Mandatory Standardized Testing Research Paper

Obama Administration Calls for Limits on Testing in Schools On Saturday, the Obama administration declared that the push for testing in the nation’s public schools had gone too far, and urged schools to step back and make exams less onerous and more purposeful. Specifically, the administration called for a cap on assessment so that no child would spend more than 2 percent of classroom instruction time taking tests. A survey, also released Saturday, found that students in the nation’s big-city schools will take, on average, about 112 mandatory standardized tests between prekindergarten and high school graduation, adding up to eight tests a year. In eighth grade, when tests fall most heavily, they consume an average of 20 to 25 hours, or 2.3 percent of school time. The totals did

They worried that the cap on time spent testing would only tangle schools in more federal regulations and questions of what, exactly, counts as a test. The agreement among Democrats and Republicans that higher expectations and accountability could lift the performance of American students, who chronically lag their peers in other countries on international measures. States created the so-called Common Core standards which outlined the skills students should have upon graduation, and signed on to tests tied to those standards. But as the Obama administration pushed testing as an incentive for states to win more federal money in the Race for the Top program, it was bedeviled by an unlikely left-right alliance. Conservatives argued that the standards and tests were federal overreach; some called them a federal takeover, and called on parents and local school committees to resist what they called a “one size fits all” approach to teaching. Still, it emphasized that the administration was not backing away entirely from tests: The announcement said tests should cover “the full range of relevant state standards,” and elicit “complex