Lloyd Lofthouse

Here’s a high stakes testing statistic you won’t hear bandied about on the news.

The suicide rate among 10- to 14-year-olds doubled between 2007 and 2014 – the same period in which states have increasingly adopted Common Core standards and new, more rigorous high stakes tests.

For the first time, suicide surpassed car crashes as a leading cause of death for middle school children.

In 2014, the last year for which data was available, 425 middle schoolers nationwide took their own lives.

To be fair, researchers, educators and psychologists say several factors are responsible for the spike, however, pressure from standardized testing is high on the list.

In fact, it is a hallmark of other nations where children perform better on these tests than our own.

In our efforts to emulate these countries, we’ve inadvertently imported their child suicide problem.

In South Korea, one of the highest performing nations…