Coming out of the holiday season where many of us, well, OK, I confess, over indulged in food, parties and visits to relatives, we understand all too well the meaning of the term "too much of a good thing."

That's how I feel about the student tests that will soon consume the school community as we begin a new year. We need them. They serve a useful purpose. They can help us change our ways and do better jobs. And students benefit from preparing for them.

Let me be clear. I am not talking here about the tests classroom teachers use to measure what their students have learned or need to learn in their particular class.

What I am talking about are state/federal tests that are supposedly designed to measure student achievement, teacher effectiveness and the performance of administrators and school board members in running a school system that achieves academic goals set by politicians and bureaucrats in Albany and Washington.

They are certainly well-intentioned and I'm happy to report that most Farmingdale students do very well on these tests, especially since most are lowest common denominator type tests.

But, in the last several years since massive testing became the latest political/educational fad, tests have become the kudzu of the educational world. For those who haven't visited the South, kudzu is a leafy vine imported from Asia and intended to serve the beneficial purpose of shading porches on hot summer days. It was so widely accepted and planted that this vicious vine now covers thousands of acres, crowding out native species and making it impossible for them to survive.

Farmingdale schools used to have wonderfully complete education programs that provided a firm structure for students to learn, explore, experiment and to grow intellectually. It still does, but that structure is getting shakier and shakier as it is being crowded out by the time needed to prepare for tests, to take and administer tests and to correct tests.

Many teachers feel that we have become so consumed by the need to "test well" that we have lost the valuable time we need to give the type of special attention that often means the difference between success and failure. Each year an increasingly large segment of classroom time - time when students speak out, act out, question and learn - is lost to the time-gobbling kudzu of testing.

And we all know that time lost is not regained. That's especially important when you remember that your child only goes through school once.

What's the answer? Frankly, I don't know where, or how, we draw the line between needed testing and excessive testing. What I do know is that we need to pay more attention to this problem. We need parents and administrators and school board members working with teachers, talking the problem through, to reach a solution that is fair to all.

This problem is more difficult to attack because it grows slowly, not in the kind of dramatic spurts that call attention to themselves. That makes it as insidious as kudzu and each year more time is covered over by testing.

But all of us need to start acting now. We need to address this serious problem before, like the kudzu, it is too late to rip it out, root and branch, from our children's' educational system.