Conflicting Viewpoints Essay: Standardized Testing

Standardized testing has become increasingly common throughout the American educational system. It has become a critical part of national and state education law and policy as a way of ensuring greater accountability for American schools. But merely because a policy is more popular does not necessarily mean that it is doing what it purports to do. Since the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) mandated standardized assessment on the individual and school level, serious questions have been raised regarding such tests validity and their ability to render schools truly accountable for the education their students receive.

Supporting My Position (Against Standardized Testing)

Perhaps the most damning indictment against standardized testing was provided by a nonpartisan study by the Brookings Institution, which found annual standardized testing by schools to be highly unreliable in the data they yielded (Standardized Testing, 2018). An estimated 50-80% of year-to-year test score improvements were more caused by differences in the test content, rather than real measures of student ability and learning (Standardized Testing, 2018). One of the key criteria for any standardized test is reliability, or the ability to produce similar results when tested upon the same population for the same purpose. Tests are expensive to administer and design, yet even the considerable resources devoted to producing such tests are questionable in their ability to do what they claim to do; moreover, different states have different assessment methods, further questioning the ability of tests to yield useful, reliable data.

Secondly, in addition to lacking demonstrable reliability, there is also evidence that standardized tests lack validity due to inherent biases. Certain members of historically discriminated-against groups such as African-Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans have under-performed on standardized tests, which can reinforce...…to be supportive of standardized testing, having devoted many hours of my life to preparing to take rather tedious exams that do not fully encapsulate my creativity or reflect the reasons I want to engage in learning. I do understand, after taking the opponents perspective, that it might be problematic not to have any standards at all for what is taught in school, and what cannot be measured and tracked cannot necessarily be improved upon. On the other hand, the fact that standardized testing has resulted in emphasizing aspects of education to a disproportionate degree such as grammar and basic math skills, while taking time away from some of the subjects that for most students make coming to class worthwhile (like reading novels, science experiments, and the arts), I still think that on a cost-benefit analysis, standardized tests have caused more harm than good for…