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November 7th, 2016

Letter to the Next President

Dear Future President,

First off I would would like to congratulate you on your win. I hope that you can help fix this problem; I would like your help to change the requirement of standardized testing. These standardized test reek many hardships on children's lives. The following reasons I'm listing are just a few of poor effects of standardized testing.

To start with, standardized testing costs a lot of money, a lot of money that could be put to better use. David Berliner of Arizona State University agrees, he says that this money should be used for "paying to out-of-school factors, such as child poverty, family violence, nutrition, and race and ethnicity" (Koh, Tsin Yen). Issitt, Micah L. and McMahon, Maureen also writes that "federal funding could be better used to improve pay rates and benefits for teachers, especially since tenure and reappointment are often based on test scores." This shows that it is not just me who disagrees with standardized testing, others do too. According to a news report by the Washington-based Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution calculated that states spend $1.7 billion all together on tests. This is a lot of money that could be used to help children with more important things. We could maybe use this money to feed children or make sure they have a warm happy house to go home to. If children are starving and living on the streets, standardized testing is going to be the least of their worries. So maybe we should spend more money on helping children get something to eat, rather than on a test that will be forgotten about a couple weeks after.

These tests are also unfair. Some children are just poor test takers. So why should one test define a whole students year? Maybe the student just is not a good test taker, but is more of a hands on learner. These tests do not allow students to show all they really know. Badertscher, Eric and Newton, Heather made a great point saying, "Standardized tests do not take into account the uniqueness of each child, with his or her own individual learning style, and the academic progress each student has made over the course of a school year." Each student has a different way of learning and showing they know the material, but these test do not give these children those options. "Even children with high intelligence may find themselves placed in remedial courses if they do not perform well on standardized tests" (Badertscher, Eric and Newton, Heather). A child may be very successful in school and completely understand the lessons, but then perform poorly on the test. Because schools only look at the test scores they would think the student did not understand anything and that the child should not be allowed to advance onto the next grade. But how fair is that? It is not.

Nevertheless these test also cause children to over stress. I am a perfect example of this. I am a very stressful person in general, but these test make it even worse. I know I am not the only child that worries about these test. In the back of your mind while you are taking the test all you can think about is "What if I fail? I will have to repeat this grade again." While taking the test those are not the thoughts that should be going through your head. You should be able to focus on the material in front of you so you can succeed. But taking the test is not the only stressful part, but the weeks and even months leading up to the test are also very stressful. A couple months before the test all we do in class is practice problem after practice problem. Teachers do not even know exactly what kind of questions are going to be on the test. Because of this, teachers try to refresh kids on problems that took all year to teach. This causes kids to become stressed because they are trying to remember lots and lots of information, just for one test. I am a prime example of being too stressed about these test. They would cause me to have headaches which would lead to migraines. These migraines would cause me to become very sick and sometimes even though up. So why are you putting kids through all of this stress? All this pressure and stress is highly harmful for their health.

I hope this was very eye-opening for you, and you will really consider fixing it. These tests are just unfair, overly expensive, and a threat to children's health. Hopefully you can come up with a better system for schools to rate children on. And I hope they will not be so harmful to children. Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,

McKenzie

Works Cited Page

Badertscher, Eric, and Heather Newton. "Counterpoint: National Education Standards Overlook Individuals and Local Communities." Points of View: Standardized Testing, Mar. 2016, p. 3. Points of View Reference Center, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=pwh&an=12462181&site=pov-live&authtype=cookie,ip,custuid&custid=infohio.

Badertscher, Eric, and Heather Newton. "Counterpoint: National Education Standards Overlook Individuals and Local Communities." Points of View: Standardized Testing, Mar. 2016, p. 3. Points of View Reference Center, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=pwh&an=12462181&site=pov-live&authtype=cookie,ip,custuid&custid=infohio.

Issitt, Micah L., and Maureen Mcmahon. "Standardized Testing: An Overview." Points of View: Standardized Testing, Mar. 2016, p. 1. Points of View Reference Center, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=pwh&an=23463780&site=pov-live&authtype=cookie,ip,custuid&custid=infohio.

Koh, Tsin Yen. "Counterpoint: The Common Core Distracts from More Fundamental Reforms in Public Education." Points of View: Common Core State Standards, Mar. 2016, p. 1. Points of View Reference Center, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=pwh&an=96222713&site=pov-live&authtype=cookie,ip,custuid&custid=infohio.

