Horace Mann

Do all children learn the same? What’s the best way teach? Are oral exams fair? These are questions I imagine Horace Mann asked himself before developing his form of written test. Oral exams were held annually and conducted publically. These proceedings seemed to highlight the professor and benefit the gifted students. However, what happened to the student who was not so bright? Horace Mann saw the injustice in this process and began to create a way to rectify the testing process.

During the mid-1800s, Mann developed and implemented written exams and used Boston Public School as his testing site. Carole J. Gallagher wrote about the history of standardized tests in a 2003 paper for Education Psychology Review, which included Mann’s goal to seek and reproduce better teaching strategies which enables all children to have a level playing ground. Mann believed children should use written test to demonstrate what they have learned and hold schools accountable. The goal was to obtain evidence regarding the ability to teach, quality of teaching and the education system in urban schools. His test revealed children had wide gaps of knowledge. Therefore more testing had to be done.

A look ahead in the first decade of the twentieth century, Alfred Binet also developed an individually administered test of

Standardize testing has come under a great deal of scrutiny with regarding to correctness and fairness but are still widely used today. The United States have been the most criticized nation as it pertain to the school system. However, several programs sprouted out of the dirt such as physical fitness, core programs and programs for the gifted and not very gifted. The government added the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) which is designed to help less fortunate students improve their education