Arguments Against Standardized Testing

Standardized tests have been a part of American education since the mid-1800s. Many people believe that standardized tests are reliable and objective measures of student’s achievements because without them, policy makers would have to rely on tests scored by individual schools. Others, however, believe standardized testing has not improved student achievement, according to the No Child Left Behind (NCLB), passed in 2002. Clearly, standardized tests are neither fair nor objective and that excessive testing undermines the ability to produce innovators. In this essay, I will argue that standardized testing in public schools is not effective. A state sanctioned test is any examination that is controlled and scored in a standard way. Teachers

A 2001 study published by the Brookings Institution found that 50-80% of year-over-year test score improvements were temporary and "caused by fluctuations that had nothing to do with long-term changes in learning..." [107]. After No Child Left Behind (NCLB) passed in 2002, the US slipped from 18th in the world in math on the Programed for International Student Assessment (PISA) to 31st place in 2009, with a similar drop in science and no change in reading. [95] [145] [144] A May 26, 2011, National Research Council report found no evidence test-based incentive programs are working: "Despite using them for several decades, policymakers and educators do not yet know how to use test-based incentives to consistently generate positive effects on achievement and to improve education."

For a variety of reasons, analyses of VAM results have led researchers to doubt whether the methodology can accurately identify more and less effective teachers. VAM estimates have proven to be unstable across statistical models, years, and classes that teachers teach. One study found that across five large urban districts, among teachers who were ranked in the top 20% of effectiveness in the first year, fewer than a third were in that top group the next year, and another third moved all the way down to the bottom 40%. Another found that teachers’ effectiveness ratings in one year could only predict from 4% to 16% of the variation in such ratings in the following year. Thus, a teacher who appears to be very ineffective in one year might have a dramatically different result the following year. The same dramatic fluctuations were found for teachers ranked at the bottom in the first year of analysis. This runs counter to most people’s notions that the true quality of a teacher is likely to change very little over time and raises questions about whether what is measured is largely a “teacher effect” or the effect of a wide variety of other factors. (Barton, 2010) Nonetheless, there is broad agreement among statisticians, psychometricians, and economists that student test scores alone are not sufficiently reliable and valid indicators of teacher effectiveness