Arguments Against Standardized Testing

Since the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983, federal and state governments have instituted one reform program after another in an effort to raise American student academic performance levels. American educators have turned to standardized testing for student assessment since World War I, which is when the U.S. Army utilized the "Alpha assessment test" in order to assign new recruits to "suitable positions" (Smyth, 2008, p. 133). Almost 15 years ago on January 2, 2002, former president George W. Bush signed into legislation the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act (Public Law 107–110). The use of standardized testing in the U.S. public school system reached a new high as this legislation made standardized testing the "main vehicle for measuring

Instead, what we have is a system in American where kids take more standardized, mainly multiple choice tests than their peers in any other industrialized nation. The NCLB is "flawed, developmentally inappropriate, ill-funded" and has the net effect of leaving "more students, teachers and schools behind than ever before" (Smyth, 2008, p. 133). It is important that every student receives a high quality education because standardized testing is not the best way to ensure that students’ receive a good education by taking away the focus on other subjects, causing extra stress for students and others involved, the No Child Left behind Act needs to be abandoned completely. This paper will analyze some of the NCLB’s key goals and negative impact of this reform idea on student learning, while also analyzing the costs of this law in terms of legal, financial, personal and institutional

Although this may sound, effective the NCLB discredits this notion by allowing almost all states now to receive waivers that allow them to miss key elements of the law without any punishments. Moreover, opponents in favor of the law may agree that the increased testing has created an environment where teachers teach to the exam eliminating unneeded materials. If you believe more rigor means more, or better, learning the reality is harder tests do not make kids smarter. Unfortunately, the love of teaching and learning is being diminished by the drills and worksheets used to get ready for “the big test”. The idea of using standardized testing to evaluate student academic performance is not new, and as of yet has shown no measurable increase in student performance. As history shows this idea was first tried in Oregon in 1874 (Abernathy, 2007). At the time, the fear was expressed that standardized testing would result in "all sorts of unwanted and unforeseen changes in the behavior" of those people administering the tests, which suggests that teaching to the test was a concern in this era as well (Abernathy, 2007, p. 2). Consequently standardized testing produces higher exclusion rates from testing and increased dropout rates. The National Education Policy Center (NEPC) at the University of Colorado,