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November 7th, 2016 Letter to the Next President Dear Future President, First off I would would like to congratulate you on your win. I hope that you can help fix this problem; I would like your help to change the requirement of standardized testing. These standardized test reek many hardships on children's lives.

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Schools offer incentives...

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We've seen in years past pep rallies, parties, raffles and other sorts of enticements - which some might call bribes - for students before they take high-stakes standardized tests. In spring 2016, for example, Washington Redskins cheerleaders surprised students at an assembly for students at a Washington elementary school to cheer them on for their Common Core tests.

Now, as school districts around the country get ready to launch into their annual spring testing season, it's happening again.

A notice was just sent to families with children attending Jewell Elementary School in Aurora Public Schools, a school with some 530 students in pre-K through fifth grades, most of them minority. The memo actually includes the phrase "PARCC incentives," with PARCC referring to the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Career, a Common Core test created by a multistate consortium funded by the former Obama administration.

[The testing opt-out movement is growing, despite government efforts to kill it]

Other schools are also offering incentives in Colorado, one of the states with the largest opt-out movements. New York has had the most opt-outs, with at least 20 percent of students statewide refusing to take accountability tests for each of the past few years, and officials are expecting big numbers again this year.

Peter Greene, a Pennsylvania teacher who writes the ever-lively Curmudgucation b log, awards the "test-prep excess award" to Eva Moskowitz, founder and chief executive officer of Success Academy Charter Schools in New York. Why? According to the New York Daily News, she has rented out Radio City Music Hall - the home of the famed Rockettes - for the charter network's annual "Slam the Exam" rally on March 24, several days before high-stakes standardized exams start. The paper reported:

Success Academy officials said the city's largest charter school network outgrew previous rally venues, including the City College auditorium used last year, when 2,345 students attended the event. This year, a whopping 3,676 kids will visit Radio City for the rally that's meant to pump kids up so they will ace state tests that begin March 28.

You can get the flavor of these events from this video of a Success Academy test pep rally from 2016:

Jewell Elementary's particular incentives: a raffle and a party in which kids can participate only if they have shown up to school on all PARCC testing days and "who have tried their hardest. (See the full memo below.) Asked about the memo, Nadine Ritchotte, Jewell Elementary's principal, provided this statement:

"It is important to recognize and celebrate students for their hard work and learning throughout the school year. This is simply another opportunity for Jewell Elementary staff to recognize our students and thank them for their efforts."

One of the reasons schools take steps they think will help test participation is because of a standardized test opt-out movement that started a few years ago as a protest against excessive testing and test results used to evaluate teachers when the exams are not designed to do that. In Colorado, PARCC tests are used in part to decide whether struggling schools should face state intervention.

Hundreds of thousands of parents have opted their children out of these tests. In 2015, an Indiana superintendent of the year, Rocky Killion, actually suggested to parents that they home-school their children during testing week because he was so opposed to the exams.

[How schools are 'bribing' kids to take Common Core standardized tests]

Peg Robertson, a Colorado educator who taught at Jewell for four years until her position was eliminated last year, wrote a blog post criticizing PARCC and the school's incentives, noting that a 2015 law states that students who opt out of high-stakes tests shall not be penalized in any way. The law states:

(b) IF A PARENT EXCUSES HIS OR HER STUDENT FROM PARTICIPATING IN A STATE ASSESSMENT, A LOCAL EDUCATION PROVIDER SHALL NOT IMPOSE NEGATIVE CONSEQUENCES, INCLUDING PROHIBITING SCHOOL ATTENDANCE, IMPOSING AN UNEXCUSED ABSENCE, OR PROHIBITING PARTICIPATION IN EXTRACURRICULAR ACTIVITIES, ON THE STUDENT OR ON THE PARENT.

Here's the Jewell school's memo:

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Analysis | Schools offer 'incentives' to fire up kids to take standardized tests - and one charter network rents Radio City for test rally

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We've seen in years past pep rallies, parties, raffles and other sorts of enticements - which some might call bribes - for students before they take high-stakes standardized tests. In spring 2016, for example, Washington Redskins cheerleaders surprised students at an assembly for students at a Washington elementary school to cheer them on for their Common Core tests.

