Pros And Cons Of Standardized Testing

Higher Education without the Testing Standardized tests is a term that every student that grew up in the United States of America within recent years is familiar with. Today, they are given to students in every grade from, at least, middle school to high school. Some schools give them earlier than that as well. They are given to assess student abilities and to determine how well a school is doing their job. How well do these tests do their job, though? They are given to students to make sure they are learning everything they need to in a year, but how can you determine how much a student learns in an entire year from a one to two day test? Wouldn’t it make more sense to base student achievement off of the work that they student does throughout

According to writers David J. Cowen and Haifeng “Charlie” Zhang (2009), who write for the Southeastern Geographer, the No Child Left Behind Act was created and initiated in 2001 as a national priority (Zhang, 2009). According to the summary of the No Child Left behind Act on Congress.gov (2001), the requirements set up by the government in this act are yearly testing, state standards for those tests, eligibility requirements for schoolwide programs, and increased the qualifications for teachers and paraprofessionals (Education and the Workforce, 2001). This act was created to achieve the goal of closing the achievement gap, which is a disparity between minority as well as low-income students and students who have more advantages (Zhang, 2009). The No Child Left Behind Act was supposed to make sure that all schools educated their students completely and

While not funding a school that does not properly educate their students makes sense, this act did the opposite of what it intended to do. In fact, it puts an enormous amount of responsibility and stress on schools that already do not have the funding and function in an unpredictable environment. Amanda Nuttall and Johnathan Doherty (2014), writers for the Urban Review, discuss the work of Richard H. Milner, who is a professor of education as well as the Director of the Center for Urban Education at the University of Pittsburg, which explains that focusing on the “’achievement gap’ itself and neglecting to consider other factors such as the structures, systems, policies and practices which could devalue students can come with consequences (Nuttall, 2014). Creating an act to close the achievement gap did not actually do anything for it and has, now, generated a negative impact in not only the minority schools, but the privileged schools, as