Essay On Standardized Testing

Teachers Pay Linked to Student Success

Standardized testing is said to be a rational way to demand accountability from a school, but do schools really benefit from testing or does it punish the lower performing schools? Funding for schools for the next school year is being determined by students’ results on standardized tests and by teachers’ abilities in preparing students for the test. Basing school funding off student tests scores is an unfair way to determine teachers’ salary because schools that need the most funding often have a lesser ability to pass these difficult standardized tests.

Throughout the history of standardized testing they have lessened teacher’s instruction and they have drawn teachers and students to untruthfulness.

Now, federal funding for schools depends on the test results of students, when they should really be developing a plan to further help the lower performing schools. Kastenbam stated, “It started with President Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act, which requires states to rate schools based on test results in order to receive federal funds” (para. 4). Test scores in the past, were considered when evaluating a teacher’s effectiveness, but never to determine the amount of money schools were going to

Scholars who attend better or sophisticated schools tend to have more successful scores than those who are enrolled at less sophisticated schools, so those less sophisticated schools will never be able to receive funding; therefore, they will never become more advanced. As Messick (1989) pointed out, this is a matter of validity, which he defined as “an integrative evaluative judgment of the degree to which empirical evidence and theoretical rationales support the adequacy and appropriateness of inferences and actions based on test scores or other modes of assessment”(p.13) as cited in (Wiliam,