High Stakes Testing=Too Rigid Standards

America is a country driven by visible results. We want to see how things are improving and, in the reform age we live in today, fix them if they do not improve fast enough. There is no exception to this attitude in America’s public school system. The way that the school systems gauge and outline school’s improvement is through the use of standardized testing on subjects the national government has decided are core skills. This standardized testing was explored in the thought provoking satire piece pictured left.

While I do agree that there must be some form of it, high stakes testing as well as the rigid standards in place today are bad for teachers and students alike.

Having attended public schools in America my whole life, I understand the ridiculous amount of emphasis teachers are forced to put on state and nationally mandated tests. In the system we have today, teachers are directly connected with the success of their students on these tests. In fact, the system believes the correlation between the teacher’s effectiveness and their student’s test scores is so strong that in one case, a teacher was told by her principle that if her student’s scores were not good enough, she would be fired (Wilder 2016). With such strong accountability weighing down on the teachers and education officials, they will do everything in their power to help the students get good scores on the tests, even if it’s not quite morally sound.

For instance, Mike Rose writes that education officials, “… lowered the cutoff test scores for proficiency or withheld from testing students who would perform poorly or, occasionally, flat out fudged the results.” (Rose 2011). Also, since the teachers are feeling the stress of accountability for their student’s test scores, educators have moved away from teaching subjects that won’t be a part of the standardized testing material. David Greene (2014) explains this by comparing teachers to brain surgeons when he writes, “Imagine your brain surgeon having to “follow the book” while operating on you or lose his job. While you are on the table, he discovers an unforeseen problem that, because of his experience and practical wisdom, calls for a spontaneous change of plan, yet he can’t do what he knows will work. You die on the table. So have students.”

Since the teachers have their hands tied and must give far more time to the skills that will be tested, this has caused the tests to drive the curriculum instead of the curriculum determining the content of the test. Rose tells us the issue with standards and standardized testing being done like this is that, “When one kind of test is emphasized and the stakes are high, the tests… can drive and compress a curriculum.” Since the tests are so imperative, teachers do not have time to teach non-tested subjects as much as they should. According to Rose, science, history, and geography received less attention while the arts were, in some cases, completely taken out of the curriculum. While some may argue that math and reading are the most important subjects to be well versed in, “but in a democracy, we send children to school for many other reasons as well: intellectual, social, civic, ethical, aesthetic.”(Rose 2011)

High stakes testing, which often times leads to a far stricter curriculum than the standards intended, places incredible stress on the shoulders of teachers and students. While there is no easy fix for the problem, I believe it is key to attempt to model our system after countries that have produced more successful, well rounded students in recent years. One country that seems to be the closest to perfecting the craft of teaching is Finland. I think a necessary first step for us should be to emulate them and “eliminate the state-mandated testing system” (Darling-Hammond 2010) which tracked progress in a fashion similar to our system. While this may not be the solution that fixes all of the education system’s problems, I do believe it is the first thing that must be done for our students to succeed and to let our teachers do their job and feel secure while doing it.

Works Cited

Greene, D. (n.d.). The Long Death of Creative Teaching. Retrieved June 9, 2016, from http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2014/03/17/how-common-core-standards-kill-creative-teaching

Oliver, J. (Writer). (n.d.). Last Week Tonight [Television series episode]. HBO.

Rose, M. (2011). The Mismeasure of Teaching and Learning: How Contemporary School Reform Fails the Test. Dissent, 58(2), 32–38. doi:10.1353/dss.2011.0042

Linda Darling-Hammond on the Common Core Standards. (2013, October 24). States News Service. Retrieved June 9, 2016, from http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-346891929.html?refid=easy_hf