The Essentials Of A Good Life By Diane Ravitch Essay

With the added pressure to do well in school, standardized testing becomes a means to added stress, anxiety and further complicates the pressure to succeed in a student’s life. Rather than a focus on learning and understanding, school has become a massive rope skill memorization test designed to have students memorize subjects to pass the test, and forget the material the next minute for the next test. When asked to speak about standardized testing, education chairman, Larry Taylor, said “It’s heart-wrenching, and it’s also insanity when you see the level of achievement these kids are already doing and yet they can’t even pass this test.” (Smith). The utilization of standardized testing further exemplifies and validates the idea that no matter how hard or long you work in school, your work will never be worth the few answers you write for the

This alteration of the class curriculum results in a narrowing of the classroom focus to better take a specific test, but when the same material is tested in a different way, results show that information is not retained (“Why” 2). An 18-month study found that because of standardized tests, elementary school teachers had to give up on “reading real books, writing, and long term projects” because they had to spend more time reviewing material that was tested in the external assessments (Shepard 3). Barth and Mitchell insist that the overuse of standardized tests will distort the curriculum to only go over what is going to be tested (1), and the group Parents Across America support that claim because their children will miss out on important lessons like teamwork, being creative and learning to ask good questions (1). Barth and Mitchell clarify that teaching the format of the test with the purpose of preparing the student can be helpful, but only to the extent of a couple of weeks before the exam

Getting an education is the main goal for everyone, although it is easy to obtain there are some obstacles to it. One of the main obstacles students face at the beginning of their education is standardized tests. Schools have started to adopt this type of tests as their main way to evaluate students’ intelligence and teachers’ effectiveness to educate the students. The way students used to learn has changed, in order to get them ready for the tests they have to spend much of the school time preparing for it instead of learning something they can use in their future life. According to Bruce Jacobs in No Child Left Behind's Emphasis on 'Teaching to the Test' Undermines Quality Teaching, a 2007 study by the University of Maryland teachers were put in much pressure and had thoughts to teach the test […]. This shows that teachers have also been affected by standardized tests in a way they have more pressure to make students pass. Having teachers ‘teach the test’ means their way to educate has been corrupted. In most cases when teachers’ ability to educate has been changed leads them to practice methods not convenient for scholars. One of these methods is memorization, in Relying on High-Stakes Standardized Tests to Evaluate Schools and Teachers: A Bad Idea by Hani Morgan describes how students start to adapt to an “inferior type of learning, based on memorization and recall students gain when teachers

“…only twenty-two percent of those surveyed said increased testing had helped the performance of their local schools compared with twenty-eight in 2007” (“Public Skeptical of Standardized Testing.”). Furthermore the poll indicated an eleven percent increase, compared to last year, towards the favor of discontinuing the usage of students’ test results for teacher evaluations. William Bushaw, executive director of PDK International and co-director of PDK/Gallup Poll also stated, “Americans’ mistrust of standardized tests and their lack of confidence and understanding around new education standards is one the most surprising developments we’ve found in years” (“Public Skeptical of Standardized Testing.”). All in all, not only are these tests a concern for students, who are forced to sit through them, hoping to get a decent enough score to place into a class, receive their diploma, or even get accepted to the college of their dreams, but they are a concern for parents as well, who only want the best for their children and to see them succeed.

The concept of living “the good life” means something different for everyone. There is a general understanding that living “the good life” is associated with unyielding happiness and lasting satisfaction. The exact meaning of this desired life was pondered by thinkers and philosophers for hundreds of years. They constructed principals of behavior, thought, and obligation that would categorize a person as “good”. Although some of these ancient philosophies about “the good life” had overlapping ideas, their concepts varied widely. This contrast of ideas can be examined through two major characters in two famous works: Aeneas in “The Aeneid” and Socrates in “The Apology”. Aeneas exemplifies the philosophy that the direct route to “the good life" is through faith, trust in the Gods, and family, while Socrates in “The Apology” emphasizes free will, and vast knowledge of life.

Parents and professors speculate why children no longer display excitement and ambition for learning. Most share the common goal of educating the youth to take on the “rights and responsibilities of citizens” (Ravitch 109). Unfortunately, educational requirements have strayed from the original purpose and began to aim their attention toward the “importance” of standardized testing. As a current high school senior, my experience has been that students are branded by their grades and test scores as if they determine who we are as a person. Diane Ravitch’s “The Essentials of A Good Education”, successfully critiques the extensive use of standardized testing in order to pursue change in our education systems and prove that focusing on test scores corrupts a child’s inner creativity.

