Standardized testing is a fundamental part of the American education system and that has been the case for many years. During those years, such testing has provided the education system with some benefits. However, for the most part, this testing has had a detrimental effect on the quality of schools, how teachers teach, the education of students, and the American education system itself. As such, this kind of testing has proved to be more harmful than it is beneficial. As a result, standardized testing should be removed from the American education system because it influences schools to inefficiently use classroom instruction time, encourages inefficient teaching methods, produces inaccurate scores, and restricts the creativity of students, a quality that they need.
Standardized testing influences schools to inefficiently utilize classroom instruction time. The pressure that standardized testing puts on schools causes them to emphasize test preparation. As a result, many schools dedicate excessive amounts of time to test preparation. For example, during one year, beginning in March, a public school in Woodside, Queens “devoted three periods a day to test prep” (Kolodner). This illustrates that an excessive amount of time is inefficiently dedicated to test preparation, as there is nothing that schools dedicate three periods to on a daily basis and this excessive test preparation takes a significant amount of time away from the time dedicated to classroom instruction in