Standardized Testing Argumentative Essay

From 2000 to 2015, American students’ academic rankings began to plummet. This was after the use of standardized tests had started in the mid-1800s which spiked after 2002’s No Child Left Behind Act mandated yearly testing in the U.S. The clear faults in the education system have been blamed on many things, including the extensive use of standardized tests. Standardized tests do not improve overall education in America. The downsides of standardized testing include it can be highly biased, unfair teacher evaluations, and does not improve student performance. Standardized tests are very biased and can discriminate among the students. ProCon.org states “Eloy Ortiz Oakley, MBA, Chancellor of California Community Colleges, points out, “Many well-resourced

According to ProCon.org, “An assistant superintendent pointed out that in one of my four kindergarten classes, the student scores were noticeably lower, while in another, the students outperformed the other three classes. But here was the problem: The “underperforming” kindergarten teacher and the “high-performing” teacher were one and the same person.” stated Margaret Pastor, Ph.D., Principal of Stedwick Elementary School in Maryland. As you can see, although one class was doing better on the tests than another class, they were taught by the same teacher which proves that standardized tests can only show how the material was comprehended not how it was taught. However, some could argue that these tests do help evaluate teachers by comparing how each teacher across the country helped their students understand the same concepts. Nevertheless, there is a notable mismatch between what the teachers teach and what the students are tested on. I strongly feel that standardized tests cannot accurately show what teachers are doing well or not, and therefore should not be used to evaluate

For example, ProCon.org explains, “Standardized test scores are easily influenced by outside factors: stress, hunger, tiredness, and prior teacher or parent comments about the difficulty of the test, among other factors. In short, the tests only show which students are best at preparing for and taking the tests, not what knowledge students might exhibit if their stomachs weren’t empty.” This evidence shows that this form of testing can be incredibly inaccurate based on external things being integrated. ProCon.org also mentions, “Students are tested on grade-appropriate material, but they are not re-tested to determine if they have learned information they tested poorly on the year before. Instead, as Steve Martinez, EdD, Superintendent of Twin Rivers Unified in California, notes, each ‘state currently reports yearly change, by comparing the scores of this year’s students against the scores of last year’s students who were in the same grade.’” This shows how the tests don’t show what has been learned, or how much progress has been made. Even so, some may argue that they are intended to provide an accurate, unfiltered measure of what a student knows. But, these external forces of tiredness, hunger, or stress can create a fault in the test making it inaccurate. I fully believe that standardized tests are only useful to show what students