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Testing time at schools: Is there a better way

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Those tests are especially on the mind of my fourth-grader. Testing begins on her 10th birthday (poor girl!) plus she knows, even though we've never discussed it, that scores on fourth-grade exams are among the factors New York City middle schools consider for admission.

The tests have certainly been the focus of a growing debate as more parents, teachers, administrators and lawmakers around the country question whether children as young as the third grade should be subjected to lengthy exams in language arts and math.

President Barack Obama added his voice to the debate in October when he said students are spending too much time taking "unnecessary" exams and announced new nonbinding guidelines, which would limit standardized exams to no more than 2% of the instructional time in a classroom.

At least eight states now allow parents to opt out of the tests, meaning state law gives them the right not to have their children take standardized tests, according to the National Center for Fair & Open Testing, a testing reform advocacy group known as FairTest. Last year, in New York state, for example, about 20% of the approximately 1.1 million students eligible to take the exams in grades three through eight -- more than 200,000 students -- did not take them and did not have a valid reason for doing so, according to the New York State Education Department.

To try and reduce the number of children who sit out this year, New York state has instituted reforms, including slightly reducing the length of the tests and making the exams untimed, meaning a child can take as much time as he or she needs to complete each exam on each of the six days of testing. Under federal regulations, if fewer than 95% of students at a school participate in the state tests, that school could lose federal funding.

"They're saying, 'Guess what? Your kids aren't going to be stressed out because they will have an unlimited amount of time, and my husband said, 'That's like saying we're going to give you an unlimited amount of time to pass a kidney stone,' " said Bianca Tanis, co-founder of the New York State Allies for Public Education, one of the organizations leading the opt-out movement.

But beyond the debate over whether we're testing our kids too much or teaching too much to the test, another question hasn't gotten as much attention: If you don't test, how would you measure student progress?

The challenges of reforming a testing regime

"Reforming a test regime is like reforming the tax code," said Anya Kamenetz, author of the recently released book "The Test: Why Our Schools are Obsessed with Standardized Testing, But You Don't Have to Be." "To actually ... go through and get rid of them becomes so hard because every test, just like every tax, has a constituency."

In an online piece for NPR, adapted in part from her book, Kamenetz laid out a number of possibilities that schools could use in lieu of standardized tests.

Consider something as simple as sampling, where a smaller number of students would take the annual tests. Instead of everyone across grades sitting for them every year, they would be given to a statistically representative sampling of students. It is the same approach used by what is known as the Nation's Report Card, said Kamenetz, lead digital education reporter for NPR.Samples of students in grades four, eight and 12 are tested to assess what U.S. students know and can do in various subject areas.

Other ideas include assessing students based on their performance, reviewing their projects, papers, presentations and portfolios. Twenty-eight schools throughout New York state do this as part of the New York Performance Standards Consortium. They don't use standardized tests but rely on teacher-created and performance-based assessments.

They point to college acceptance and high school dropout rates to show the success of their approach. Ninety-one percent of students in the consortium are accepted to college, versus 63% for New York City as a whole. Less than 10% of students in the consortium drop out of high school versus a 19% high school dropout rate across the city, according to the consortium.

"Here's a program that simply does not rely on standardized tests but produces data that can be aggregated up to show the success of the program," said Monty Neill, executive director of FairTest. "To us, that's a more meaningful accountability than another test score. It's real world. I mean part of school is what you do afterward? We want kids, I assume, to be learning and happy and healthy and all that in schools, I hope we do, but test scores don't tell us much about that."

New Hampshire, as part of a pilot program, will be using performance-based assessments in some grades in eight districts throughout the year instead of the state standardized tests.

Assessments built into the curriculum are a better way to monitor students than high-stakes standardized tests, said Tanis, the opt-out activist and mother or two. When you attach stakes to the assessment, it "becomes the driving force of what goes on in the classroom," she added. "When it becomes the focus, it really corrupts the nature of teaching and learning."

'Stealth assessment' of students

So-called stealth assessment, done without students' knowledge, is also gaining traction, experts say. Instead of progress based entirely on the results of annual tests, student performance is measured throughout the year, even day to day, using software and could be compared with a national scale.

"Good teachers are doing assessment every day in their classroom, so how do we aggregate that sort of student-level information up to a place where it's providing very precise information and it's not interrupting the flow of learning," Kamenetz said.

