Last October, a group of over a hundred and twenty authors–including Maya Angelou and Judy Blume–sent president Obama an open letter stating, “Our public school students spend far too much time preparing for reading tests and too little time curling up with books that fire their imaginations.”
Indeed, students do.
Any teacher would be thrilled to get the opportunity to teach a student with an IQ in the top five percent; any school would welcome a naturally inquisitive child that questions the world around them. But standardized testing, which is implemented nationwide, miscategorizes these young, curious minds.
The American Federation of Teachers conducted a study in 2013 on two school districts, which they named Midwestern District and Eastern District.
The results of the study showed that high school students in the Midwestern District and the Eastern District spent an average of 42 hours and 123 hours, respectively, of their entire school year preparing for standardized tests.
Having to spend so much time focusing on these exams, as well as the time it takes to administrate the tests, forces teachers to subject their lesson plans to test prep and drills. And this makes teachers teach less and less of the material that is truly valuable to the student.
Proponents of standardized testing applaud its ability to objectively show how schools are doing and how they are improving throughout the years, but how much of a child’s education should be purely objective?
Objective test statistics, which can be used to ‘grade’ schools, affects school funding through a form of politics called grants-in-aid. By implementing this type of politics, the state government can supply schools with certain amount of grants based on two main factors: test performance progress and test administration.
Hypothetically, schools can refuse to administer standardized testing. But by doing so, they would endanger government grants that are necessary for their students.
On top of that, these test statistics fail to consider subjective aspects of the school environment, such as the district’s socioeconomic status. This creates a paradox in which schools with a lower socioeconomic demographic do not get the funding they need to pull their school’s test scores up to qualify for more state grants; schools that aren’t doing well are expected to improve without the means necessary for improvement.
Art and music–although barely funded–should be an important part of education and purely objective testing contradicts the creativity that is needed to flourish in this field.
And in a world where our lives are practically online, why hasn’t there been a HTML or C++ section on the FCAT?
In the opposite sphere, standardized testing in math and science diverts class time from doing hands on labs. In order for students to fully grasp the conceptual aspect of math and science, it is important to see it come to life through novel experimentation in order to achieve a level of understanding above rudimentary concepts.
The benefits of a comprehensive approach to education have been proven over and over again. The benefits standardized testing has to the quality of life of students, to letting young minds imagine, and to preparing kids for the future have never been shown.
By teaching students to pick the right answer, and not to question its rightness, we fail to teach kids to think for themselves.
The United States needs employees that question authority. Employees that fight for what they believe in and are civically engaged, employees that are the next generation of creative entrepreneurs, employees that will create the bright future we all dream about–none of which will rise from the monotonous minds bred from standardized assessments.
