Pro & Con Quotes: Do Standardized Tests Improve Education in America?

“Some folks have tried to suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic underlines the importance of testing and therefor underlines the importance of our old high stakes testing system. In fact, it does the opposite. COVID-19 testing is a simple binary; do you have the virus or not? But it is absurd to suggest that a single standardized math and reading test can somehow answer a binary question like, “Is this child well-educated or not?” Even ed reform fans have known for a while that the big standardized test does not deliver useful information. The pandemic reminds us that when it comes to testing, you need something that provides a clear answer to a clear question.

It’s time to scrap the big standardized high-stakes tests entirely, and replace them with a system that would provide real accountability… One of the biggest fallacies of the ed reform movement has been the notion that a single multiple-choice math and reading test can somehow measure everything.”

“Standardized tests are not flexible and cannot provide us a true measure of how kids are learning or developing. Even before the crisis, the same teacher might score in the top percentile and bottom percentile in the same year, on the same test, for different classes…

These tests – which are highly biased against non-white students, ineffective at quantifying student engagement, and disconnected from any concept of critical thinking – have leapfrogged curriculum. Instead of demonstrating effective curriculum, post hoc, it informs curriculum from its inception…

We’re asked to accept a dubious claim: a collection of multiple-choice questions are the key to evaluating teachers and schools, or at least enough to make important decisions on which students and schools deserve adequate funding. But the soul of education doesn’t lie in rote testing ability or data retention. To learn is to actively engage with the world; to teach is to encourage the growth of those who seek to change it. Tests don’t tell that story.”

“Surprise! Surprise! – since test scores are highly correlated with race and class, most of the black kids are in the lower classes and most of the white kids are in the higher classes… It’s because of (1) economic inequality, and (2) implicit bias in the tests.

In short, standardized assessments at best show which kids have had all the advantages. Which ones have had all the resources, books in the home, the best nutrition, live in the safest environments, get the most sleep, don’t live with the trauma of racism and prejudice everyday.

However, even more than that is something indisputable but that most policymakers and media talking heads refuse to acknowledge: standardized testing is a tool of white supremacy.

It was invented by eugenicists – people who believed that white folks were racially superior to darker skinned people. And the purpose of these tests from the very beginning was to provide a scientific (now recognized as pseudo scientific) justification for their racism.

A standardized test is an assessment where the questions are selected based on what the ‘standard’ test taker would answer. And since this norm is defined as a white, middle-to-upper-class person, the tests enshrine white bias… They ask test takers to read passages and pick out certain things that are more obvious to people enculturated as white than those enculturated as black. They use the vocabulary of middle to upper class people just to ask the questions.

This is white supremacy. Using these tests as a gatekeeper for funding, tracking, and self-respect is educational apartheid.”

“[A]n assistant superintendent… pointed out that in one of my four kindergarten classes, the student scores were noticeably lower, while in another, the students were outperforming the other three classes. He recommended that I have the teacher whose class had scored much lower work directly with the teacher who seemed to know how to get higher scores from her students.

Seems reasonable, right? But here was the problem: The “underperforming” kindergarten teacher and the “high-performing” teacher were one and the same person…

We test the children’s learning with admittedly limited instruments—standardized tests—that were never designed to be used as a standalone analysis. A lot of classroom time is dedicated to preparing for these tests and giving them. Results are affected by dozens of variables that we can’t control: illness, hunger, sleep deprivation, unfamiliar forms of a test, limited command of English…

[M]y own experience of watching tests and students for many years is that standardized test results underestimate large numbers of students as learners, especially those who belong to minority groups… Teachers—good teachers, who are with students day after day through all the variables of learning—are far more likely to know not only what a student can do but also how to increase his learning. If we focused on that and worked to build our strength as identifiers and promoters of children’s learning, we could have a real impact.”

“Good schools know how every student is doing in every subject every day. They don’t need a week of testing in the spring to tell them what they already know…

One problem with state-mandated tests is that they don’t take advantage of everything teachers know about their students…

It’s time to end a century of standardized testing and focus instead on helping young people do work that matters. We no longer need to interrupt learning and test kids to find out what they know. A couple of brave state policy leaders could trigger what would be a quick change because everyone hates the tests.”

“We currently have a system in which teachers and schools are assessed by student performance on tests that many (most?) likely disdain, might not care about how they perform and have little-to-no understanding of the negative consequences for their school or teachers if they don’t perform well…

For students who give their full effort, receiving a lower-than-expected score (particularly when their teachers have assessed them as being at grade level) could dampen spirits and lower motivation on future tests.”

