The Pros And Cons Of Standardized Testing Within The School System

Throughout the past few years there has been an important debate amongst students and teachers as to whether or not standardized testing should take place within the system. Standardized testing in school started under President Bush in 1965 and was originally designed to create tests in order to gauge how students are doing in school, and how well teachers are teaching subjects with little to no success. Standardized tests have since gone through some changes which widened the range of what the tests covered and created several state regulated tests such as the SAT, however the same principles of standardized testing still stand within school systems in the US today. Standardized testing does not belong in the school system because it gives

For example, in Alfie Kohn’s Standardized Testing and its victims, it is claimed that “The discriminatory effect is particularly pronounced with norm-referenced tests, where the imperative to spread out the scores often produces questions that tap knowledge gained outside of school” (Kohn). This quote is referring to the fact that some tests tap in information that schools don’t teach which gives higher class families an advantage because they can afford more resources for learning this information outside of school. Another example is in another part of the article in which Kohn talks about how there are companies that sell test prep material to people who are willing to buy, and therefore prepares them for the test better, since higher class families have more money, they also have better resources

For example, in Sumita Bhattacharyya’s Can you hear us? Voices Raised against Standardized Testing by Novice Teachers it is stated that “Since the tests are on reading, math and science other subjects come to be neglected” (Bhattacharyya). This quote is about how three subjects out of the many possible have standardized tests and are therefore seen as more important than the others. Alfie Kohn also talks about how tests only cover English, science, and math and are cutting into the funding of activities and groups that teach about other subjects that aren’t those three