Essay on State and International Assessment

Virginia requires all students to take year-end tests known as the Standards of Learning. Many people hate these SOL’s because they cause unnecessary stress. Other students love them because it gives them a goal for the year. Regardless of the various opinion there are many pros and cons, of the SOL’s.

The educational system in the United States was originally developed using concepts from around the world, created using ingenuitive ideas from countries such as China, Japan, and Korea. However, as the United States quickly moved into position as the leading country for state-directed educational standards, America looked less and less to the systems of other nations and more into how we could improve what was locally and currently being applied in education. Consequently, an improved type of education instruction was officially launched in 2010. These new state standards, practically titled Common Core, were declared to focus on developing a child’s skills in reasoning, problem solving, communication, and competition (Conrad, et al. 52). While the standards are professed to be an extremely practical and beneficial method of teaching today, there are issues which have recently surfaced and raised some concerns. The Common Core State Standards are emerging as the subjects of a provocative controversy in society today as they prompt discussion on global economic efficiency, nationwide academic standards, and the ultimate well-being of school-age children.

After the implementation of the “No Child Left Behind Act” high risk standardized testing has become a pressure cooker of corruption in the United States due to often unrealistic expectations, abundant incentives, and harsh punishments placed upon educators and administrators, overall resulting in the essential need for reform. The concept that every student’s academic ability can be assessed by a single universal exam is a misguided notion.

Over the last two decades America’s educational system has been descending on the national ranking chart. According to Rankingamerica.com, countries like South Korea and Japan are leading the charts in education while the U.S is rank number fourteen. There are many attributes that play a part of this destruction, but the overuse of the unforgiving arrangement of standardized testing has a strong presence. Though, standardized testing has been around since the 1800’s but the tests that are implemented today are no match for educators or students.

The use of standardized examinations have long been debated in American society. In fact, the last several years have seen an immense shift from the prioritization of standardized testing to more holistic measurements of student achievement. Despite this shift, many school districts across the nation and college/university entrance requirements still place a significant, if not pivotal, emphasis on test-taking and standardized exam results. Throughout this paper, I will explore 1) the history of standardized testing, 2) arguments for and against its practice, as well as 3) situate the consequences of its use in one of the three philosophical goals of schooling. All of this will subsequently paint an investigation into the purpose of schooling in American society.

These tests will provide teachers and administrators a diagnosis of how the school is performing and in which areas the school needs to improve on. This will also inform policymakers which schools are doing well and why. Then that technique can be applied to schools in which the scores were not meeting standards. President Bush and the U.S. Congress have challenged educators to set high standards and hold students, schools and districts accountable for results. (Dept. of Ed, 2004)

All citizens go through the kindergarten, all the way to their senior year. Hall, Hutchison and White (2015) report that teachers having less experience in the classroom have less acquaintance with the standards than those with more. Thus, there is the need for initiating pre-service teacher education programs in aide of the common core state standard in order to put more emphasis on the standard and generally in learning. At every level, the American education system allows students to be assessed using different evaluations on Science, Mathematics and English Language arts (Barnett and Fay, 2013). Nevertheless, a number of schools in the United States of America have upgraded their state standards and embraced the Common Core State Standard in the recent past. This development has given the entire world a platform for standardizing tests for various subjects such as reading skills, writing, and

The Every Student Succeeds Act is a reauthorization of the “50-year-old Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)” . The purpose of the Every Student Succeeds Act is to “provide all children significant opportunity to receive a fair, equitable, and high-quality education, and to close educational achievement gaps.” In order to accomplish this purpose, Federal Government requires that the state test students each year in the grades 3 through 8 and at least once in grades 9 through 12, in the subjects of math and reading or language arts. The Federal Government also requires that states test students “not less than one time” in grades 3 through 5, grades 6 through 9, and grades 10 through 12. This form of standardized testing is to

In the 1990s, a movement began across the United States whereby individual states began writing academic standards which outlined the academic content students were expected to know and be able to master at the end of each grade level. Subject specific assessments were also designed and implemented in order to measure whether students were meeting those standards (Gibbs, T. & Howley, A., 2000).

Since the release of the annual report by Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) in December of 2010, many in the government and community are searching for ways to reform the American education system to give American students a greater opportunity to succeed. According to the report, one cannot ignore the fact that American students are not testing as high academically as other nations in the world (Duncan, 2010). There are many contributing elements that have brought America to her knees in the education system, however, the obsession with standardized testing is found to be more of a stumbling block than a stepping stone in the education system. To understand how to rectify the problem, we must look at all the facts

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

In 1997, President Bill Clinton stated that the United States needed, “ a national crusade for education standards - not federal government standards, but national standards, representing what all our students must know to succeed in the knowledge economy of the twenty-first century”(http://books.nap.edu/books/0309062802/html/13.html). The way to succeed in this journey is through standardized testing that results in consequences for teachers and students.

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for teachers and administrators to diminish the implementation of standardized tests under the justification that the anxiety-ridden students are constrained to agonize over exams, thus we as students must write our own Declaration of Assessments to bring to light the cruel and unwarranted application of regulated exams exercised by educational facilitators across the country, through doing so to see and recognize why we should and will take away standardized testing for the students.

The Sol test is an important state standardized test for the state of Virginia. However, while preparing students to take this test teachers are forced to teach to the test and are unable to make sure that the students have retained the information given. The need to get successful scores on the Standards of Learning tests in Virginia causes students to have unnecessary stress.

Currently, instructors are pressured by state education department to adjust school curricula to meet the expectations of the standardized test. Educators alter the curriculum to “match the [standardized] test” (“How Standardized”). Therefore, instructors are limited and classroom instruction is focused around test preparation for the annual standardized test. Teachers are forced to abandon their creative lessons and “teach the test,” or concentrating only on the material that will be evaluated (“How Standardized”). This frequently involves taking multiple choice tests that are formatted identically to the standardized test and only memorizing facts, formulas, and items included only on the standardized tests (“How Standardized”). Even though test scores may improve, students are not learning how to think critically and perform better in other subjects that are not on the test (“How Standardized”). Instructional time is limited in the other subject areas such as science, social studies, music, and art. Instructors feel “handicapped” and plead to state officials abandon these standardized tests for the sake of the “quality of the instruction in American schools” (Zimmerman 206). School curricula are being modified only to prepare students for a single test, not for education the students need in the future.