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Standardized Testing Persuasive Essay

635 Words3 Pages

The United States has been talked about as being a powerful nation, but our education system has become ineffective. The United States lacks the high test scores compared to the likes of nations such as Finland and Singapore. As a nation we must ask, what seems to be the problem? A critical issue that is holding our country back is the enforcement of standardized testing in the United States. Standardized testing is a form of test that requires all students to answer the same questions so that it can be scored in a consistent manner nationwide. The use of testing is to make comparisons with other schools nationwide to see where you stand individually. In Finland they do not administer these tests and the students score exponentially …show more content…

The high amount of testing also takes away precious time in the classroom. The lost time stifles creativity at a young age. I believe teachers can demonstrate learning better through projects and activities within the classroom. This replacement can bring excitement and creativity back into the school system. I also believe, the tests are not a true representation of a child’s learning. I for example am a honor roll student consistently, but I haven’t scored so well on my ACT. I learn well when given a longer time period and specific topics to learn from, so the standardized tests are difficult for me. A solution to this I believe is make a curriculum based off of each individual area. If we as a nation were to do that then the strength of each student would flourish and the weaknesses would diminish. An example of this would be give to students in the Youngstown city system a different structure of education than a system such as Canfield which is significantly more difficult. The image that signifies this perfectly is the one where the board of education asks a fish to climb a tree. The image perfectly exemplifies our education system because it shows that he tend to asks students to do work that as physically not possible for them to accomplish. As a

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There are also much better ways to test a student’s capability to learn; a 2006 Center on Education Policy conducted a study and found that a curriculum that follows state standards and uses the test data as feedback led to higher scores than those that prioritized test-taking skills. When teachers are more focused on teaching material rather than test strategies, their students benefit from it (“Do Standardized Tests Show an Accurate View of Students’ Abilities?”). Several alternative methods to state assessments for measuring a student’s academic success include comparing high school graduation rates and the number of dropouts, offering advanced placement courses, and looking at the percentage of the former students that are admitted to colleges. State assessments are more harmful than helpful to students; they are a large cause of test anxiety and a majority of teachers can never fully prepare their students. Although state assessments are an easy way to be able to see the growth of students, that does not mean that they are the best

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