"There's an inherent advantage because you are reducing test anxiety because there's not one high-stakes day, and you're also getting a picture of effort over time. When a teacher has a sense of a student, how hard they're trying, that's something that is really important information for learning and for success."

Since nearly every child in third through eighth grade is familiar with video games, it's no surprise that developers are also coming up with novel ways to measure progress by assessing kids' thinking and the ability to take feedback, according to Kamenetz. Could you just imagine the joy on a child's face when, instead of having to take annual standardized tests, they would be given game-based assessments to measure how well they perform?

"What games do is they offer this sort of inherent personalization because as you play the game, you sort of learn how to play the game. ... You often fail a lot, but it still is part of the fun," Kamenetz said. Game-based assessments can help students "learn how to fail productively on the way to conquering a challenge," she said.

Another approach is some form of a school quality review system along the lines of the one that the United Kingdom has used since the 19th century, including today in Scotland's own school system. Teams of people, often retired educators or educators on leave, spend time at a school, where they look at curriculum and assessment evidence, interview teachers, administrators and parents and shadow students, FairTest's Neill said.

Such an approach, along with a limited form of standardized testing, preferably sampling, would give a "much better sense of accountability that goes beyond evidence of learning in two subjects or three," Neill said. (In addition to standardized tests in English language arts and math, some students are given a test in science, too.)

With more conversation about how important qualities such as perseverance and grit are when it comes to success, social and emotional skill surveys are another approach to measure how well students are doing in lieu of annual tests.

In Maryland, the Montgomery County Public Schools have reportedly used the Gallup Student Poll, a survey that aims to measure levels of engagement, well-being and hope. Nationwide, more than 850,000 students in grades five through 12 took the poll last year. Gallup, according to its research, says it has found hope is a stronger predictor of college success than GPA or SAT and ACT scores.

"There's this assumption that a test score is going to indicate that you are college ready," said Tanis of the New York State Allies for Public Education. "We have to ensure that we are creating confident, civic-minded, well-rounded, creative, outside-of-the-box thinkers, and actually there's no evidence that what we're doing supports that."

Do you support annual standardized testing of students? What do you think is the best way to measure student progress? Share your thoughts with Kelly Wallace on Twitter @kellywallacetv.

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standardized tests: how do you measure progress without them?  - cnn.com

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Testing time at schools: Is there a better way?

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Those tests are especially on the mind of my fourth-grader. Testing begins on her 10th birthday (poor girl!) plus she knows, even though we've never discussed it, that scores on fourth-grade exams are among the factors New York City middle schools consider for admission.

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Testing is not the enemy

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When cognitive psychologists talk about testing, and when the rest of the population uses that word, they mean different things. For educators and parents, testing means standardized testing: a tool wielded by politicians and administrators to terrify children and teachers. When cognitive psychologists hear the word testing, they think immediately of "the testing effect" - one of the best learning strategies. This may seem like semantics, but it's a problem.

The testing effect is the idea that trying to remember something leads to greater learning than just re-reading information. In one famous experiment, participants tried to learn information from a textbook either by repeatedly re-reading, or repeatedly writing out everything they could remember after reading the information only once. The strategy of writing from memory led to 60 percent correct recall of the material one week later, compared to only 40 percent in the repeated reading condition.

But despite its effectiveness as a learning strategy, the testing effect had to be rebranded to the less scary/more fun-sounding "quizzing" and we have had to come up with more and more subtle ways to produce the effect without students realizing that they are being tested - somewhat akin to hiding broccoli in brownies.

As champions of the testing effect, we find it awkward to hear bemoaning of standardized tests. So, let's tackle a few of the most common critiques:

Tests cause anxiety

There's no doubt that challenging, high-stakes tests can provoke anxiety in some students. But, perhaps counterintuitively, the solution to this problem is not to get rid of testing; instead, it is to encourage more testing - particularly frequent, lower-stakes testing. With many tests spread out across the year, each individual test will be worth less and thus necessarily lower stakes; students will become more accustomed to testing, and thus, less afraid of it. What's more, every time they bring information to mind during a test, students are creating new memories from the cognitive effort involved. So more testing will lead to more learning and could decrease anxiety.

Combine MCAS and PARCC, and what do you get?

