Is Testing The Answer To Student'S Success?

Is Testing the Answer to Student's Success?

Throughout the history of education, going back to the 1950's, a big debate has been if testing is the answer to a student's success. Education is not how well one can take a test. Instead it is the knowledge and understanding that a student possesses. This is why I believe that something must be done in order to prevent standardized testing detrimentally affecting the process of education. The government and states should not require standardized testing to determine academic advancement because of the uses of standardized testing, the statistics on standardized testing, and the problems with standardized testing. Students are also compared to one another through these country and state tests. It is clear from the results that this is not the answer! A student will not be successful and always want to improve just from seeing a poor test result. According to the Association for Childhood Education International, "Implications of failure in the younger years can be devastating." The child believes they are a failure when they are told they need to repeat the last grade or didn't pass. This feeling can stay with the child throughout their education and hinder academic and social growth. Consequently standardized tests should not be administered during the primary grades or at least greatly reduced. Also, if more preparation, time, and money were put into these efforts, they might be a more reliable source in determining if a student is where they need to be academically. Also, the government needs to take credit for these poor test results the students are producing. No Child Left Behind was created to improve student's success no matter what background they are coming from. When the program is mismanaged and under funded, how is this expected to be a help? It isn't!! The government needs to step it up and give a little more for student's success or else they need to take full blame for the failure.

Preparing for a test is one of the most vital parts in order for the results to be successful. A student needs to be taught by the right kind of professionals, or teachers, in order to be able to take and apply the information needed for the tests. The teachers that are responsible for these students success are not as "highly qualified" as many think (Mantel 471). Eric A. Hanushek said the following about teachers:

Teachers are central to any consideration of schools, and a majority of education policy discussions focus directly or indirectly on the role of teachers. There is a prima facie case for the concentration on teachers, because they are the largest single budgetary element in schools. Moreover, parents, teachers, and administrators emphasize repeatedly the fundamental role that teachers play in the determination of school quality. Yet there remains little consensus among researchers on the characteristics of a good teacher, let alone on the importance of teachers in comparison to other determinants of academic performance (Hanushek 4).

The quality of the teachers honestly is one of the most important parts in testing students. Well the students need to be taught the material that will be needed to do well on these tests, and that's the teacher's responsibility. True learning involves teaching the students to think logically and form their own conclusions based on facts and inferences, not memorization and regurgitation of facts. These facts would be useless to the students if they were not able to use logic to connect these facts and make educated decisions. Nevertheless, the core school subjects do not include this. According to Brady, "School subjects are just convenient organizers of information. As all effective teachers know, the real challenge isn't to stuff kids' heads with secondhand information, but to teach them to think, to draw inferences, generate hypotheses, formulate generalizations, explore systemic relationships, make defensible value judgments, and so on." Education is not about how well a student can memorize a subject. It is about motivating the student to think and come to logical conclusions and hypothesis on their own. This being the case, the standardized tests are not conclusive and accurate of what education and learning are. They need to be given practice tests and good examples of things they may need to know when taking these tests. No student can or should be expected to apply what he/she has learned in school if a teacher can't link things together. What is being taught and what is being tested are totally different at this point in time. There was a test that was administered around the country for all students to participate in. "98% of the schools that administered the test learned that they failed to meet the cutoff requirement score" (Koch 401). This is unacceptable and truthfully embarrassing as a country. Hirsh states that "yearly testing is essential both to keep track of each student's progress and to encourage teachers to cooperate in providing students with a coherent education in which each grade can build on the previous one" (98). Government surveys show that, "one out of four secondary classes in core academic subjects is assigned to a teacher lacking even a college minor in the subject being taught" (Mantel 475).This is so wrong! When parents realized these are the kind of people that their children are spending eight hours a day with and supposedly getting an "education" from, they were very upset.

Although testing is the trend in determining a student's academic level, it is not a reasonable and reliable way. One alternate put forth by Fairtest is to use a team of trained judges. These would be much better than a machine scored test since they would give the administration the ability to test a wide variety of areas both academic and non-academic. According to the article, "How Standardized Testing Damages Education", "Studies have shown that, with training, the level of agreement among judges (the inter-rater reliability) is high." This is the same system used in the Olympic Games to evaluate the contestants, where both the highest and lowest scores are thrown out so there aren't any extremes. Nevertheless this is not the only alternative, another is to change what it tests. Until this is done students should not be held accountable for the results that these tests are producing. The most complicating part of this whole testing dilemma is that many states have not yet aligned their tests with their new standards, and the students aren't being tested on what they are actually learning in school. If they don't know and aren't even somewhat familiar with what they are being tested on, how are they expected