The clock ticks slowly by in a cold classroom that’s dead silent for multiple hours, only the sounds of air conditioning and breathing can be heard. Students sit impatiently completing their assessment. They let out sighs of exhaustion when entering the classroom full of drained faces, the sun is dim and the only shining thing is bright Chromebook screens that illuminate faces. You may be thinking, are these law students taking their final exams or medical students taking the boards? No, this is the reality for third graders starting in May all across the United States. Children in grades three through twelve deal with dreaded testing week every school year and not one of them understands the point of it.
State Testing is a standardized test based on the k-12 learning curriculum in the United States, these tests are meant to measure what students know and how students perform in different areas of the country. But where do all these test scores that take so much hard work disappear when they don’t come back for another year? The questions on these tests are “standardized” making them “one size fits all” which does not take in any consideration of a child’s creativity, leadership, or critical thinking skills.
For example, when a student gets a grade it’s not solely based on how they do on the subject, teachers consider the student’s behavior, participation, and how much they apply themselves to the class. The skills that are not measured on these tests are the skills that we tend to need more in life than math, English, and science so standardized testing is technically setting up students for failure and leading them toward the basic boring human lifestyle of Birth, Work, Marriage and then eventually death. Some students can be extremely talented and creative but score horribly on standardized tests because the education system is too rigid and not fit for them.
Albert Einstein is known as a brilliant scientist and when you think of tremendously intelligent people, he is the person most people think of. But to the world’s surprise, Albert Einstein was a horrible student. He got poor grades and didn’t perform well as a child but could solve the world’s most complicated problems. A former assistant secretary of education in the US who believes, “ Sometimes the most brilliant and intelligent minds do not shine in standardized tests because they do not have standardized minds.”
In these tests, students do not get to demonstrate Any sort of creativity. Massachusetts was the first state to take action against testing. The Massachusetts Consortium for Innovative Education Assessment (MCIEA) is looking to create partnerships with schools in the area and create a more effective testing system to look at children’s education levels and their character. But still 49 other states are failing students.
Even if a student perhaps writes a creative response in a certain section of the test, the machine that is grading the test will mark it incorrect because it must meet the quantity of education that’s measured on a broad scale. This is probably the biggest issue with standardized testing because it discourages students from being creative and makes them think that in life, there is only one correct answer. This also changes children’s outlook on school and they will most likely grow up not enjoying school and learning new things. The standardized testing system is neglecting what makes each child unique and what we need to see more in the world, Standardized testing is setting us back.
Like most great things in the world, they don’t have a very clean background history. The world is full of good things like love, society, and compassion but it is also full of hate,prejudice, and inequality. A popular question that is usually asked about Standardized testing is, Does the standardized testing system discriminate towards different races, social classes, and ethnic groups?
This type of bias in testing is used to predict the downfall in performances for students who have less access to resources, technology, and overall a decent education. These test scores for 11th graders practically determine the rest of their life because it could be the factor that either gets them into college or a hole of despair. This outdated method of testing has been in American education for over 150 years.
Standardized Testing was created by Carl Brigham, a psychologist for the army in World War I which advanced to become the SAT. The test was created to segregate soldiers by race because at the time race and intelligence were interlinked. This way of determining intelligence by how the students answer and their race was left unnoticed until 2001 when No Child Left Behind educational reform was passed giving the government absolute control over public schools and education.
The test assumes that Black and Latinx students will not perform as well as their White and East Asian peers. In all schools of different areas, across the country, some students are taking their test on the newest computer with months of preparation and warnings on what’s on the test while others are using computers that barely work and are completely lost on the test because they didn’t have access to the best curriculum. These test scores influence how teachers view their students, what college they go to, and how they view themselves.
These tests have been found sexist, racist, and classist towards test takers everywhere. Answers are predominantly based on the average white middle-class boy for the test and assume students know the background knowledge of their white male. Educators around the country and the government are aware of this problem and have attempted to tweak it, but these prejudiced ideas will forever linger as long as these tests are around. At New York University, Professor Joushau Arason and his colleagues concluded multiple studies on how stereotypes interfere with academic performance. According to Learning to Justice Magazine, Consistently, their research indicates that being targeted by well-known stereotypes (“blacks are unintelligent,” “Latinos perform poorly on tests,” “girls can’t do math” and so on) can be threatening to students in profound ways, a predicament they call “stereotype threat.”(Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson).
