Why Is Standardized Testing Important

The Importance of the Process “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” The famous Irish poet William Butler Yeats (2001) stated this but it is sad to say that the United States of American has strayed away from this idea. The Common Core State Standards are supposed to aid students reach the goal of education. The purpose of the CCSS is to ensure that all students are prepared for life after high school; whether it be employment or college. These standards provide clear, consistent guidelines for what every student should know and have the ability to do in the subjects of Language Arts and Mathematics. Establishing consistent guidelines allows every student in the United States of America, whose state has adopted

The standardized testing approves the act of comparing students with other students. Society puts pressure on conformity and reaching this unattainable image. The method of standardized tests does the exact same thing because, as James W. Popham (1999) states, these tests permit “…comparisons among students from only a small collection of items” (p.3). Students are pressured to score high on these tests just as teachers are pressured to learn all the material and then proceed to teach it in the time allotted. Not every student, or person for that matter, is born with the same abilities. With that being said, everyone has their own personal skills that are not being tested. Some of these include interpersonal and intrapersonal skills. Teachers are supposed to encourage interests, foster growth, and teach content and social skills. An enormous amount of importance is based on only a couple of aspects of the students and teachers and as a result, they can be severely

As an educator, one must be prepared to teach and foster the growth of an English Language Learner as well as the rest of the diverse individuals in the class. According to the U.S. Department of Education (2015) the United States has undergone an enormous increase that was “fueled by the latest wave of immigration, enrollment of Hispanic and Asian students in American schools has increased by more than 5 million since the 1990s” (p.1). With this high rate of immigration there comes a higher percentage of students who are not proficient in the English language and yet there has not yet emerged an effective way to measure these students’ abilities. When a child’s home language is not primarily English, the student’s learning can be impeded. The reformation of the No Child Gets Left Behind Act undertook by the Obama administration still maintains that all the students, even the English language learners, must be tested annually. These standardized tests are meant to measure the students’ progress in reading, writing and mathematics. When the students who have low levels of English proficiency take these tests, they may not understand the directions. Conor P. Williams (2015), one of the researchers for the New America Foundation, states that English language learners are “not yet actually ready to access math and English-language content” (p.