Resolved: On balance, standardized testing is beneficial to K-12 education in the United States.
Attention getter: Last year, districts in Philadelphia had a $0 budget for books. At the same time, a quarter of a percent of America’s education budget, several billions of dollars, was spent on standardized testing.
Thesis statement: Standardized testing is not beneficial to K-12 education in the United States.
Definitions:
Standardized test: Any form of test that requires all test takers to answer the same questions, in the same way, and that is scored in a consistent manner, which makes it possible to compare the relative performance of individual students.
Beneficial: Favorable or advantageous; resulting in good.
K-12 education: A short form for the publicly-supported school grades prior to college. These grades are kindergarten and the 1st through the 12th grade.
Introduction: My partner and I find the idea of spending limited money on tests which students don’t have the resources to take to be overwhelmingly irrational. Fundamentally, standardized testing has encouraged test-taking at the expense of problem solving, without solving any problems itself. It is for this reason that my partner and I negate today’s resolution.
First
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UVA’s Dewey Cornell presents some harrowing results. These results indicated that more than three fourths of the students reported adverse emotional reactions. For example, half of the students were willing to admit that they felt stupid. More than half reported that they felt depressed, and more than half reported that they felt embarrassed. Most students reported multiple negative reactions. The issue isn’t simply that testing cripples students’ self-esteem and subsequent passion toward their own education. The issue is that these harms are the results of testing which doesn’t even measure real-world skills or