The United States government has not done enough to make good education accessible for every child, of every race, gender and living condition. Harmful stereotypes are being created because of the biased system that then also affects not just a students academic performance but also their self esteem and how they view themselves and others. This should be a wake up call for everyone to realize the privilege they have and use it to help others and create a more fair testing system, because we all have a common goal of seeing success. The testing system calls out students who aren’t possibly native english speakers because the test is heavily based around language proficiency and structure. These tests play significant roles in students’ lives as they grow up and get closer to college.
Colleges rely heavily on test scores for determining admissions and fundings which should also be an alarm to create a more holistic way for evaluating students potential and performance. Racism, Classism and Sexism. To address biases in testing, we should think about diversifying testing content to be more inclusive and have new perspectives for all different learners. We should also increase resources and support for all different students because the students of today are the future of tomorrow, so we should do everything in our power to make sure they are prepared to make an impact on the world. Biased standardized testing will be the downfall of American education if it continues to work against diverse students of different financial backgrounds.
After students complete their long and miserable week of testing, the whole subject of standardized testing vanishes from their minds and discussions, as if nothing had happened. Parents, students, and educators do not see these test results for around another year. The testing results are not for educational purposes, they are for administrative, political, and financial purposes. The reason the tests are still around is because Testing companies are making millions of dollars from this unfair system, even though everybody, including the government, is aware of the problems with Standardized testing but refuses to cancel testing. After all, it makes the test creators a lot of money.
Standardized testing is completely worthless to children and even as they get older, they still don’t understand the point of it because testing has no benefit to students, only detriment. Citizens know that Testing is ineffective but one way politicians get into power is by making promises they can’t keep Politicians say that they will help boost test scores and make them more useful in the United States but as soon as they get those fundings, the money goes anywhere but help for standardized testing.
State testing is also misleading because it makes parents and students think that they are doing well in school and assume that they are well prepared in school and know the whole curriculum but that could be false. Students may of comprehend the very simple and basic questions that don’t demonstrate critical thinking and creative questions, the whole idea of testing creates too much stress on students just for the results to be used towards nothing. Agonizing hours of testing for young kids around the country just for the results to be practically thrown out the window with no reward for them.
New Jersey has always had PARCC Testing and Standardized testing as a hot topic, it gained its most popularity around 2013. Parents and Educators opened their eyes and started to dig deeper into these tests and what they were designed to do and they all found that these tests, basically do nothing and serve no purpose for the state, students, and parents if they aren’t going to make any changes from what they see from these inaccurate test results. Julie Larrea Borst of Allendale, NJ was one of the millions of confused and frustrated parents who expressed their opinions on social media and in their local community. Borst says “We have people from all over the state…It doesn’t matter if you’re from a sparkly district or a poor one, or if you’re liberal or conservative. People have so many reasons for concern about this, from how much time is being taken away from actual teaching to teachers being evaluated on how kids are scoring to people like me, a special-ed parent who knows my daughter does not operate at grade level, so what’s the point of giving her a material test she’s never going to see?”
These tests do not provide any sort of feedback on what to do if a child gets a low score and how to correct their mistakes which is not helpful in any way because it eliminates the chances of a child understanding where they went wrong and calls them a failure. This twisted learning system does not represent the real world at all and is a waste of time and money if students do not get any benefit from it, the only people who benefit from these senseless tests are the government.
Thankfully in some states, there is an option to opt out of state testing. However, still that child is missing out on a learning opportunity just like everyone else because they aren’t doing anything educational either. Suppose the government wants to fix this problem and end third graders’ suffering before they complete ten more years of testing. In that case, they need to acknowledge the problems with tests and fix them because when the system is so twisted, it serves no purpose for anyone.
In this situation, Education needs to come before money and the economy because all children deserve access to schooling and education that helps them grow by allowing them to understand the learning process and to become better test takers, education is needed for so many things in life such as jobs, critical thinking, productivity and more because it really can teach students so much if we make sure it’s teaching them the correct things.
Standardized testing has been an issue for years but still, no action has been taken to save children and teens from losing their creativity and self-confidence. It is time to create a fairer system that includes non-academic skills, accessibility to resources, and making those hours spent in that dead classroom worth our while by using the test for educational purposes.