“The tests are meaningless because the results are returned months after the test, when the student has a different teacher. The tests are meaningless because the scores provide no information about what the students learned and didn’t learn. The teacher is not allowed to find out what students got wrong…

Schools have cut back on the arts, civics, science, history, and physical education because they are not on the test…

The testing regime is destroying education. It is driven by politicians who think that tests make students smarter and by educrats who fear to think an independent thought.”

“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.”

“Results from a 2015 survey of more than 1500 NEA members teaching the grades and subjects required to be tested under No Child Left Behind (grades 3-8 and 10-12 in ELA and math) indicate that a vast majority of these educators – 70 percent – do not believe their primary state assessment is developmentally appropriate for their students. Only 13 percent agreed that the NCLB-required state standardized test their students took met that standard…

Unfortunately, standardized tests based on a narrowly prescribed curriculum and linked to specific grade levels are not a good way to judge student or teacher success.”

“Students as young as 6 or 7 years old are now subjected to weeks of preparation for high stakes tests. Because math, reading, and to a lesser extent, science are the only subjects regularly tested, students are drilled in those topics. Meanwhile, subjects such as history, civics, music and art – which help develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills–are squeezed out of the school day. When we teach only what will appear on multiple choice tests–and when we ask teachers to read from a prepared script and spend no more and no less time on prescribed subject matter–we cheat our children.

Students’ questions and approaches to learning are as unique as each of them. The current standardized multiple choice tests are a crude instrument for assessing student achievement.”

“You deprive kids of recess, eliminate music and the arts, cut back the class meetings and discussions of current events, offer less time to read books for pleasure, squeeze out the field trips and interdisciplinary projects and high-quality electives, spend enough time teaching test-taking tricks, and, you bet, it’s possible to raise [test] scores. But that result is meaningless at best. When a school or district reports better test results this year than last, knowledgeable parents and other observers respond by saying, ‘So what?’ (because higher test scores do not necessarily reflect higher quality teaching and learning) – or even, ‘Uh oh’ (because higher test scores may indicate lower quality teaching and learning).

And once you realize that the tests are unreliable indicators of quality, then what possible reason would there be to subject kids – usually African American and Latino kids – to those mind-numbing, spirit-killing, regimented instructional programs that were designed principally to raise test scores? If your only argument in favor of such a program is that it improves results on deeply flawed tests, you haven’t offered any real argument at all.”

[Editor’s Note: In a June 8, 2012 email to ProCon.org, Alfie Kohn confirmed that he remains “Con” to our core question.]

“The poisonous essence of this law [NCLB] lies in the mania of obsessive testing it has forced upon our nation’s schools and, in the case of underfunded, overcrowded inner-city schools, the miserable drill-and-kill curriculum of robotic ‘teaching to the test’ it has imposed on teachers, the best of whom are fleeing from these schools because they know that this debased curriculum would never have been tolerated in the good suburban schools that they, themselves, attended.

…There are some mediocre teachers in our schools (there are mediocre lawyers, mediocre senators, and mediocre presidents as well), but hopelessly dull and unimaginative teachers do not suddenly turn into classroom wizards under a regimen that transforms their classrooms into test-prep factories.”

“There are little to no positive effects of these [test-based accountability] systems overall on student learning and educational progress, and there is widespread teaching to the test and gaming of the systems that reflects a wasteful use of resources and leads to inaccurate or inflated measures of performance…

Studies published in the best economics and education journals have shown unequivocal evidence of excessive teaching to the test and drilling that produces inflated measures of students’ growth in learning; cheating on tests that includes erasing incorrect answers or filling in missing responses; shifting of students out of classrooms or other efforts to exclude anticipated poor performers from testing, or alternatively, concentrating classroom teaching efforts on those students most likely to increase their test scores above a particular target, and other even more subtle strategies for increasing testing averages…”

“Standardized tests may be lucrative for educational publishers and useful for politicians who want to control school resources, but they seldom improve learning. No Child Left Behind has promoted empty lessons geared toward such tests. As a result, teacher spontaneity is compromised, leaving students uninspired.”

“You all know what’s happening with No Child Left Behind; the test is becoming the curriculum, when it should be the other way around. And the curriculum is being narrowed. I hear story after story about music, and art, or physical education, or field trips being cut out of the school day to make more time for drilling and routine work to prepare for the test. I don’t know about you but I remember those field trips. I learned a lot on things that took me out of the classroom with my teacher’s guidance and gave me a view of a wider world. How much learning is exactly going on? Our children are getting good at filling in those little bubbles, but how much creativity is being left behind? How much passion for learning is being left behind? And what about those children who we know are bright and successful in the classroom but simply don’t perform well on tests? And we know these children; I know these children. They have tremendous talents, maybe musical or artistic talents. They’re made to feel like failures because the curriculum doesn’t reward what it is they are good at.”