Many high schools are spent huge amount of time and resources to prepare high school students to test or even being responsible citizen. Diane Ravitch in her essay “The essentials of a good education” tells about it, “More time was allotted to take practice tests in mathematics and reading. Because there are only so many hours in a day, there was less time for subject that were not tested” (page 106). She believes that if student spent whole day to prepare to test and get “A”, such school is a not really good school, even if gets high scores and the state awards it an “A”. Also many educated parent are would not tolerate a school that cut back or eliminate the arts to spent more time preparing for state test. If student will study well on each subject, for example good enough on math, writing and reading so he/she will not need extra class to prepare for test and spent his/he time and money. So Diane Ravitch believes that, our education system is in wrong way because they spent much time to preparing test. On the other hand, John Taylor Gatto in his essay “Against school” represent that, the problem of US education is not to give a knowledge, but conversely to make good citizens or workforce. He tells in his essay that US education system become like Prussian system, “Our educational system really is Prussian in origin, and that really is cause for concern. One of the very worst aspects of Prussian culture: an educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens - all in order to render the populace "manageable."(117). In his opinion the education system problem was that they make people become predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor

Teachers expect their students to work hard for good grades and achieve the highest possible test scores on standardized test. If all teachers are concerned about is the grades their students are getting and not whether or not they are learning the material being taught to them. They can’t expect students to retain the knowledge they are receiving with the pressure of high expectations from teachers. The stress of memorizing for a test is unbelievable. All students care about is how many questions they can get right, what grade they have received, and how much it will affect their grade. A majority of students forgets the material they spent

The use of standardized testing to measure students’ knowledge is an inaccurate reflection of their capabilities. By being forced to take a test that does not effectively show their abilities, students become overstressed, and the tests themselves do not promote true academic achievement. Rather than learning about subjects in order to gain knowledge, students simply memorize facts and formulas to get a decent test score. Standardized tests are not an appropriate measure of student performance, only benefit certain groups of students, and do not prepare students for the real world.

Standardized tests are hurting our educational future. They were implemented for reasons such as evaluating teachers, schools, districts, and so forth, and to determine if students should advance to a higher grade. What standardized tests are actually doing is taking over students’ education. Different levels of the educational system are continuously requiring more tests to assess various objectives, without any evidence that these tests are benefiting students. The effects these tests are having on the education are crippling. Teachers are under a surmountable amount of pressure for their students to achieve high scores, since their careers are in the hands of them. Teachers are reverting to unethical practices to protect their careers. Valuable education time is lost with preparing for and taking of these tests. Students could advance their education further and quicker with less preparation and tests. These tests are not an accurate assessment of students’ abilities since they only assess few subjects. Comparing students’ on only a portion

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

“Standardized testing evaluates a student’s performance on one particular day and does not take into account external factors. There are many people who simply do not perform well on tests. Many of these students are smart and understand the content, but it doesn’t show on the test. Many students also develop test anxiety which hinders performance (Columbia.edu).” Students often get so caught up in the denotation of “test” and do not show the same level of knowledge as they were when doing classwork. I just do not see why we put so much accentuation on something that does not even show the full potential of these young

“High school grades reflect years of effort and are more reliable assessment of college potential than test scores.” Historians detected that standardized testing started back in the seventh-century in China. The government of China began to organize written exams to select people for the civil service. Also many educators try to make sure that they are following the right requirements but some of them don’t and do all sorts of stuff with the results. Many individuals would say that standardized testing is a helpful way of learning from what the student knows and doesn’t, but the consequences that teachers found out of the standardized tests are making the students have a decrease in critical thinking.

“Our educational goal [is] the production of caring, competent, loving, lovable people” . The students found in the schools across the United State are the future of America. They are the doctors, teachers, business people, lawyers and many other roles, that will be out in the workforce in the years to come. What they learn in school will impact them immensely; it is the responsibility of a teacher to give students the best education in order to ensure the common good of the future. It is essential for students to not only learn content matter, but also the skills to enable them to participate in a democracy. Due to standardized testing, the emphasis of education has become on score and rankings rather than learning. A standardized test does not look at the whole student, the scores provided are on a very narrow aspect of education. In the classroom, there are countless ways for teachers to assess the student as a whole person not as just a score. Standardized tests scores should not be the sole criteria for determining a student’s academic achievement.

When students think about tests, their thoughts tend to move more towards the idea of “how am I going to memorize all of this in one week,” I know this from experience. Why is this the way that students treat such “important” tests? I ask myself that question just about every time I think about taking an end of course test, SAT, ACT, or anything like that. All across the nation, students have also been introduced to a thing called common core, which has, for some reason, been made even more difficult than the previous set standards. This seems to be no solution to the problem, but will more than likely only worsen the ditch that we have gotten ourselves into, in terms of education. Before focusing on making school more challenging for students and teachers, would not it make more sense for the problem of students not actually learning the content of the course to be fixed first? With more challenging tests, comes more confused students who are willing to do anything just to pass; including flushing their education down the toilet. They do this by only storing the information in their short-term memory rather than actually learning the content of the class, but it’s not always their faults, either. The way the school system is set up, students are not taught how to actually learn the material or use it in real life. A student’s only goal is making good grades on the tests and surviving the class. This memorizing business can hurt students later on in life, as well. These kids get used to taking the easy way out, and will never learn the “deeper-thinking skills” that they need to succeed in the world today. “The focus on memorization, fueled by standardized testing, has obstructed learning, according to Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University, who argues that students have been losing or squandering most of the information they acquire in school.” (Towler.) Even a