having to wait between two and four months before final State test results were available at the school level, minimizing the utility of these tests for instructional purposes. (12) In 2015, a typical American student took 112 mandated standardized tests across the length of their elementary and secondary education years, including both federally mandated summative assessments and non-federally mandated summative assessments. Countries that outperform the United States on the PISA only test their students three times throughout the kindergarten through twelfth-grade years. (13) Research has shown that current testing volumes narrow curriculum to the tested topics, particularly when exams are high stakes. Other important subjects, such as art, music, finance, foreign languages, social studies, civics, and physical education are downplayed or ignored.