Standardized tests are meant to be beneficial to student's learning, highlighting what material is necessary, however there are major criticisms of how effective they really are. Standardized Testing basically is any test that is created to test skills that are thought to be most crucial for students and taken by a large number of students across wide areas. For example the PSSA tests are taken by all students in Pennsylvania while the SAT's are taken all over the United States and are used to determine college placement. Tests are meant to be unbiased and are used to help guide teachers on what exactly is important and what is not. The problem with Standardized Testing is its lack of subjectivity and how well students are actually learning information, not just learning how to fill out a bubble sheet.
Standardized testing forces teachers to teach certain things, while cutting others out. While this can seem like a good idea it can actually be harmful to the student. It depends on the situation, a poor or inexperienced teacher could be helped and guided on what to teach. However teachers who know what they're doing have to adapt their teaching style around confinements put on by the testing, cutting out time for content the teacher thinks is important for what the test makers think is important. There is a large gap in what is actually taught to students by their teachers and what could be taught on tests. Because schools need students to do well on tests for funding or for the student's personal benefit, students are taught not necessarily to enjoy a subject or to go farther and further in their pursuit of knowledge, but to learn how to score on a test.
Some teachers and schools are tested just as much as students are, which puts enormous pressure on them. In some states, a teacher's continued employment is based entirely on their ability to increase scores. In some Californian school districts, parents are able to look at how a teacher is graded. They are not evaluated on how effective they were in the classroom or how well students learned or retained content, but how high his or her student's test scores were. It makes sense that a "good" teacher would have students who were learning the material effectively and able to apply it on the test, while a "bad" teacher would be just the opposite. However this is a modeling a standardized world of which we are not a part of. Some highly effective teachers are able to teach in unorthodox ways, ways that are not easily transferred into high test scores. Having teachers employment at the mercy of their students has another problem: how willing the class is to actually learn. Even with an amazing teacher, students will still fail if they are unmotivated, and making teachers accountable for this can be unfair or put force them into cheating, as an entire school was caught doing in the Sunnyside school district early this November. Standardized testing also is questionable in how well students are actually learning material.
A dangerous president is being set by Standardized tests, they tell students that "This is what is important. This is what you need to know.", while that simply isn't true. Give a group of ten students an outline for a 20 page chapter they must read and complete by the next day. Nine out of ten of those students will not actually read the information, they will skim for each part of the information needed to complete the assignment. Complete the assignment, not learn the material. Students learn something to apply it on their next test and then to forget it. That is exactly what standardized testing teaches and why it is harmful to students. Learning should be more about how to explore something and to understand why things work, and how to apply them and teach critical thinking, not why the answer is A, B, C, or D.
Excellent points. "Teaching to the test" has serious ripple effects, and in this modern society, it's horrible to consider that many students, instead of developing critical thinking skills necessary for life, are developing the skills to complete things, not learn things. But like you said, teachers are under serious pressure themselves to look "good" (high standardized test scores). Does a numerical statistic really reflect a student?? I certainly don't think so, but that's the sad reality.
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