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| Feb. 21, 2007 -- After researching standardized testing, one high school student concludes that the practice supports the creation of
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| by Yelena Akopyan
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Editors' Note: We first found this essay on Yelana's YouThink page where she noted: "I wrote this as a research paper last year, but it's a subject that really interests me. It's pretty long and in essay format (the most boring way to write) ... [but] I'd like to know what other people think." We thought a lot of her analysis and commentary and are pleased to reprint it here.
Education -- defined by dictionary.com as "an instructive or enlightening experience." And so should be the experience students receive at schools -- places supposedly responsible for the education of the general public. However, as time goes on, public schools are becoming, according to Alfie Kohn, more of "glorified test centers" than the places of education and learning most parents and students mistakenly believe them to be.
A factor that enormously and alarmingly contributes to the steady decline in quality of education is the steady increase in standardized testing in schools. Millions of students in America can tell you they are frustrated and fed up with standardized testing, but few understand just how unfair, misleading and detrimental to their well-being and education standardized testing truly is.
Forced upon kids as early as the 4th grade, standardized testing largely succeeds at it's aim: to suppress the creativity and individually of American students, to place emphasis on things of little importance in classrooms, to take education out of the hands of teachers, and to make success more difficult for poor and minority students.
This is not a natural part of the progression of education or society, but rather a force used by politicians and businessmen to get ahead in their careers or in the business world. This is also a force that can be defeated, and there are multiple measures, radical and less extreme, that students, teachers and parents can take to increase knowledge about the harmful effects of standardized testing and fight it's power.
Standardized testing is a troubling phenomenon that subjects students to unprecedented amounts of stress and pressure, but disturbingly enough, is completely inaccurate at measuring true knowledge and skills; the true goal is instead to categorize students into "high achievers" and "low achievers."
The very nature of how test makers formulate questions and decide which questions should be included on the test and which should be discarded gives away the lack of validity standardized tests have. When selecting which questions should be included on a test, test makers make sure to discard questions that too many or too few students are answering correctly (based off sample tests) because "they don't want everyone to do well on the test," since "the ultimate objective, remember, is not to evaluate how well the students were taught, but to separate them, to get a range of scores (Kohn15)."
Unfortunately, since the questions that many students answer correctly are the ones teachers found to be most important or valuable, they are also the questions that are discarded. In effect, standardized testing places great weight on non-important information. And because teachers are pressured into doing well on standardized tests, they often "teach to the test" by stressing information that has been released from previous tests and "try to adjust the curriculum in order to bolster their student's scores (Kohn 16)."
In this way, teachers begin to teach students non-important information because of standardized testing. The SAT, accurately dubbed the "Suck Ass Test," by a character from the film The Perfect Score, recently added an essay portion to the writing section of the test in March of 2005. However, this part of the SAT, as well as all other aspects of the SAT, has come under fire from critics.
After examining scores given to multiple essays, Dr. Les Perelman, a director of undergraduate writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found a direct correlation between the length of a student's essays and the score received, regardless of the content of the essay.
"I have never found a quantifiable predictor in 25 years of grading that was anywhere near as strong as this one," said Perelman. He performed an experiment in which he proceeded to guess the score an essay received based entirely on length and shape, without ever reading a word of the essay itself. He was right 90% of the time (Winerip 1).
In addition, the accuracy of statements made in the essays is not considered when it comes to giving each essay a score. Perelman fears this teaches students terrible writing habits (Winerip 2).
In subjects like social studies and science, "the best way to teach (according to a growing consensus among educators in those fields) is diametrically opposed to the best way to raise test scores, which may involve textbooks, lectures, and worksheets to promote memorizations of dates and definitions (Kohn 33)."
Due to the way test questions are chosen, the fact that standardized testing is determined to sort students into groups of achievement, and the human and mechanical error often involved in scoring tests, it is clear that standardized tests are in no way an accurate measurement of important knowledge, and are actually detrimental to the quality of what is taught in schools.
In addition to being inaccurate measures of knowledge and damaging to the quality of instruction in schools, standardized tests are also intrinsically biased against minority students and students of low-income families. "For decades, critics have complained that many standardized tests are unfair, because the questions require a set of knowledge and skills more likely to be possessed by children from a privileged background (Kohn 33)."
A study of math scores on the 1992 NAEP found that the number of parents living at home, parents' educational background, and type of community the student lived in explained a "whopping 89 percent of the differences in state scores," although these factors have nothing to do with school instruction. The same holds true for other states.
