The idea, in other words, is to put in place tests worth teaching to. In the education world, whether you're in a kindergarten classroom or the superintendent's office, testing is a big carrot and a big stick. These are more open-ended tests, where teachers judge students on written essays, on the process they use to solve a math problem, or even on portfolios of their work over the school year. For some political conservatives, however, performance-based testing is anathema. The way to reform education, they say, is to go back to tests that emphasize basic skills.
Testing is fraught with other issues of contention.
While blacks and most other minorities have, by and large, shown both relative and absolute gains in standardized test scores over the past several decades, they still score much lower than whites as a group. Some educators believe that many standardized tests are culturally biased, drawing upon the experiences of middle-class white students. Finally, there is the issue of the abuse and misuse of test scores. Standardized tests, by boiling down to one number all that a student knows, make classifying and quantifying students much easier. Assessment reform, requiring more authentic means of assessment, aims to mitigate such abuses of scores.