Major Findings From The Campus Equity Audit

I teach first grade at Lowe Elementary School; my class is made up of twenty-four very diverse seven year-olds; they come from all over the city of Louisville, from a variety of socio-economic situations. Each student brings a unique personality to our classroom community, and they all work hard to become “smarter and smarter” and to “go to college”. Thirteen students are boys and eleven are girls. Of these twenty-four students, three of them are English Language Learners. Additionally, eight students receive tier two interventions and two receive tier three interventions in reading. In math, five students are tier two and four are tier three. I also teach one student who receives ECE services for a developmental delay. Within my class there is a wide achievement gap.

Standardized tests are exams that are supposed to measure a child’s academic knowledge but have long been a controversial subject of discussion. Although it is one method to see how a child is performing, is it the best method? Standardized testing can be biased or unfair, inhibit both the teacher’s and the children’s creativity and flexibility, affect funding for schools, cause untested subjects to be eliminated from the curriculum, and cause anxiety for children and teachers.

What once began as a simple test administered to students yearly to measure understanding of a particular subject has, as Kohn (2000) has stated, “Mutated, like a creature in one of those old horror movies, to the point that it now threatens to swallow our schools whole” (p.1). Today’s students are tested to an extent that is unparalleled in not only the history of our schools, but to the rest of the world as well. Step into any public school classroom across the United States and it will seem as if standardized testing has taken over the curriculum. Day after day teachers stress the importance of being prepared for the upcoming test. Schools spend millions of dollars purchasing the best test preparation materials, sometimes comes at the cost of other important material. Although test

Welner (2014) states that “standardized assessments are linked to curriculum standards and performance standards and tied to specified consequences” (p. 39). Welner discuses that the standard-based testing in American schools are a mess and need to be untangled because of the consequences of underperformance. Schools are defunded, teachers and principals are laid off, and schools are marked as ‘failing’. There needs to be a reform in schools that need academic improvement and the way to figure out which schools need development is by testing the students. Jones & King and McLaughlin & Overturf provide different feedback on standard-based testing. According to McLaughlin & Overturf (2012), “Using formative assessments is not only an effective way to monitor student progress, but also a viable way to glean information for planning future instructions” (p.157). In order for teachers to know if their lessons are effective or not, teachers give standard-based tests and assessments to their students. Without tests, student progress cannot be tracked in a concise manner. Jones & King (2012) agree that by building new assessments and curricula, American schools are redefining success (p.37). That success can also come at a price when dealing with more rigorous standards that are new to the

In an attempt to create educational reform, pieces of legislation like the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) have been passed with the hopes of making schools “accountable” to the children within their walls. Although this piece of legislation was eventually overturned its effects are still being felt within Americas public schools and it is estimated that this generation will be less literate than their precursors (Kohn). Although well intentioned, the NCLB failed schools, teachers, and most importantly students all as a result of one key aspect of the law: high-stakes testing. According to the No Child Left Behind act, all states are required to give standardized tests to their students in the hopes of holding teachers accountable for their scores and ensuring all students become “proficient.” These tests have come to determine whether or not students can graduate, how and what teachers teach, as well as how much funding a school will receive. High-stakes tests can make or break a school, but with all this pressure are kids really showing sizable gains in areas like math, science, or reading? The answer is no and time and time again

Standardized testing alone is not an accurate gauge of a students overall knowledge. We start indoctrinating our children in the first grade with standardized testing to prepare them for the next 11 years of testing. These tests put a lot of undo stress on students to preform well on standardized tests throughout the year. While some students are excellent test takers others become over whelmed with the process and fail to rise to their true academic level. “On Mar. 14,

tests were primarily employed as measures of student achievement that could be reported to parents, and as a means of noting state and district trends (Moon 2) . Teachers paid little attention to these tests, which in turn had little impact on curriculum. However, in the continuing quest for better schools and high achieving students, testing has become a central focus of policy and practice. Standardized tests are tests that attempt to present unbiased material under the same,

Opponents have stated that the tests are not objective or fair, that extreme testing challenges the ability to yield students that are critical thinkers, and they support a thin curriculum. Standardized testing evaluates a student’s performance on one certain day and does not take into account exterior influences. The success of a school is contingent on the performance of the students. There are many individuals who just do not do well on tests. Many of these students are understand the content and are smart, but it is not reflected on the test. Standardized testing only evaluates the student’s performance instead of the general progression of the student throughout the year. In this paper I will provide my thoughts on whether or not standardized testing is a good thing or

