There are two things that a standardized test is meant to achieve: comparing the academic levels of school children, and comparing the teaching levels of teachers and schools. The idea is for standardized tests to encourage parents, teachers, and students to recognize and work on academic weaknesses, but the truth is standardized tests cause a lot of harm. As a result of standardized tests, teachers and schools are unfairly graded based on the skills of the students, causing the nationwide curriculum is beginning to revolve around test scores, and decreasing the quality of education.
Because of how they work, standardized tests are not fit to provide a complete picture of the quality of education. Though it is true that standardized tests measure academic proficiency, they fail to give a fair assessment. As the professor and critic, James Popham, explains in one of his essays on standardized testing, standardized test questions are chosen based on how many students answer them correctly (Popham). If about 50% of the students answer the question right, the question is ideal, but if 90% of the students answer it right, the question is thrown out (Popham). For this reason, skill that most children have are not tested, meaning the core of the lesson from a given school year will never appear on a test (Popham). Instead, many questions are based on a given student’s innate intellectual or critical thinking abilities (Popham). In order to have an even spread of right and wrong answers from the students, standardized tests must rely on skills and information which some students have and some do not, making them unfit to measure the quality of the education.
When standardized tests are used to measure the quality of education, everyone loses. Teachers have lost their jobs and entire schools have been shut down due to standardized test scores (Meador). Parents use standardized test scores in order to pick schools for their children, so there is pressure on principles to base the entire curriculum around taking standardized tests (Meador). Although it is true that standardized tests are capable of pointing out important flaws in education, the consequences are too drastic for a single, flawed measure of academic proficiency. As James Popham explains, “If a school’s standardized test scores are high, people think the school’s staff is effective. If a school’s standardized test scores are low, they see the school’s staff as ineffective” (Popham). The face of standardized testing has changed from once per year to twice per year to a constant, year-round excursion, and it is all because of the pressure parents put on schools to raise their scores (Kolker). Because society considers standardized test scores to be the black-and-white measure of student and teacher success, there are harsh consequences for everyone involved.
The weight that is placed on standardized testing is turning children away from school. Students that were once excited to learn have a tendency to burn out of school as soon as the curriculum begins to revolve around tests. Intricate lesson plans and large projects make way for all-day test prep, and students become uninvolved (Kolker). Creative subjects like painting and music lose importance because they do not appear on a standardized test (Kolker). Common subjects like reading lose their joy when they transform into vocabulary and reading comprehension (Kolker). The true face of standardized testing is the stripping education down to the bone, and teaching only information that will appear on the test.
Standardized testing has removed the education from education. If a school cannot compete with its neighbors on standardized tests, it goes extinct, so schools are forced to focus their curriculum on test items. The creative and engaging parts of education are stripped away, leaving only test prep. By placing their faith in a single test which is incapable of giving a fair measure of an education system, society is destroying the education system that it has.
- Kolker, Robert. “The Opt-Outers.” New York Magazine. 24 November 2013. 9 December 2014.
- Meador, Derrick. “Pros and Cons of Standardized Testing.” About. 2014. 9 December 2014.
- Popham, James. “Why Standardized Tests Don’t Measure Educational Quality.” Using Standards and Assessments 56.6 (1999). 8-15. Web. 9 December 2014.
