Why Students Should Not Pass Standardized Tests In High School

There are many different reasons that students may need additional assistance to be successful academically. Students may have a difficulty reading, or English may not be their primary language. They may have suffered a traumatic brain injury or may have been born with Autism. Students might even have difficulty socially interacting with teachers and peers or due to some physiological impact in their young lives might have other emotional impairments. No matter what the cause for the disability, special education services and interventions are vital to success of these special students.

The Special Education team for learning disabilities will test the student. These students have shown signs of continuous problems with interventions in place. Psychologist, psychiatrist, and any other testing will be conducted with parental consent have evaluated the student. Parents will be mandated to attend all assessment evaluations and the team shall review the findings for referral back to tier two or upgrade student to tier four for special educational services based on educational or problematic behaviors.

Standardized testing has been around since the mid 1800’s. Numbers went up when President George W. Bush enforced the No Child Left Behind Act and stated that testing will be annually in all 50 states. That is when education became more about being able to pass the test then actually trying to learn the subject and truly understand. Ever since students have always dealt with trying to get a certain score on test so they can know what schools are willing to accept them. That score just does not apply to the student it also involves the educators and the school as well. If schools do not achieve a certain goal they have budget cuts and cut teachers. Are test scores the determining factor of how much money a school will receive for that year? Is that fair to the students who want to get a great education and want to thrive to try to go law school or medical school?

When an English Language Learner either goes to school for the first time or finds themselves at a new school, they are assessed. Many times these ELL students are put in the wrong classes or programs. This is a constant issue still today. "Disproportionality is considered one of the most complex issues in the field of special education. Disproportionality is defined as the “overrepresentation” and “under-representation” of a particular population or demographic group in special or gifted education programs relative to the presence of this group in the overall student population" (National Education Association, 2007, p. 6).

Like most things in academics, I just knew that the standardized test were just donkey manure and additional gatekeepers to the system. Sure there are waivers, but the fact that you have to pay for them, especially for something because college requires is foolish. Should you be applauded for doing well on them? Most definitely. But it’s like having to pay and being required to take a swimming test, which can only test how well you can swim, how fast, and how many form. But if you’re not a swimmer but a basketballer or a footballer or whatever your gift is, then you’ll be penalized for not performing as well. The point is, we’re inadequately being tested on forms that do not measure all correctly and yet have been indoctrinated in the same system or requirements that was only adopted in the 1960’s when the University of California system signed on to it. Furthermore, standardized tests like the SAT/ACT is more of a measurement of class than anything else. As of this writing, I come to find that many more colleges have dropped that requirement, but still, the fact that so many students spend so much wasted time paying and studying for it, like I did, makes me shake my head. I knew that I had to play the game, or get left behind. I knew the game wasn’t about my

Oh no…it’s happening. Anxiety and the eventual memory loss of the material strikes and suddenly we don’t know what to do. Standardized tests have been feared for years and it doesn’t seem like the fear is going away any time soon. Standardized test scores shouldn’t be taken seriously because they fail to successfully measure the knowledge and achievements, can ruin students plans for higher education and can place unnecessary stress on college bound students.

When I was in grade school there was a large push for us students to excel in standardize testing. In recent years I have been more and more aware that these tests are not so much about us as students. What it is about is the school proving that their little education community is superior to others in a fight for funding. That’s not to say that the public school system is poor, or that I feel I have been done a disservice by attending public school. I loved my high school, I am just simply concerned with how much conformity was encouraged in that community. I remember, vividly, being told by one of my English teachers that my opinion was wrong because it did not match the opinions expressed in the text book. This was one of the most extreme

In which cases students that come from disadvantaged homes, have learning difficulties that go away, misses extensive amounts of school and it affects their grade, students with vision impairments, or students that are cognitively below the learning standards and it affects their everyday living. Students must be affected in the areas of speaking, listening, reading, writing, processing, and mathematics.

In order to graduate in 2018 and beyond, a high school student is required to take seven standardized tests, achieving a cumulative score of 18, earning a minimum of four points in math, four points in English and six points across science and social studies (Ohio Department of Education). Students, in many schools, can spend weeks, and sometimes even months preparing to take these assessments. Teachers take time out of their lesson plans to help their students by teaching to the test. Once it is time to actually begin the assessments, students will spend weeks staring at computer screens, answering question after question, and then sit around doing nothing for at least half an hour because of the required amount of time everyone has to take the test for. Once the tests are over, students go back to their lives, forgetting about them until they get the scores in the mail, or when they ultimately have to take more assessments the following year. Standardized testing has a negative impact on the students, and this poor evaluation of a student’s growth needs to be changed.

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.

High-stakes tests often known as standardized tests, are assessments composed of similar questions, taken under similar conditions and scored in the same matter. Standardized testing is used to allocate budgets, craft policy, and determine student placement. Ever since the enactment of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2002, standardized testing has been at the vanguard of education debate. The accentuation of testing has been placed as a means of measuring the quality of students, teachers, and schools. Though these changes are frequently meant to aid under-performing students, there are unintended effects on high performing students. This act has stirred controversy, a number of papers have been written and research has been conducted focusing

“We are raising today's children in sterile, risk-averse and highly structured environments. In so doing, we are failing to cultivate artists, pioneers and entrepreneurs, and instead cultivating a generation of children who can follow the rules in organized sports games, sit for hours in front of screens and mark bubbles on standardized tests.” (Darell Hammond) Standardized testing, or better known to us Virginias as SOL’s, is repressing knowledge of the students and degrading the effectiveness of an educator. Only basic, random learning is taking place, training kids to only want to learn what they are being testing on. No one is able to have an interest in anything except what is in the curriculum. Certain people that are not aware of hard work and dedication are making tests that aren’t even relevant to the interest or understanding of the student. The tests are not even clarifying enough to make simple to teach. There are so many discrepancies, we are not even educated enough to know the simple purpose of why is it mandatory we are tested. Standardized tests are not in the best interest of the student neither enhancing the education of the student, giving ambition to learn in depth, are clear enough to cover the material, and nor is anyone observing the children to understand why it is so highly unfavored.

There are so instances where standardized tests are not able to effectively measure a student’s educational achievements. Phillip Harris, the executive director of the association for educational communications and technology provides us with Gerald Bracey’s list of the goals of education that we cannot measure using these standardized tests. The list includes: creativity, self-discipline, honesty, leadership, courage, courage, compassion, and many more. These attributes valuable achievements that schools help teach students how to acquire. Colleges look for some of these characteristics in their upcoming students. Without these being provided into the standardized tests students are only being looked at for their academic achievements first and not their other valuable achievements earned through their education. This means that if students that do not completely excel academically do not do well on the test, then they will be overlooked from the rest of their peers without a chance.

Some problems that children with special needs may face are speech and language disorders, which include articulation disorders, fluency disorders, receptive or expressive communication disorders, and many more. Speech disorders cause children to have difficulty pronouncing words and sounds, while language disorders make combining ideas and creating sentences challenging. Speech therapy can help these children improve their ability to communicate verbally, and, if it is administered early in their lives, children may improve enough that they will no longer even need therapy (Evans, n.d.).

Standardized testing, has been a social issue within itself. The test add more pressue on the schools ecpecially those from the lower income students. The problem with standardized testing is that students are taught all year to focus on this test and are not really allowed to endure and absorb the real concept with why school is so important. They are going to school to pass a text at their end of the year, instead of haveing the freedom to concentrate on the subjects themself. The wort part about it is that it the student fails they did not pass the test and they did not have the chance to learn the subject correctly to use the material later in their