Standardized Testing: Evaluating Educational Quality In Schools

If you ask lawmakers, taxpayers, teachers, parents, and students to critique our current education system, you will likely hear one complaint loud and clear. Schools are being forced to spend far too much time, money, and effort on standardized testing. Standardized Achievement testing should not be the sole method used to evaluate educational quality in schools because it has proven to be an unreliable measure of student performance, is excessively stressful for teachers and students alike, and has not improved student achievement.
In 2014, some Ohio students had as many as 60 days of their 180-day school year set aside for standardized testing that would determine whether students pass their grade and get to progress or if they would fail.
Panic attacks and breakdowns should not be a typical response to data collection, and if it is, we are doing something wrong. But still, vomiting is not uncommon, and loss of control of bladder and bowels are not unheard of. Some children give up on the tests, ready to admit utter defeat because they simply cannot handle the pressure. A group of eight prominent school principals from around New York State drafted a letter to parents expressing their deepest concerns about the validity of new Common Core-aligned standardized tests. In that letter, the principles informed parents of disturbing information about how students were responding to the extensive standardized testing, saying “Children have reacted viscerally to the tests: We know that many children cried during or after testing, and others vomited or lost control of their bowels or bladders. Others simply gave up. One teacher reported that a student kept banging his head on the desk, and wrote, “This is too hard,” and “I can’t do this,” throughout his test booklet.” Common sense tells us that these unpleasant types of school-related experiences certainly do not have a positive effect on a child’s eagerness to learn and grow
If not the students or the educators, then who? Testing puts obvious financial strains on schools; Ohio alone paid over $25 million for PARCC to supply language and math tests with the last school year, according to Ohio Department of Education spokesman John Charlton. Standardized tests mostly benefit the companies making millions from them. Companies such as Pearson Education, McGraw-Hill, and others have profited enormously from America’s testing