Arguments Against Standardized Testing

How Standardized Tests are Ineffective and Time Consuming

Your sitting in your classroom while your teacher is passing out your ISTEP tests. Even though you have spent many hours preparing for this, the person next to you starts having a nervous breakdown. There are two sides to the debatable effectiveness of Standardized Tests, people for it, and people against it. I am on the side against the ST’s, as I will now call them. I am on this side because they are inaccurate, bad for public schools, time consuming, and other factors. In the following paragraph I will explain how much valuable time these tests take up. The amount of tests taken in grades K-12, on average, is 112 tests. Overall, these tests take up to 2.3% of class time. Some

The ST’s are a base for funding. The 2002 law, “No Child Left Behind” states that schools that don’t show growth get penalized. This is not good for small schools that don’t have enough room for growing. If they don’t get the much needed funding, how can they be expected to grow? They need the money to pay for better education or tutors. More populated schools that are in big cities have students that can pay for a tutor if they feel that they are falling behind in class. In the smaller or poorer schools can’t do that because nor the families or the school has enough money to pay for the tutors. This shows that the Standardized Tests are bad for small schools and

The tests don’t take into consideration the fact that some kids don’t have it as good as others. Some kids might not want to try hard on the tests because they are too busy wondering where their next meal will come from. Based on a PISA test taken by 6,100 students, shows that the U.S wasn’t doing as good as we used to be. We dropped a few places on math but remained about the same in reading. The students that took this test could of been chosen randomly, and if they were, then they could of took a few students that are below the poverty line. If we are going to get back to the top of the list of “smartest” countries, then we need to fix the poverty