This led a Massachusetts researcher to the conclusion that the student's performance "has almost everything to do with parental socioeconomic backgrounds and less to do with teachers, curriculum, or what the children learned in the classroom (Kohn 39)." In addition, there is an obvious correlation to scores students receive on the SAT and the family income and parental education of the student (Wikipedia 1).
According to Senator Wellstone, "We cannot close the achievement gap until we close the gap in investment between poor and rich schools ... [Otherwise,] we hold children responsible for our own inaction and unwillingness to live up to our own promises and our own obligations. We confuse their failure with our own."
If serious effort is not attempted at leveling the playing field for poor and rich children, it cannot be expected for ethnic children of lower income families living in poverty to compete in the same arena with well-off often white children. Because there is such a distinct correlation between a student's socio-economic status and their scores on standardized tests, it is completely unfair for those students to be subjected to such tests until the playing field is even.
Even more absurd is to base the distribution of funding on test results, depriving money for the schools and districts that are in the most desperate need.
Not only are standardized tests detrimental to education, ridiculous in content and biased against less privileged students, but they are also little more than a cleverly crafted and well covered-up scheme for politicians to further their careers and for the corporate world to make more money.
Politicians use standardized testing to show the public that they are truly concerned about school achievement and the quality of education in schools. Because attaching numerical and seemingly scientific data to children and schools is a "quick and easy" (although inaccurate) way to determine the level of achievement in schools, politicians use it as a driving force behind their campaigns to gain popularity.
"Demanding high scores fits nicely with the use of political slogans like "tougher standards,' 'accountability' or 'raising the bar (Kohn 3).'"
The influence of big business in and on schools is an undeniable one. This includes everything from corporate sponsorship to schools' decision to sell Coke in vending machines instead of Pepsi to Clark Magnet High School's relationship with Compaq, Intel, Novell, Meridian (Dall 1).
According to Stephen Metcalf, the current testing mania is part of a "results-oriented and business-minded approach to public education (Shannon 45)." Corporations would encourage schooling that satisfies the "low end of the labor market (Shannon 49)" because teaching students only a narrow range of skills breeds good workers. That is why oftentimes politics, corporations, education and standardized testing go hand in hand.
A prime example of such relationships in action is the current administration of George W. Bush. Mere days after his 2000 election to presidency, "an executive for publishing giant NCS Pearson addressed a Waldorf ballroom filled with Wall Street analysts. According to Education Week, the executive displayed a quote from President-elect Bush calling for state testing and school-by-school report cards and announced, "This almost reads like our business plan (Shannon 51)."
Money spent by states on testing has tripled in the past five years, and in 2002 was estimated at $390 million. In addition, 2002's reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act requires that students in every state be tested annually from third to eight grade.
When Bush invited "education leaders" to a meeting on his first day in office, "the guest list was dominated by Fortune 500 CEOs," including Harold McGraw. As McGraw himself commented, there is not a "substantial alignment among all the constituents-the public, the education community business and political leaders (Shannon 51)." There is a substantial amount of evidence to show a visible relationship between politicians, corporations, and their demands for more testing, which are used to increase profits and public popularity.
Despite the atrocities that are being committed daily upon the quality of education and the mental progression of America's youth due to standardized testing, and the fact that schools and schooling are becoming "increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprise of the planet (Gatto 9)," there are still many ways the public can aid the hindrance of these tests.
- Parents, teachers, and students alike can take action, and has been taken in numerous instances throughout the country. Everyone can write letters of discontent to their school administrators, board members, or state and government officials.
- Teachers can risk their jobs by refusing to issue standardized tests they know are harmful to their students, or choose to spend only a short amount of time right before the test preparing students for standardized testing, and spend the rest of the year engaging their students in useful and challenging curriculum.
- Students can protest the tests by refusing to take them or deliberately flunking them, such as students at Whitney Young Magnet School who said they "refused to feed this test-taking frenzy (Kohn 65)." They can also educate their parents, teachers, and other students about the harmful affects of standardized testing.
Ultimately, we are facing an intellectual emergency in America. As standardized testing continues to focus on worthless information, to be disadvantageous to poor and minority students, and to serve as methods for power and control for politicians and businessmen, the quality of education in America will steadily decrease. This will create a society of mindless robots that were taught little more than definitions and facts they could not relate to or find connections with during their schooling years, people who have grown up spending 40 hours a week in a system that does it's best to suppress creativity and analytical thinking.
A society full of such individuals is imminent if importance placed on standardized testing continues at the rate it currently is, and desperately needs to be fought by people who understand the problem and refuse to let it control and manipulate our future generations.
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