Standardized Testing In America's School System

Due to preparation teens are overworked, overscheduled and overstressed, and it's taking a toll on the mental health. School psychologists say, students are aware of the high stakes attached to state exams. Students spend an excessive amount of class time preparing for them, and know that they will do poorly. Low test scores could ultimately cause a school to close or a teacher to lose a job. Students also can feel pressured by their inner drive to succeed, a quest for perfection or a fear of failure, especially if they may be unfamiliar with the English language or are not yet up to the reading or developmental level of the test in front of them (Frenette 5).

Depending on how desperate a teacher is for good test scores, inappropriate preparations can be made before testing, sometimes even to the point of cheating. While having standards and a uniform teaching model, high -stakes testing is generally detrimental to the education of America. The importance of these tests has become the be-all and end-all of high school. The accountability of the testing will follow the student throughout his or her educational life. Despite being held in such high regard, the high-stakes testing effects are far from the desired and predicted

Unfortunately, while some kids can prosper under timed conditions, many are not good at multiple-choice only tests, and they are frowned upon for low scores. Leslie Rayburn is a teacher in Santa Cruz, California, and she, too, believes that this is unfair to students, and to teachers who are graded based on their students’ grades. She explains that, ‘the children who perform poorly on multiple choice standardized tests (but perhaps might perform well on an open-ended form of test) are labeled as “less intelligent’ and the school suffers” (Rayburn) Since progress of a student is mainly viewed based upon the outcome of standardized test scores, the lower-performing students are seen as “not college- ready”, which creates a roadblock to a student about where they may want to attend college. The fact of the matter is that no two students are the same, learn the same, or test the same, so standardized tests are inaccurate measurements of a student’s full learning capability and

The first one, based on Hurst (2010), He stated that the standardized tests are not parallel with typical classroom lesson. Due to the fact that questions have to be generalizable to the entire population, most items assess general knowledge and understanding. Also, it’s quite the thing that put teacher in the box. According to Reddy (2013), In United States, teachers need to prepare the class that focusing mainly about this kind of examination. The teachers have to teach based on what will be in the standardized test to prepare their student to get ready.

The Game of School: Why We All Play It, How It Hurts Kids, and What It Will Take to Change It by Robert L. Fried is a great tool for identifying challenges in school systems and planning school reform. This book explains in great depth the problems faced by students and educators in schools today and ends with a call to action for solving these problems. Some major concepts that arise frequently throughout the book are time being wasted, students feeling powerless and the prioritization of test scores over authentic learning. Time is wasted by everyone in school and is wasted in various ways, for example students are given busy work and teachers rush through a curriculum while students learn nothing. Students, while they are the most important stakeholders, feel as though they have no control over their education.

All this joyful news of how standardized testing supposedly creates miracles of our knowledge, increasing student achievement, may be proven wrong or right, but that is not our deepest concerns. A student’s mental/physical health and future as an authentic learner is most at risk here. No matter how many cries from multiple students are heard, they continue to be silenced. Simply put, all standardized testing should be abolished for they are hurting students both in and out of classrooms. As students we deserve the ability to access authentic learning, however, with standardized testing heavily relied on, students are deprived of this interaction.

The Grading System: Completely Necessary Grades are an important part of the school system. Grades set the extraordinary students apart from the ordinary ones. In Jerry Farber’s essay, “A Young Person’s Guide to the Grading System,” he argues that grades are the only motivation students have in school. Farber even calls it “phony motivation.” He argues that students do not actually learn anything. Farber also argues that I disagree with Farber’s viewpoint on the grading system and the effect on students.

It is clear that this school is “…trapped in seven deadly habits: criticizing, blaming, complaining, nagging, threatening, punishing, and rewarding to control the behaviors of their students (Eby, Herrell, Jordan, 2010, pg. 27). Teachers’ frustrations with student behavior can be heard throughout the halls. Furthermore, it seems as if the discipline policy currently in place is reactive as opposed to proactive in nature, and focuses on what students did not do, rather than what students can do. Therefore, it is imperative that the school finds a new, research-based positive discipline program designed to teach students expected social behavior.

Although, some say standardized testing is beneficial to the way students learn, statistics show that this is simply not true, standardized testing adds unnecessary stress on students, suppresses their creativity, and limits the creativity of teachers. To begin, standardized testing puts a lot of unhealthy stress on students and gives them even more problems to worry about. Many students find standardized testing to be extremely stressful and can lead to faulty habits. According to the author Quinn, Mulholland: "One student couldn’t handle the stress of all of these tests and broke down in the middle of one. “She had a complete meltdown,” Neely-Randall told the HPR.

The dilemma is assessments should not be limited to nor even rely substantially on a standardized test that is primarily multiple-choice paper/pencil. Student assessment a challenging area because our school accountability is dependent on how well our students perform on the state standardized assessment. The accountability system has a lot to do on how and why our educators continuously assess students knowledge of the content using traditional summative assessment strategies such as multiple choice questions. Instances when the accountability ratings are available to each district, there is a period where the data is disaggregated followed by central office personnel having meetings with each principal on what interventions will be in place to ensure the scores go up in this current weakness area. Then, the principal has a conference with the educators on the campus in which the standardized test is taught and has data-driven conversations on how they will improve the scores the upcoming