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Standardized testing is problematic because...

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Standardized testing is problematic because...

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"Virtually all relevant experts and organizations condemn the practice of basing important decisions, such as graduation or promotion, on the results of a single test" (Kohn). Basing the funding of an entire school on a single test is not a rational choice. Testing windows are predetermined, and events like snowstorms, community violence, Covid waves, and other happenings entirely out of the school's control can force that school into a situation in which their results are unsatisfactory. Giving students only one opportunity to prove that they are competent in the skills and knowledge related to a a subject is like expecting a batter to hit a homerun when they have only one at-bat in an entire season. One opportunity simply isn't enough.

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Standardized testing is problematic because...

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Standardized testing is problematic because...

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"Norm-referenced tests were never intended to measure the quality of learning or teaching" (Kohn). Kohn's point is that norm-referenced tests weren't designed to "catch" which students aren't learning or which teachers aren't teaching. They were intended to determine if a student was ready for college, and designed almost entirely to measure the quantity of facts they knew. They were, of course, concomitantly measuring income and parental involvement, but as a measure of volume, they worked. Over time, because they are cheap and an easy way to shuffle the attention of the public from complex political issues like income inequality and racism, they've been advertised as a way to measure whether a student has learned what they are supposed to and whether teachers are teaching what they're hired to. The issue has become incredibly complex since 2020, as student bodies across the nation have developed an inconsistent attitude toward attendance while state requirements for learning have stayed the same. The statistics produced thus seem to show that students have a "learning gap" and teachers are "lackadaisical," without taking into account the number of learning days students miss, and without taking into account the inaccurate nature of standardized tests as a way to measure anything but the quantity of facts a student has learned.

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Standardized testing is problematic because...

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Standardized testing is problematic because...

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"Noninstructional factors explain most of the variance among test scores when schools or districts are compared" (Kohn). Kohn's point is that crime maps, political districting, food deserts, and tax bracket records are just as determinative of student scores as standardized testing is. When that is the truth (as it is), the expense of standardized testing (28.4 million dollars for one test in 2022) is money ill spent. That money could much better go to food and health services for students, tutoring, social workers embedded within schools, or any other program that ameliorates the noninstructional factors that affect student scores. Changing the quality of students' lives cannot all be left to teachers within the classroom. There have to be changes that happen to the quality of their lives before they arrive if there is any hope that they will be ready to learn.

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People who support standardized testing say...

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People who support standardized testing say...

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That "The information from these accountability measures enables policymakers to identify the schools that need intervention, up to closure" (Churchill).
Policymakers want a way to be able to identify schools that aren't working toward educating their students effectively. They feel a justified need to control the quality of education students receive, as public education is the main route toward effective citizenship in the US. They also want the situation to have some teeth: the threat of closure is a powerful incentive to both communities and school districts to support their schools.

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People who support standardized testing say...

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People who support standardized testing say...

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They offer "...comparability of student achievement, a desirable feature for parents and practitioners alike. Most parents, for example, would like to know whether their child is meeting state benchmarks, or how she compares to statewide peers. Statewide standardized exams give parents this important information. Meanwhile, school-shopping parents have every right to inspect and compare the standardized test results from a range of schools, including charters, district schools, and STEM schools, before selecting a school for their child" (Churchill)

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People who support standardized testing say...

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People who support standardized testing say...

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"...standardized tests allow for less probability of subjective bias when scoring responses" (Tunnell) Because the machine or the people who score standardized tests don't know the student, the school, or even the state that the results come from, they can theoretically be unbiased in their scoring. That's both a strength and a weakness of the process, as the idea of objectivity allows (supposedly) a true snapshot of that student's learning at that moment, but it doesn't take into account important factors such as whether the student had breakfast, slept the night before, was threatened on the way to school, or any other kind of adverse factor that would lower their score. Standardized tests can only measure the best the student can do at that moment, under the conditions they're dealing with, not the conditions themselves, which is what society should really be dealing with.

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People who support standardized testing say...

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People who support standardized testing say...

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"...the time allotment is the same for each student, and the use of multiple-choice or true-false problems increases the chance of neutral and accurate outcomes" (Tunnell). Proponents of standardized testing promote the "standardized" part of test construction. By constricting student answers to either multiple-choice or true/false, they believe that the answers students give will either be clearly right or wrong. The difficulty is that the things that standardized tests purport to measure - creative thinking, lateral deduction, and the ability to see the larger meaning - are impossible to measure in a true/false or multiple-choice question. They can only be measured through personal contact and in longer forms like extended writing or projects, which cost a great deal more to score. That cost directs state departments of education back to standardized testing because they are required by legislatures and the federal government to test students in some way.