Standardized Testing Fairness

Standardized testing is an unfair way to judge how these students are making progress. Simply, some students do not test as well as other students do. There could be a very smart student that simply can not do well on test for whatever the reason may be, but the sad thing is we allow this to continue happening even when its totally unfair. Most of the time, students that come from a low-income family are treated the most unfairly. They attended poorly-funded schools with large class sizes, too many teachers without subject area certification, and inadequate books, laboratories and so on. States don’t put these schools into consideration that they don’t have the best education system. Instead, they continue to take it out on the students and deny them diplomas because of them not being about to afford a highly-funded school.

Ever since then standardized testing has been a huge part of education. Teachers across the nation had to teach to the curriculum instead of what they thought the students needed to learn. Nowadays colleges strictly look at ACT and SAT scores rather than classroom grades, because they believe that some teachers grade on a curve and are not giving the students a fair chance. Standardized tests are an unreliable measure of student performance. A 2001 study published by the Brookings Institution found that 50-80% of year-over-year tests core improvements were temporary and “caused by fluctuations that had nothing to do with long-term changes in learning…”(“Standardized Tests”). Teachers are stressed over if they are teaching “correctly”. They went to a 4-year college, some even more, to get a degree in something that they wanted to do, either for themselves or for the children, and now they have to “teach to the test”. Tests can only measure a portion of the goals of education. A pschometrician, Daniel Koretz says, “standardized tests usually do not provide a direct and complete measure of educational achievement.”(Harris, Harris, and Smith).

Standardized tests are discriminatory because they don’t take cultural backgrounds, experiences, or personal lives into account, which leaves students at a disadvantage, which is why standardized tests are more damaging than beneficial to students. According to www.commondreams.org, in New York City, ELL students make up 14.4% of the student body population, and are expected to take a standardized exam between 7 and 8 times before passing. Only about 39.1% of these students end up graduating from school because the test doesn’t take their backgrounds into account. They haven’t fully learned the language, or properly know the full american schooling system yet. When students are put at this kind of disadvantage, this throws them a curveball,

Standardized tests, in all forms, provided information for the students, teachers, and parents (Christison & Schneider, 2013). For students and parents alike, standardized test was a useful way for students to measure their own progress and parents to monitor their child’s progress academically (Blazer, 2012). Unlike regular classroom grades or comprehension exit exams, standardized testing was also a great predictor of how a student would later perform in college and/or their level of work readiness (Blazer, 2012). Teachers used the data provided by such tests to monitor what their student were and were not learning and the material that they had already mastered (Carroll, 2015). Teachers often used standardized testing data as an instructional tool to determine whether or not their lessons were effective for their student’s (Carroll, 2015). Standardized testing was a reliable method to provide standard information on student skills and changes that needed to be made in order for students to meet their goals for learning (Carroll, 2015). Standardized testing was found to be the only objective, consistent, and comparable method to measure the student’s success (Morial,

As a graduate student in a doctoral program, I have a fair share of standardized testing experience. Never have I been exceptionally great on standardized tests but have always willed myself to reach whatever benchmark I was challenged to accomplish. Coming from a home where Spanish was the first language and my parents barely had more than a middle-school level education, I had to discover ways to overcome academic and testing difficulties. Statistically, it is well documented that many of our country’s diverse learners have trouble positively representing themselves on standardized tests for a plethora of reasons; I can attest to this from first hand experience. From language barriers that cause deficiencies in vocabulary development to deficient levels of formal education in the homes, the barriers often compound to enormous heights for children from low-socioeconomic statuses and/or those where English is a second language within the home. Regardless of these facts, testing will continuously remain to be an accountability system that is vital in education. Although, in education we often fall short by using tests and data as the ultimate answer when it can be used for so much more. Through technology and assessment, the ability to pinpoint every single deficiency that student’s have is completely possible. Rather than using testing as the answer, educators must become better at understanding how to use testing as a tool. Furthermore, when stronger testing platforms and protocols can be created and implemented, the more our educational

