Standardized Testing as Discrimination

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Students know of the dreadful anxiety they get the night before a big test. It does not matter how much they have studied for the test or how long the teacher has been cramming the material into their heads, the anxiety will still arise. As stressful as standardized tests are, it is disappointing for a student to hear that it is merely a measure of their school’s and their own academic achievement. It is not of much use to students in terms of learning, but now thanks to the No Child Left Behind Act it requires annual standardized testing and penalizes schools that do not maintain satisfactory yearly progress in improving student achievement.

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The use of standardized tests is not improving the American Education system.

Standardized tests are unfair and discriminatory against non-white students and students who are not as academically advanced as their classmates. In “Testing Times in Higher Ed” Peter Sacks recalls of one of the fathers of IQ testing, Alfred Binet, and how in his first version of an IQ test Binet “observed the powerful relationship between one's performance on his so-called intelligence test and a child's social class.” This observation, although it was made about one hundred years ago is significant because it is still evident to this day.

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From 1991 to 2001, the gap between white and black students “widened five points and eleven points on the SAT verbal and math sections” (Sacks). Also, standardized tests do not account for students who are behind, which is ironic because the No Child Left Behind Act is supposed to do the opposite of that.

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In “Don’t Teach To The Test” Ron Berler uses an example of a fifth grader who is reading at a second grade level but the teacher gets the student up to a fourth grade level. Since the student has not reached the fifth grade level, then the student will inevitably fail the fifth grade standardized test.

The problem with this is “that kid got no credit for that advancement. Nor did the teacher, nor did the school. That school did a tremendous job, but they get nothing to show for it” (Berler). This is one of the largest flaws with standardized testing and why it is unfair. The system is broken because it always comes up short when measuring a student’s academic achievement. In “Interpreting Test Scores: More Complicated than You Think' Susannah Tully puts it best, “ they measure only some of the important goals of education. For example, we measure achievement but not creativity or persistence, and we measure achievement in some subjects but not others.” A broken system in standardized testing weakens our American Education system. A solution to this problem could be to test students at the beginning and the end of the school year with the same test to measure how the improved and study their academic growth.

Standardized testing is not effective because it is drastically narrowing the curriculum to “teach to the test.” Teaching to the test is when a curriculum is cut short so that a teacher can teach another curriculum that focuses solely on preparing students for a standardized test. In “A Test Worth Teaching To: The Race To Fix America's Broken System Of Standardized Exams” Susan Headden explains the problem with teaching to the test is that “it inevitably subjugates higher-order thinking… to the coarse business of pattern recognition, mimicry, and rule following.” Students are not really learning anything during this time period that teachers have to teach for standardized tests, they are simply memorizing what they need to know in order to do well on the test. Although, not taken into consideration that most students will not memorize everything. Teaching to the test is a broken system because it narrows the way students think and limits the way teachers teach.

Another issue with teaching to the test according to Susannah Tully in “Interpreting Test Scores: More Complicated Than You Think” is that “the simple approaches we have used often lead to inappropriate types of test preparation, and those in turn can cause severe 'score inflation' -- increases in scores that are substantially larger than real improvements in students' achievement.” Score inflation is caused by teaching to the test because if students are memorizing the contents of the test then they will know what to do while taking the test, but that is not equivalent to actual learning and knowing the answer. Memorizing how to answer test questions cannot measure a student’s academic improvements. Stuart S. Yeh states it clearly in 'Limiting the Unintended Consequences of High-Stakes Testing' Yeh states, “improved test scores merely reflect teaching to the test, rather than broad gains in learning.” There is no point in standardized testing if it will only show what a student has memorized not what a student has learned. These false interpretations of students’ test scores make our American Education system look untrustworthy and flawed.

