Pros And Cons Of Standardized Testing

Standardized Testing Standardized testing has lately become a huge controversy within the field of education between educators, parents, and the government. It all began when the No Child Left Behind Act was passed in 2001. Its main goal was to ensure that every student in the nation graduate from high school. The Act requires testing that is meant to help keep all children across the United States stay on the same academic pace as each other no matter what race, social class, or gender. This certain assessment, to be distributed to every student across the country, measures the growth and level of academic achievement for each child. With these results, the country can determine which schools need help, which can include firing teachers.

In this article, the author Lelac Almagor, discusses the pros of standardized testing. She begins the article by sharing a personal experience of the first time she realized standardized testing was important. Overall, a student that Almagor knew was unable to get into a prestigious school because the school she was already attending (a school on the wrong side of the tracks). This school was not doing a good job of helping her reach her full academic potential even though she was in the top percentile there. The reason for this is because the other school on the other side of town was, over all, on higher academic levels. If standardized testing had been used at that time, the student may have known sooner that she was not as high achieving as the students from the other side of town and would have been able to do something sooner to fix the problem. Throughout the article, Almagor discusses how standardized testing levels out the playing field for all schools on all sides of tracks. It places a standardized goal that all schools should achieve. She also states that it is good for parents to have the knowledge of their students academic success compared to all students of the same age around the

By determining the growth, a standard curriculum can be set at a pace that is beneficial to the education of America. While this aspect of standardized tests seems positive, there are some areas of the tests that many people have found negative and even detrimental.

It has been found that these tests can cause a large amount of stress and anxiety for the students taking them because of the pressure to do well on them. In the article “Standardized Testing in Kindergarten,” from National Association for the Education of Young Children, coauthors Stephanie Feeney and Nancy Freeman discuss the issues of standardized testing in Kindergarten. They state standardized testing as a large ethical issue that breaks the NAEYC Code of Ethical Conduct. This is because kindergarten teachers are administering the test and witnessing their young students stress out a great deal.

Additionally, since many teachers have lost jobs because of low classroom test scores, teachers are beginning to put a great amount of emphasis on preparing students for the test. As author Vito Perrone stated in his article, “Stop Standardized Testing in Early Grades” from The Education