For more than a decade, the debate over how to measure American children’s progress in school has raged in the media, among teachers, parents, politicians, and researchers. American educators try to assess the success of teachers’ methods and students’ work through a variety of methods, including standardized testing. They compare students not only to others throughout the nation, but attempt to relate the results to how students all over the world are doing. Since 2002 when President George W. Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) into law, for “the first time in U.S. history, NCLB made federal funding for K-12 public schools contingent upon the use of standardized achievement tests to assess student performance” (Duckworth, Quinn, and Tsukayama, p. 440). In spite of its positive-sounding name, NCLB and its emphasis on standardized testing has not helped American students to reach the top of academic success either nationally or in comparison to its global competitors (Khazan). There are several reasons why the emphasis on standardized testing is detrimental for today’s American students. Standardized testing assumes that every child should accomplish the same level of success no matter the student’s advantages and disadvantages such as wealth, intelligence, or personality and punishes teachers, schools, and students for failing to meet this impossible goal, it fails to encourage other importance of learning such a self-control and creativity, and does not account for methods of teaching and has little value for individual students in predicting future academic success or personal educational needs.
It is well known that students who come from wealthier areas are at an advantage over poor or minority students when it comes to having success in school. According to educator Alfie Khan, two things that place minority and low-income students at a disadvantage are the innate bias of the tests which “require a set of knowledge and skills more likely to be possessed by children from a privileged background” as well as the fact that wealthier students’ parents can afford additional tutoring and test-preparation materials that low-income parents cannot (3). Unfortunately, for schools that lack the funding of a wealthy tax-base supporting its students, the resources to help children succeed in school may simply not be available to teachers. Schools whose students fail to perform well on NCLB’s required testing are punished with denial of funding, which makes the task of succeeding academically more difficult not only for students, but also for the teachers who want to see their students succeed. While the threat of losing funding is supposed to motivate schools, teachers, and parents to push students to success, as Dr. Joshua Starr, superintendent of Montgomery County Schools in Maryland says, “I don’t know any business that motivates its employees by shaming them and demonizing them” (Silva). Standardized testing has served to be a tool used as evidence to punish schools and can defeat its own purpose by being ultimately responsible for resources being taken away from the struggling schools that need them the most.
Schools have become so focused on teaching in a way that will maximize their students’ scores on standardized tests that they neglect to include other things in their curriculums that encourage academic and career success such as self-control, creativity, innovation, and more. Researchers Duckworth, Quinn, and Tsukayama discovered that “standardized achievement test scores and report card grades differentially reflect intelligence and self-control, two distinct traits shown in prior studies to predict successful functioning in—and beyond—the classroom” (2012, p. 441). In other words, although a student may do very well on a standardized test, the test does not reflect the overall capabilities of the student. such as how well the student can innovate, lead, or come up with solutions to complex or creative problems. It can only measure how well a student can take a multiple-choice test on a particular subject such as math or English. What this means is that for students whose education has focused on teaching them how to take a standardized successfully, the same student may be completely unprepared for the challenges of higher education or the world of work.
Another problem with the focus on standardized testing is that it does not account for methods of teaching. Again, the rankings resulting from the results of these tests only measure students’ abilities in taking multiple-choice exams. According to researchers Duckworth, Quinn, and Tsukayama, “teachers judged the most important purpose of standardized achievement tests to be the comparison of a student’s performance to that of other students” (2012, p. 31). These standardized tests tell educators nothing about why their students are generally experiencing success or failure in the classroom. It provides no useful data on whether their students are prepared for college or to enter the work force. It simply says that a student is doing better or worse than other students. An exam that provides such limited data is a futile exercise that pits one school against another in the fight to obtain precious and scarce economic resources vital to retaining good teachers, obtaining good educational materials, and being able to offer classes and other programs that will allow students to be successful, competitive members of the 21st century global work force.
There are many alternatives to educational systems like America’s that rely on standardized testing as a foundation and basis for almost all of children’s learning today. Singapore and Finland offer wildly different models, yet both surpass American students in math, science, and language testing. In Singapore’s system, which “tracks” students according to their academic abilities, students take a test that determines almost all of their future educational options such as going to a school for the gifted or vocational school after six years of primary school (Khazan). While this method has made Singapore’s students successful, it seems like an impossible method for Americans to embrace; Americans would like to believe that if anyone works hard enough, he or she can go to college, become a doctor, a dot com millionaire, and so on. Americans want to believe that any student can attend the best colleges if he or she works hard enough, unlike Singapore’s system where factors such as intelligence and talents may limit a student’s choices for higher education. On the other hand, in Finland, “schools assign less homework and engage children in more creative play, there are no standardized tests, and teaching is a high-status profession that pays well and requires at least a master’s degree (Khazan).
American students need to excel in order to be able to promote the country as a contender in the highly competitive and globalized economy of the 21st century. Unfortunately, NCLB and its emphasis on standardized testing does not appear to be the solution that will push American students toward the top of the world’s students in academic achievement. America must examine the methods of its own educational systems and those of successful countries around the world, placing less focus on standardized tests and more on how schools prepare students for their futures.
Works Cited
Duckworth, Angela L., Quinn, Patrick D., and Tsukayama, Eli. What No Child Left Behind Leaves Behind: The Roles of IQ and Self-Control in Predicting Standardized Achievement Test Scores and Report Card Grades. Journal of Educational Psychology, 104(2). May 2012. Web. <http://jenni.uchicago.edu/Spencer_Conference/
Papers%202010/Duckworth_Quinn_Tsukayama_2010_What%20No%20Child%20Left%20Behind%20Leaves%20Behind.pdf>.
Khazan, Olga. Here’s Why Other Countries Beat the U.S. in Reading and Math. The Washington Post. 11 Dec. 2012. Web. <http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/
wp/2012/12/11/heres-why-other-countries-beat-the-u-s-in-reading-and-math/>.
Kohn, Alfie. Standardized Testing and Its Victims. Education Week, 27. Sep. 2000. Web. <http://math.buffalostate.edu/~med600/handouts/KohnTesting.pdf>.
Silva, Daniella. Education Experts Debate High-Stakes Testing in Public Schools. NBCNEWS.com. Web. <http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/10/07/20855554-education-experts-debate-high-stakes-testing-in-public-schools>.
