Standardized Teting In Our Schools

Standardized testing is a phrase that has come to strike fear into the hearts of many students. Students dread them, adults look back on them with remorse, and teachers fret over preparing their students for them. But what is their real purpose? Is it to test knowledge and intellect, to analyze the quality of the taker's education or is it something else? Standardized testing is not an effective way to test the skills and abilities of today's students. Standardized tests do not reveal what a student actually understands and learns, but instead only prove how well a student can do on a generic test. Schools have an obligation to prepare students for life, and with the power standardized tests have today, students are being cheated out of a proper, valuable education and forced to prepare and improve their test skills. Too much time, energy, and pressure to succeed are being devoted to standardized tests. Standardized testing, as it is being used presently, is a flawed way of testing the skills of today's students.

Too much time is being devoted to preparing students for standardized tests. Parents should worry about what schools are sacrificing in order to focus on raising test scores. Schools across the country are cutting back on, or even eliminating programs in the arts, recess for young children, field trips, electives for high school students, class meetings, discussions about current events, the use of literature in the elementary grades, and entire subject areas such as science (if the tests cover only language arts and math) (Kohn Standardized Testing and Its Victims 1).

Alfie Kohn, author of The Case against Standardized Testing, recalls a specific incident of how children are being cheated out of valuable class time. He states that a school in Massachusetts used a remarkable unit, for a middle-school class, where students chose an activity and extensively researched it, and reported or taught, it to the class. This program has had to be removed from the course curriculum in order to devote enough time to teaching prescribed material for their standardized tests.

At my high school all students in the tenth grade were required to take the Graduation Qualifying Exam. Many students did not pass the test their first time, and were forced to go through the test up to four more times, and if they did not pass the test in this amount of time, they did not graduate. It is hard to test students in this way since no one was taught the same way all 12 years or learned the same exact things; these differences are why people are different (Popham 2). School is more about testing now, and we have veered away from creative teaching to teach a test. We need to have teachers who inspire kids to want to learn instead of robots who cram information. These tests take away from that creativity by forcing teachers to teach the curriculum one way.

Teachers are being forced to give up their lesson plans in order to prepare students. One teacher told how she had spent considerable time and money assembling books of importance to Latino culture, and how her students had responded enthusiastically to her initiative. Her students, however, would have to wait to learn about the Latino culture:

She was dismayed to see, upon returning one day from lunch, that the books for her week's lessons had been set aside. In the center of her desk was a stack of test-prep booklets with a teacher's guide, and a note saying, Ð''Use these instead of your regular curriculum until after the TAAS (a standardized test)'. The TAAS test date was three months away (Meier 4).

Additionally, standardized tests have the ability to make or break a student. Today, children are being failed, denied access to an advanced program or school, or even refused a high school diploma on the basis of a single standardized test (Sacks 3). Moreover, these tests can determine whether students will spend their summer vacation on the beach or sweating out summer school. Since standardized tests have a great deal of power, students are forced to prepare for them rather than learn valuable knowledge, simply for the sake that they can graduate or enter into the program or school of their choice.

Standardized tests take away the creativity from the teachers forcing them to "teach to the test" this means memorizing facts rather than learning processes for future application. The learning process should be about how to do things. Not just formulas for a test but how did those formulas come about. After taking a standardized test, how many people can actually say that they remember, or will ever use such formulas and facts again? Standardized tests do not include everyone because they only include the average. This means that the tests may not include what you learned because the average of the nation didn't learn it. You may not have been taught to the test so you are at a disadvantage just because the teaching style varied.

The pressure to succeed on these tests is resulting in a steady rise of cheating by both students and teachers alike. In fact, it is so intense that some teachers have even been caught cheating with their students. Everything from teachers' pay to principals' jobs are linked to student performance, intensifying the pressure to "do anything" for high scores. Recently, investigators in New York accused dozens of city teachers and principals with cheating on standardized tests. Over the past few years, scattered reports of cheating by educators have surfaced in a number of states, including Connecticut, Virginia, Arizona, Maryland, and Texas (Bruinius and Clayton 1). Joseph Rezulli, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Connecticut in Storrs and a critic of high-stakes tests, wrote, "These scores have become the only exchangeable currency in educationÐ'... so people are starting to cheat. If my job or my promotion or my salary or my recognition as a good principal is on the line- they think, Ð''Why not?' "(Morse 3). Furthermore, like teachers with their jobs on the line, students feel pressure to do well on standardized tests and get good grades. Applying to college, and getting into the "good schools," has become an intensely competitive process

Not only are we spending too much money on these tests, but these days' educators are feeling pressure to raise test scores that range from significant to excruciating, depending on where they work. And also depending on where they work, educators are leaving the field because of what is being done to schools in the name of "tougher standards".

"A growing number of schools are rudderless, struggling to replace a graying corps of principals at a time when the pressure to raise tests scores and other new demands