Resolved on balance

I apologized for not making my style of debating clear from the beginning. I first present evidence to support the agrument I'm making, then I later make analytical arguments at the end. I see how this may have been confusing. BUT this doesn't mean my argument is false, that would be a "fallacy fallacy" (). And saying you don't need to present any further arguments just shows how week your argument is the first place. Now my plan for Round three is to present two pieces of evidence (I only put in the parts I thought nessary in order to save time reading) and then move on to analytical arguments to directly address your arguments. Argument 1. Why we don"t need standardized testing http://www.edweek.org... There are two main arguments against using standardized tests to guarantee that students reach at least a basic level of academic competency. The first is radical: These tests are not necessary. The second"less radical and more familiar"is that, even if standardized testing were an efficient benchmark of basic skills, the costs associated with it are too high. Standardized tests are unnecessary because they rarely show what we don't already know. Ask any teacher and they can tell you which students can read and write. That telling usually comes in the form of letter grades or evaluations that break down progress on skills. So trust the teacher. Publish grade distributions. Locally publish a compilation of evaluation reports. Release a state or national report reviewed and verified by expert evaluators with legislative oversight. People will say: "That's crazy! Schools will fudge results. Grade data means nothing because teachers apply different standards with different values. Let's give them all one reliable test. And won't this proposal create a whole new bureaucracy?" All true (except for the one test being reliable). Given high stakes and the accompanying pressure, people will game a system. And it is all too true that grades vary widely because of four factors: a teacher's conception of achievement, a teacher's sense of equity and rigor, a teacher's ability, and the composition of students. But people are already gaming standardized testing, sometimes criminally. And, at a basic level of competency, a grade or an evaluative report would give us as much information as we now get from standardized tests. We have the grade problem at my high school. In the same course or department, a B in one classroom might be an A, or even a C, in another. It's a problem for us, and, likely, a problem in most schools. "To sum up, we don"t learn much from standardized accountability, and we have lost a great deal by giving it so much prominence." Arguement 2. Standardized Testing Undermines Teaching http://www.npr.org... No Child Left Behind has turned into a timetable for the destruction of American public education," she tellsFresh Air's Terry Gross. "I had never imagined that the test would someday be turned into a blunt instrument to close schools " or to say whether teachers are good teachers or not " because I always knew children's test scores are far more complicated than the way they're being received today." No Child Left Behind required schools to administer yearly state standardized tests. Student progress on those tests was measured to see if the schools met their Adequate Yearly Progress goals. or AYP. Schools missing those goals for several years in a row could be restructured, replaced or shut down. "The whole purpose of federal law and state law should be to help schools improve, not to come in and close them down and say, 'We're going to start with a clean slate,' because there's no guarantee that the clean slate's going to be better than the old slate," says Ravitch. "Most of the schools that will be closed are in poor or minority communities where large numbers of children are very poor and large numbers of children don't speak English. Schools undercut the opportunities for public schools, making public school students feel like "second-class citizens.It's simply a way of avoiding the public responsibility to provide good education." Analytical arguments: 1. C1. by taking tests the students don't see how much they know just how much they can memorize right before taking a test; the information doesn't stick they can cram information the night before and then forget it all in a week. The purpose of education is to learn information and then use it later in the world and tests undermine that. -also standardized test don't tell the student anything they don't already know. Most students are already well aware if whether they know something or not; even if they didn't they have grades which provide more information than any test as it consists of more studies. 2. C2. we can make the term standardized tests broad enough so it covers all forms of tests. But most of the issues lie in the tests which do occur once a year as they hold the biggest impact on the students future. 3. C3. Just because a student does well on a test doesn't mean he or she know the information. Most student's don't consistently study, rather they cram all the information the night before, students who do study are much more likely to experience a block than students who cram info. (http://www.galamind.com...) -also there are, as we know today, three types of learners, tactile, audio and visual. and test only favor visual. Conclusion: Due to the lack of the pros arguments I uphold my belief to that standardized testing is NOT beneficial to k-12 education in the United States, and I urge the affirmation of the resolution.