Standardized Testing Issues in the Us

Jourdan Ramirez

ENGL 1302- Honors

17 November 2015

Standardized Testing Issues in the US

Abstract

Standardized testing has become an increasingly debated topic over the past several decades.  Even some of the highest ranking officials of our government have a vested interest in how this issue is resolved.  Students, now days, are bombarded with test after test and the perceived outcome is that these tests are an invalid means of assessing student knowledge.  Test anxiety is also on the rise and this also leads to the decrease in validity of these tests.  Teachers are becoming more concerned with the outcome of their students’ scores because scores are being tied directly back to them as a reflection of how they perform as teachers.  Because of this, teachers across the country have fallen into a massive “teach-to-the-test” movement in which sometimes more important aspects of student education are ignored, for example, creativity.  Standardized testing is not inherently bad, but there is some serious work that needs to be done in order to bring testing back up to standard.  This paper will discuss the main points of validity of standardized tests, testing anxiety, and the massive “teach-to-the-test” movement many teachers have fallen victim to.

Introduction

Standardized testing has become an increasingly more debated topic over the last few decades.  In the last few years, in particular, standardized testing has come under high scrutiny from not only parents, teachers, and students, but also some of the highest ranking officials in our government.  After the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act passed by George W. Bush in 2001, many teachers have begun to “teach-to-the-test” a phenomenon in which teachers ignore sometimes more important aspects of the curriculum in an effort to ensure that all their students pass the exam at the end of the year.  Goldberg (2005) discusses the areas that have been over looked as a result of high-stakes testing, “creativity, perseverance, ability to work in a cooperative group, initiative, integrity, discipline, performance excellence…are rarely taught and scarcely counted in judging students' performance” (p. 11).  Teachers don’t have the time or energy to teach these, sometimes more important, topics because they have fallen into the “teach-to-the-test” cycle.  Dr. Ronald Ferguson describes how he feels about the NCLB and the Race to the Top program put in place by President Obama.  “Ferguson describes the law's reliance on standardized tests as ‘a step along the path to getting [accountability] right.’ ‘I think No Child Left Behind is important; [educational funding contest] Race to the Top has been important,’ he says. ‘I think attention to test scores has been important, but the balance is not right yet.’ Ferguson also notes that ‘having people become single-mindedly focused on test scores is a mistake’” (Roach, 2014, p. 36).  The United States is quickly falling behind many other countries across the world in the education field and if we want to be able to compete with these other countries, we need to do something about the standardized testing issues that plague this country.  I intend to discuss several of the main ideas of why tests are causing such a problem for students and teachers alike, such as validity of testing, test anxiety, and “teaching-to-the-test” and what we, as a nation, should do to solve these problems.