You won’t find any disagreement that students take too many tests in schools.

While there’s consensus on that issue, how much we should trim standardized tests is still open to debate.

Gov. Mark Dayton has proposed cutting a third of the 21 exams that students are now required to take between their third and 11th grades. But a task force charged with the same goal proposed a more modest change. That group agreed that college readiness tests should be scrapped, but it recommended keeping reading and math Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments in grades three through eight.

At least both sides are taking steps in the right direction. While the tests provide a yardstick for measuring students’ progress, their value as tools for determining how well students are educated has been inflated. They’re a much better indicator of the demographics of school districts than a reflection of the educational abilities of teachers.

We’ve known for years that the students of middle-class parents perform well in general in school while students from poorer families typically underperform. Without taking into account the economic differences in the families served by school districts, comparisons among district test scores are misleading.

Meanwhile, the heavy focus on test scores has stifled creative approaches to education in classrooms and frustrated teachers who see education as more than just filling in the right bubble in a multiple-choice test.

Rather than having students simply recite facts and figures, we need graduates who possess critical thinking skills. They have to have the ability to gather information from a variety of sources, analyze the data and draw a meaningful conclusion. Moreover, schools should be centers for creative thinking not a cookie-cutter mentality that discourages students from thinking outside the box. Some of our country’s greatest entrepreneurs were those who were not afraid to challenge the status quo or go beyond traditional wisdom. Interestingly, some of our greatest entrepreneurs also performed poorly in traditional schools.

We don’t mean to suggest that all testing is bad. We expect students to graduate with the key skills they’ll need to move on to college or jobs and ensuring that they’re making adequate progress toward those goals is important.

But multiple tests by the state, which are often supplemented by assessment testing done by individual school districts, isn’t the solution. It’s become part of the problem. It’s no wonder Education Minnesota, which represents teachers across the state, and others have called for a saner approach.

By reducing the testing burden and focusing on a few tests that can help teachers truly determine a student’s progress, we can get education back on track and put the focus back on individual students and the way they learn. That’s a goal that the Legislature should embrace.