Resolved: On balance, standardized testing is beneficial to K-12 education in the United States

On the mark: is standardized testing good for education? Hoffman 99, Today's Parents Something has changed. For years we were content to sail along, secure in the belief that Canada had one of the world's best education systems. We looked around at our literate, economically successful democracy and thought, "We must be doing a good job of educating." But, at some point, that belief began to crumble. Maybe it was a reaction to more holistic education approaches introduced in the 1960s, and a growing perception that our schools turn out graduates who lack basic skills. Maybe it's because the most educated adult population in history has higher expectations of schools. Perhaps it's our shrinking global society. We know much more than we used to about what Japanese, German and American children learn in school. Do they learn times tables a grade earlier than our kids? Will that make them better software designers and widget-makers as adults?Whatever the reason, we increasingly look to Standardized tests to see if our schools measure up -- seven of ten Canadian provinces, as well as the Yukon Territory, now have some form of regular testing , usually beginning in grade three or four. Greg Gribbon of Bradford, Ontario welcomes this trend. He wants testing to confirm what his six- and eight-year-old daughters are learning and to tell him whether the school is doing its job. For Gribbon, report cards and classroom marks aren't enough. "I've heard too many stories from parents who were told that their child was doing fine, only to find out in grade three and grade four that he couldn't read."So, what's a good test? "It must have both validity and reliability," says David Ireland, a retired manager of research and evaluation for the former Carleton Board of Education in eastern Ontario. Validity means the test measures what you want it to measure -- for example, basic math skills. Reliability means that the same child would get the same result from one week to the next, no matter who was doing the marking.Get Congress out of standardized testing Tribune 11 Standardized testing is good for assessing the progress of a child's education and determining where to go next. That is, if the test is a diagnosis-type test. However, standardized testing -- the types done to comply with NCLB -- is seriously flawed. These tests aim to determine how a classroom, a school or a district stands in educating children. They are flawed partially because they encourage schools to teach to the test and partially because they fail to consider the contribution parents make or, more pointedly, fail to make. Teaching to the test only builds memorization skills, rather than understanding context, opinions and social aspects.Data gathered from the survey reveal important information about the impact of testing. Klein Zevenbergen Brown 06 Klein, School of Education Zevenbergen, Department of Psychology Brown,Student Personnel Administrator This paper explores how teachers manage standardized testing in schools. A survey was distributed among 20 elementary, middle, and high school teachers in a semi-rural community of Western New York. The data gathered from the survey responses reveal important information about the impact of testing on teaching. Standardized testing affects many of the teachers' focus on instruction. In many cases, teachers prepare their students year-round. Teachers provide test-related, preparative instruction, which governs most of their curricula. A few teachers admit that testing allows them to develop more focused teaching experiences for their students. Insights gleaned from this research study reveal the need to address the many challenges teachers encounter related to standardized testing.