Teachers and parents can also try to redirect some of that anxiety, a tactic that makes students feel more confident and actually perform better on high-stakes tests. Researchers have found one promising method in which students are told that the anxiety they feel before a test is actually helpful - not harmful - to their test performance.

Finally - and this is something that ought to be examined empirically - the negative views of testing repeated by teachers and parents may be feeding into kids' anxiety and test-aversion. Just like public speaking, tests are an aspect of education that kids tend not to like even though it's good for them. Our job as parents is to realize that the benefits of testing outweigh the inconvenience of dealing with kids' complaints.

Teaching to the test

The idea that teaching to a test isn't really teaching implies an almost astounding assumption that standardized tests are filled with meaningless, ill-thought-out questions on irrelevant or arbitrary information. This may be based on the myth that "teachers in the trenches" are being told what to teach by some "experts" who've probably never set foot in a "real" classroom. What these defiant teachers fail to realize - or simply choose to ignore - is that these experts are groups of carefully selected individuals that always include well-seasoned "real classroom teachers", who guide the decision-making on what material should be assessed by the tests. For those wanting to find out more about how tests are made, here's an informative video by the Educational Testing Service which develops, administers or scores more than 50 million tests.

Standardized tests are biased

Standardized tests are not the great equalizer that will eliminate discrimination. But it is highly unlikely an individual teacher alone could create a more fair, unbiased test than many experts with access to a lot of resources, a huge amount of diverse data, and the ability to refine tests based on those data. As stated in the ETS video, once a new question is introduced, statisticians work to figure out whether it's performing equally well for different groups.

Unfair, biased questions are certainly an important ongoing issue for the makers of standardized tests to address, but much work is going into the refinement and improvement of these questions, with the goal of avoiding and, hopefully, eventually eliminating such biases. All individuals have implicit biases that are almost impossible to override, so leaving assessment to individual instructors can only worsen the problem. The crux of the matter is trust - can we trust a board of experts that includes experienced teachers to act in our best interest as a nation of educators, parents, and children? And if the answer is no, then how can we trust individual teachers, and how would we hold them accountable?

Tests don't provide prompt feedback

Here standardized tests have a lot of room for improvement. Feedback on standardized tests is tardy and often incredibly confusing, and doesn't include information on which specific questions the student answered incorrectly. By the time it comes, the feedback is just a meaningless score. Although students can learn from tests even without feedback, it is clear that feedback increases the benefits of testing. Tests can be expected to improve on this front as they transition from paper to online, where rapid feedback is more viable on a large scale.

Standardized tests were created to track students' progress and evaluate schools and teachers. Griping abounds about how these tests are measuring the wrong thing and in the wrong way; but what's conspicuously absent is any suggestion for how to better measure the effect of education - i.e., learning - on a large scale. In the absence of direct measures of learning, we resort to measures of performance. And the great thing is: measuring this learning actually causes it to grow. So let's reclaim the word testing, so that the first word that comes to mind when we see it is "effect".

Yana Weinstein is an assistant professor in the Psychology department at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Megan Smith is an assistant professor in the Psychology department at Rhode Island College. They are the co-founders of Learning Scientists (@AceThatTest on Twitter).

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Standardized testing is not the enemy - The Boston Globe

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When cognitive psychologists talk about testing, and when the rest of the population uses that word, they mean different things. For educators and parents, testing means standardized testing: a tool wielded by politicians and administrators to terrify children and teachers.

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Don't Believe the Hype

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Latasha Gandy is the Minnesota Program Director for Students for Education Reform (SFER). Latasha co-founded and co-led SFER's chapter at Metropolitan State University from 2012... Full profile →

A major effort is underway to cut back on standardized testing because many, including President Obama and Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton, argue that too many tests detract from student learning in the classroom. As decisions are weighed about which tests to eliminate, I want to be sure we don't send the wrong message to our children.

The students and families of Students for Education Reform-Minnesota know the power of standardized tests as a tool in the fight for educational justice. We believe schools should send the message that they want to know how our children are doing against national learning benchmarks, and that they'll use the results to make sure our children-especially children of color and low-income children-are getting an education equal to that of their more affluent and white peers.

Today's testing debate has become so politicized that we forget that we were once sitting in our children's seats.

If you're like me, growing up you needed to bring a #2 pencil to school some days. You'd take a timed test and answer questions about a paragraph you'd just read, solve a long division problem or complete an analogy. These tests required critical thinking skills I've used throughout my life-in fact not having them would have put me at a disadvantage. I want to my kids to have these skills, too.