Standardized high-stakes testing is necessary in today's school systems and policies within education. The fate of annual standardized testing is being considered as Congress debates the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), also known as the No Child Left Behind Act (Evans, 2015). Testing in its current form may seem detrimental to student learning, but the only thing worse than standardized testing is not having testing at all (Evans, 2015). Standardized High-stakes Testing is necessary because it serves as a platform for guiding students and teachers, it’s a great measurement tool on an individual’s performance, it helps prepare administration and it also provides a “level playing field.”

The educational system in the United States has gone through many changes over the last century. These changes are a part of a constant movement toward educational excellence for every child in this nation. One of the most recent acts placed on public school systems by the government is to create more accountability for schools in order to ensure that all children are receiving the proper education. Part of this mandate is that public schools will require students to take tests in order to gather information about their academic achievement. Although educators and administrators claim that the mandatory ability testing programs being initiated in America’s public schools will hold students and teachers accountable for academic

Assessment has drawn much attention, especially since the implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESES). It is not that assessment is new to education but that the stakes of assessment has risen to a new level. It is apparent that testing is now viewed in a much different way by the public, schools and all stakeholders of schools than in the past. Over time, testing has developed roles of providing a grade to mark student progress, diagnose students’ strengths and weaknesses so that instruction can be planned for student improvement and indicate teacher effectiveness (Popham, 2014). In recent years, it has become common practice for the general public to use testing to form judgement of the effectiveness of schools. Tests are now included in teacher performance evaluations, and used to improve the teaching process.

Today, it can be observed that society has shifted education drastically from the time schools were constituted, to now. Throughout history, schools have gone from private, where only the elite can attend, to public schools where virtually anyone can attend. One of the factors that goes along with education is standardized testing. Frederick J. Kelly, father of the standardized test, once said, “These tests are too crude to be used, and should be abandoned.” Not only has this shift occurred within education itself, but it has occurred within the testing concepts found within standardized testing so much so that the founder of these tests has chosen to give up on it.

“Children feel like failures now as early as PreK, preschoolers are being expelled at 4 X higher rates than K-12 children. . .” These are the words of Dr. MArcy Guddemi, Gesell Institute’s Executive Director. Testing is filling lives of children now with stress and negative feelings for school instead of the happy place full of learning it should be. Test scores’ impact on learning is not even effective and most score change is due to life outside of school. Schools also spend great amounts of spending on these tests every year. School is important for numerous life skills and lessons; with excessive testing children aren’t able to learn these lessons. The U.S. Department of Education and its local counterparts needs to administer fewer standardized tests because they don't accurately show learning, they are costing us too much money, and the impair growth.

Educational assessments have for long formed a fundamental part of the American school system. In fact, they have been so well established that most of us could not imagine a world without them. For years, politicians have claimed that educational assessments, such as standardized tests, are a vital determinant of the goals of education. Therefore, policies have continued to hold schools accountable for measuring up to the given standards. Accordingly, because standardized tests are alleged to be objective, efficient, rigorous, and fair, educators and politicians have resorted to use these test scores to allocate resources in public schools, and more recently, to evaluate teachers. However, although the intended role of educational assessments is to measure how well students have learned the material, standardized tests have often failed to capture the diversity of its tested population. As a result, “critics who ignore the impact of social factors on test scores miss the point” (Koretz, 2008). Likewise, the interpretation and actual use of the results is often inappropriate, and therefore standardized tests have become an obstacle rather than a tool for education. As a result, it has become essential to consider how reliability, validity, measurement error, and sampling error

I have chosen to research data for one of the Dayton Public Schools’ buildings, Eastmont PreK-8 School. During the 2015-2016 school year, Eastmont had one principal, 42 teachers, and an average daily enrollment of 503 students, of which 100% were economically disadvantaged. During the 2015-2016 school year all students received free breakfast and lunch. The 503 students’ ethnicities were comprised of 349 white, 88 black, 37 Hispanic, 28 multiracial, and 1 other. Sixteen students were limited English proficiency and 127 students had disabilities. Eastmont housed students in grades preschool through eight, but currently houses students up to grade six.