One of the best decisions a parent can make to protest the faulty standardized testing system is to decide to opt their children out of their state-mandated standardized tests. James D. Kirylo, a former K-12 teacher, university professor and most importantly a parent, states in 'The Opt-out Movement and the Power of Parents: After Years of Writing and Speaking about Standardized Testing, a Veteran Educator Finds a New Way to Influence Policy' the simple steps Kirylo took into opting out his child was to discuss with his child the purpose of opting him out and writing a letter to the school to tell them he was opting his child out the reason being that “high-stakes testing has little to do with meaningful learning.” If Kirylo only took two simple steps to opt his child out, then it shouldn’t be hard for other parents to join Kirylo in the opt out movement.

In 'Standardized Test Refusals Still an Issue for School Districts' Nicole Sheldon explains why the decision to opt out has become so popular is because “many people, including parents, faculty and administrators felt that grading school faculty for the whole year based on kids' scores from three to four days of testing was an inappropriate unit of measurement, so students and parents began ‘opting-out’ of the state tests.” Students and parents across the states are protesting the misuse of standardized test scores with their right to opt out. The only issue with deciding to opt out is the consistent pushback dished out by schools and school administrators. Some schools and school faculty will threaten the school’s loss of funding to try to force parents to change their mind about opting their children out, they will even go as far as ignoring a parent’s decision and keep their child for the test (Kirylo). It is not only schools discouraging the decision to opt out, the College Board, the publisher of many Advanced Placement (AP) exams and Standardized tests, discourages it as well.

The reason for this is simple: money. Schools are funded if the students do well on the standardized tests, but the College Board directly profits just from students taking the test. This is because the College Board charges students a large fee to take their AP exams and Standardized tests. Although in some school districts the fee is covered, in many others it is not and students are forced to pay full price if they choose to take the test. The College Board is exploiting the students who need to take these AP exams in order to pass their class. Students try as hard as they can and do whatever they need to pass AP classes because if students pass an AP class then they get extra points toward their grade point averages (GPA). In 'ON AP RIGORS, HELPFUL AND USELESS' Robert Caridad Wayne, a Harvard graduate who took several AP classes in high school, addresses how “[Forcing] students to take the test amounts to compelling students to pay for the right to seek the best high school education they can get.” Students should not have to pay to better their education, that is not what the American Education system is about. They are already taking a challenging AP class that several other students shy away from because of its difficulty, the College Board shows no sympathy towards them. These AP students are not really given a choice to opt out because the AP exam they have to pay for counts towards their GPA. Students and parents across the nation opt out to protest test scores misuse and the exploitation of students and parents for their money. More educational movements like the Opt Out Movement are what’s going to help our American Education system prosper and become one of the best education systems around the world.

Still, many believe that standardized tests are not narrowing the curriculum because of teaching to the test, rather they are focusing it on other important skills students need to master. In a study conducted in 2005 by Stuart S. Yeh from the Education Policy Analysis Archives (EPAA), 61 teachers and administrators in 4 Minnesota school districts were interviewed to analyze what they thought about teaching to the test and how it affected the curriculum. The results revealed that both teachers and administrators believed that the “overall impact of state-mandated testing is positive” because it “improved the quality of the curriculum” and improved “students attitudes, engagement, and effort” (EPAA). Although this may be true, the study was just based on the accounts and opinions of 61 Minnesota teachers and administrators. Making the results weak because it was such a small study and it was solely concentrated on teachers and administrators from Minnesota. Whereas teachers and administrators from other school districts teach differently, have different materials they have to cover, and a different amount of time they have to cover all those materials. A study will have to be done on a larger scale to get accurate data and results from teachers and administrators from across the United States. Attempts to end or cut back on teaching to the test haven’t successfully been made yet, although a plan to stop over-testing should, in theory, cut back on teaching to the test, it won’t. In “Plan to End Over-Testing Needs More Action” by UWIRE Text, in 2015 President Barack Obama addressed his concerns on over-testing in America. Soon after, the U.S. Department of Education released the Testing Action Plan, which “recommends that states not allow students to spend more than 2 percent of their classroom time taking mandated standardized tests and calls on Congress to enforce that cap.” The test taking cap only regulates.