Standardized Testing In Education

Education is not a perfect or smooth running profession. The world of education is rife with complex problems that have no black or white solutions. Education policies and practices often exist in an open ended grey area that change frequently. Standardized testing is an open ended problem that plagues the future of education in this country. Optimally, standardized testing could be used as a powerful tool to monitor student growth and achievement, as well as provide valuable data to educators, administrators and policy makers about educational gaps and deficiencies. This information could be used to help allocate necessary resources to schools and students in need. This is what standardized test were designed to do. However, this is not how they are used.
They have high stakes consequences that put unfair pressure on schools and educators that can lead to federal sanctions or financial withholding. This high stakes component of testing also leads to unethical practices in methodology, such as sacrificing teaching higher level thinking skills in order to teach skill specifically linked to the test. Standardized tests have construct-irrelevant variance because they do not properly account for differences in diverse groups, and reflect structural inequalities in education. The majority of curriculum used in the classroom is poorly aligned to the tests, and the skills the tests emphasize teaching do not correlate to the skills required in the real world. Finally, access to, and integration of, the technology required to take the tests, along with confusing presentation and interface, are variables which are drastically affecting