Taking tests wasn't a traumatic experience for me and many others, it was a reasonable and necessary one. Sadly, that's not the message kids are getting these days from an unlikely source: teachers.

Adults didn't tell me that tests were stressful, that I couldn't handle them, or that my school would be punished based on my performance. Teachers didn't discourage me from participating in what is a completely reasonable school activity: measuring student progress.
So why are children suddenly unable to emotionally cope with standardized tests in 2016? Has anything changed since we took them? Or could it be that our children are capable of taking tests, but adults aren't comfortable with what the testing reveals?
In fact, teachers regularly gave us spelling and math quizzes to measure what we learned. There was even testing in gym with the annual Presidential Fitness Award. All of these tests are still given today, yet nobody's boycotting them.

Year after year, standardized test results have exposed glaring racial biases in our education system. Teachers and schools are no longer able to hide behind school averages in performance, and are now having to answer for the low academic performance of students of color and low-income students. Many parents are being told to boycott these tests when really we should be looking more closely at the results.

Standardized test scores are now broken down by student race and income. This allows everyone-including teachers, parents and policymakers-to see how inequitable our schools are. If you've heard of what's commonly called the " achievement gap "-the shocking difference in educational outcomes between white students and students of color-you probably have standardized tests to thank. With test results, we can no longer hide the underlying racial inequity in our schools, and we cannot and should not go back and pretend it doesn't exist.

Thanks to standardized test results:

We can see whether a child is at grade level and how he or she is performing relative to other children in the next class, across town and around the country.

We can see that schools in higher income neighborhoods-often considered the "good schools"-are only performing well for Caucasian students. The majority of black, latino and native students are not getting a high-quality education there.

We can make informed choices for our children. Test data show that in some schools children have a 1 in 10 chance of reading at grade level. Put another way: the odds are against children learning at such schools. This data allows us as parents to seek out schools that are effective at teaching our children.

Report cards and teacher feedback are helpful tools in gauging our children's academic progress, but they are subjective. They tell us how well our children's teachers think they are doing according to unique assignments and tests they create, but don't compare our children's progress against a set of standard learning benchmarks.

Many teachers embrace standardized test data. They use it to celebrate success and pinpoint areas for improvement. My own children attend schools that use testing to set goals and measure progress rather than consider it a punishment. The school regularly shares test data with me, has a clear plan for helping my daughters in areas they're struggling in, and gives me tips I can use at home. Our family talks openly and positively about the tests. Setting goals and achieving them is a source of pride for us and builds my daughters' confidence.
3 Questions to Ask Your Child's School About Testing:
Our kids are capable of greatness. They can and must take the tests so we know if they're mastering the critical skills they are learning from great teachers and great classes, skills they'll need to pursue the college and career of their dreams. And, guess what? We adults are emotionally capable of handling them too.

1. How does your staff talk about testing? At many schools individual teachers tell students to boycott the tests-even stopping children on their way to the testing room to discourage them. Other schools see them as a positive and a chance to help their students stay on track and grow. Let the principal know your expectations for how tests are talked about with your child by every staff member at the school.

2. What will you do with the results? Are results shared with students and their families, and do teachers explain their children's scores and how students rank locally and nationally? Is there a plan to boost achievement at school in needed areas through targeted instruction? Is the school upfront about identifying and targeting any gaps they find in outcomes between students of different races or incomes?

3. What skills are measured by the tests and how will you ensure my child masters them? Talk to your child's teachers at the beginning of the year about the skills he/she needs to master and find out the teacher's plan for ensuring your child masters these. After the tests, make sure the teacher identifies ways to get your child on track, keep them on track or challenge them to achieve beyond their grade level. Teachers should also let you know what you can do at home to support your child.

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Don't Believe the Hype: Standardized Tests Are Good for Children, Families and Schools

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Latasha Gandy is the Minnesota Program Director for Students for Education Reform (SFER). Latasha co-founded and co-led SFER's chapter at Metropolitan State University from 2012... Full profile → A major effort is underway to cut back on standardized testing because many, including President Obama and Minnesota Gov.

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Is the use of standardized tests improving education in America? Read pros and cons in the debate.

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Standardized tests: Making our students and teachers sick?