Standardized testing has for so long been the determinant of success and progress in many school systems around the world. Students get exposure to standardized tests at one point or the other, and the result from these tests are used to determine if a student can advance to a higher level or not (Moore, 2014). The school system in the United States has in place standardized tests for students who wish to join college and this need to be taken and passed for one to be sure of a college education. Even at lower levels of learning standardized tests remain to be the primary determinants of one’s performances, and in many instances, failure of standardized tests may be the reason why one is retained in the same class for a second consecutive

With such high stakes involved, standardized testing has become less about the student’s progression, and more about the survival of the educational institution itself. Legislations such as No Child Left Behind and Race to The Top have resulted in the very thing they have tried to overcome. Children who score low are being left behind due to instances of teacher intervention during testing or exclusion, and students who excel in schools are being developmentally held back with curriculums being narrowed to focus on the tested materials to ensure they pass as

“The case against standardized testing: raising the scores, ruining the school.” Teacher Renewal. (N.p.), 2000. Web. 2 May 2017.

Holding educators to student performances on standardized tests is a current trend being utilized by state and local school boards, but the standards to which teachers are being held are vague and leave teachers lost on how to improve their craft. In 2013, the Bill and Melissa Gates Foundation funded a study of current teacher practices in order to identify effective strategies linked to increased student achievement. The data obtained from the study lead to discussions surrounding the current teacher evaluation process. Those discussions have led to a realization that evaluations tied to specific teacher feedback appeared to have greater impact on teacher improvement and as a result, increased student achievement (Goodwin & Hein, 2016). In the search for any artifacts involving the formalization of teacher evaluations, one article provided a guideline which state and local educational governing bodies could use when creating evaluation criteria for teachers. According to the findings cited in the article, “developing a comprehensive teacher evaluation system is far from straight forward [and] policymakers should make every effort to ensure teachers are being evaluated fairly and accurately” (Hull,

Gender, culture, socioeconomic biases give White, affluent, and male test-takers advantages on standardized tests. This occurrence is problematic because it adversely impacts, a definable subgroup of test takers when to compare with the remainder of the test takers. When a test is biased, it can be problematic if the differential validity test is not equally valid for relevant subgroups. Argumentatively, that there is no such thing as a bias-free test, but it can still be unfair. African American students are the recipients of this inequity versus any another racial/ethnic group. Theoretically, the test-makers must aim to reduce or lower test bias for racial, gender, ethnic groups. Always consider African Americans’ background experiences

In trying to develop a comprehensive system, some school districts in Denver, New York, Washington DC, and Houston have started using the students’ annual test score method as a measure of evaluating teachers’ effectiveness (Wilkerson & Lang, 2007). However, many policy makers have maintained that the use of test scores in evaluating the

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.

Like the use of teacher evaluation tools like VAMs or standardized testing, the United States is attempting to diagnose academic achievement through the use of standardized testing. As explained by Gratz, “Standardized test scores accurately measure student achievement and [this] constitutes for the full range of goals we have for students.” (78). Disengaged politicians have taken the forefront in determining what the expectations of the education system should be, but the actual application falls

The increase of standardization in education in the years following the NCLB’s implementation brought more undesirable consequences, one of them being the pressure placed on teachers to perform well. More now than ever, teachers are accountable for the test scores and performances given by individual students (Wiliam, Dylan). In fact, the main purpose of standardized testing is not to assess the contextual knowledge of students, but rather to act as an assessment of teacher performance and quality. Teachers are held more accountable for the scores of their students than the students themselves are, despite the proven lack of control that teachers have over test scores. This particular facet of the American education system sets us apart other developing countries, where students are held as equally accountable to their scores as teachers are. According to Dylan Wiliam, two-thirds of the reasoning behind test scores can be traced back to socioeconomic factors, further showing that teachers have a small influence in a student’s test score, and that they should not be assessed based on them alone.

Based upon the sources I have cited, standardized testing can be biased or unfair to students, tests are created and often are not written by people with no to little teaching experiences, teachers are forced to teach test material, thus eliminating a student's creativity, and students are given over the requirements of testing.