Standardized testing is a good thing

I would first like to state that I feel the issues that plague schools stem from viruses that pollute society in general. In my opinion, these issues cannot be tackled in schools until they are honestly confronted and addressed in society. However, for the purpose of this debate I will attempt to couch an international dynamic within a scholastic paradigm. The issues I allude to include classism, poverty, racism and many other concerns and controversies that are relevant to the effectiveness of standardized testing. I will refer to these topics as they relate to standardized testing during the debate. As I stated in the comments section, standardized testing would be more accurate if schools were standardized. As it stands, schools are basically still separate and unequal. Meaning, many underprivileged schools are expected to achieve the same results as fully funded, avant-garde schools. Can this be done? Yes, on occassion. Should this be expected? No. "As of 2011 48 percent of all public school students were poor* and this year, students of color will account for the majority of public school students for the first time in US history. .. What is surprising about these shifts is that they are not leading to more diverse schools. In fact, the Civil Rights Project has shown that black students are just as segregated today as they were in the late 1960s, when serious enforcement of desegregation plans first began following the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. " [1] While it is clear that diversity provides a more enriching scholastic experience, I would like to make it clear that segregation is not the major problem. The main problem is that schools that house underprivileged and/or melaninated children are not provided with the same level of finances, support or resources as schools that house privileged or affluent students. True education should employ more of a nurturing what's within than an instilling from without concept. When I see or hear debates regarding what's best for students the one variable that is usually missing is input from the student's themselves. Standardized testing is not an accurate method of assessing a student's true grasp of the purpose, relevance or potential of the information they have processed. With so much attention paid to teaching to the test, students often receive little to no knowledge of how to apply the information dealt with in the tests in a real world setting. What's Wrong With Standardized Tests? Are standardized tests fair and helpful evaluation tools? Not really. On standardized exams, all test takers answer the same questions under the same conditions, usually in multiple-choice format. Such tests reward quick answers to superficial questions. They do not measure the ability to think deeply or creatively in any field. Their use encourages a narrowed curriculum, outdated methods of instruction, and harmful practices such as grade retention and tracking. Are standardized tests objective? The only objective part of most standardized tests is scoring, when done by an accurately programmed machine. Deciding what items to include on the test, how questions are worded, which answers are scored as "correct,” how the test is administered, and the uses of exam results are all made by subjective human beings. Are test scores "reliable"? A test is completely reliable if you would get exactly the same results the second time you administered it. All tests have "measurement error. " This means an individual's score may vary significantly from day to day due to testing conditions or the test-taker's mental or emotional state. Scores of young children and scores on sub-sections of tests are particularly unreliable. Do test scores reflect significant differences among people? Not necessarily. The goal of most tests is to sort and rank. To do that, test makers make small differences appear large. Questions most people get right or wrong are removed because they don’t help with ranking. Because of measurement error, two people with very different scores on one exam administration might get similar scores on a retest, or vice versa. On the SAT, for example, two students' scores must differ by at least 144 points (out of 1,600) before the test’s sponsors are willing to say the students' measured abilities really differ. Don't test-makers remove bias from tests? Most test-makers review items for obvious biases, such as offensive words. But many forms of bias are not superficial. Test-makers also use statistical bias-reduction techniques. However, these cannot detect underlying bias in the test's form or content. As a result, biased cultural assumptions built into the test as a whole often are not removed by test-makers. Do tests reflect current knowledge about how students learn? Not at all. While our understanding of the brain and how people learn and think has progressed enormously, standardized tests have remained the same. Test makers still assume that knowledge can be broken into separate bits and that people learn by absorbing these individual parts. Today, cognitive and developmental psychologists understand that knowledge is not separable bits and that people (including children) learn by connecting what they already know with what they are trying to learn. If they cannot actively make meaning out of what they are doing, they do not learn or remember. Do multiple-choice or short-answer tests measure important student achievement? These kinds of tests are very poor yardsticks of student learning. They are weak measures of the ability to comprehend complex material, write, apply math, understand scientific methods or reasoning, or grasp social science concepts. Nor do they adequately measure thinking skills or assess what people can do on real-world tasks. Are test scores helpful to teachers? Classroom surveys show most teachers do not find scores from standardized tests scores very useful. The tests do not help a teacher understand what to do next in working with a student because they do not indicate how the student learns or thinks. Nor do they measure much of what students should learn. Good evaluation provides useful information to teachers. How has “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) affected the use of standardized tests in the U. S. ?NCLB has led to a huge increase in testing. It requires state testing of every student in grades 3-8 and once in high school, more than twice previous federal mandates. NCLB also led to an explosion of other standardized exams, including “benchmark” tests often administered 3-10 times per year. U. S. students are now the most tested on Earth. What is high-stakes testing? High-stakes tests are used to make important decisions such as student promotion or graduation, granting teacher tenure, or sanctioning schools for poor performance. Twenty-six states now have graduation tests; some states and districts have tests for grade promotion. NCLB attaches sanctions to test results. Even though NCLB has failed to improve schools, policy makers continue to expand high-stakes test uses such as “value-added” teacher evaluation. What happens when tests become high stakes? High-stakes testing often results in a narrow focus on teaching just the tested material (test preparation). Other content in that subject as well as untested subjects such as social studies, art and music are cut back or eliminated. High-stakes testing also produces score inflation: scores go up, but students have not learned more. Their scores are lower even on a different standardized test. This undermines the meaning of test results as well as education. What are other consequences of high-stakes testing? Attaching high stakes to test results increases cheating and other efforts to boost scores without improving educational quality. This can be done by arranging for low-scoring students to be absent on test day or pushing them out of school, often into the prison pipeline. Are there better ways to evaluate student achievement or ability? Yes. Good teacher observation, documentation of student work, and performance-based assessment, all of which involve the direct evaluation of real learning tasks, provide useful material for teachers, parents, and the public. Many nations that do the best in international comparisons, like Finland, use these techniques instead of large-scale standardized testing. [2] Racial bias in standardized testingWhat many people do not know is that the use of standardized tests has its origins in the Eugenics movement, where basic tenets assert that certain races are inferior to others biologically and intellectually. From our 21st century perspective, we can look back in horror, but we have to be clear about the original purpose of standardized tests. The original IQ tests were designed by French psychologist Alfred Binet for benign and limited uses: a) on young children who were not developing “normally”; b) as “general” tools to make “general” decisions, not a precise measurement for precise decisions; and c) to signal when a child needed more help in their intellectual development. Unfortunately in the United States, IQ scores were posited to be fixed and innate, and were promptly used to rank and sort individuals by race and ethnic background. Businesses, government agencies and educational institutions used IQ tests to justify placing certain people into certain jobs and excluding them from others…. [3]This, it is my assertion that standardized testing is not a good thing if the goal is to produce a well rounded student with skills that will make them productive, industrious and independent in a post academic setting. I await a response from my opponent. . http://www.urban.org... [1]. http://www.fairtest.org... [2]. http://parentsacrossamerica.org... [3]