Lily de Philly

Introduction

Children are legally obligated to attend school when they turn six and are generally required to stay there until the age of 18, so school clearly takes up a lot of our time. Children are also objected to standardized tests almost as soon as they enter school, and these tests can determine the course of the rest of their lives. Standardized tests are very unfair and inaccurate but so much of our society is based on them; whether you get into a good high school, and in turn a good college and grad school, and these things set the path for the rest of your life. These tests determine what kind of opportunities children have in their education, but they also increase inequalities in our society, and so inequality continues to prosper.  

If you attended any level of school in America it is more than likely that you encountered some sort of standardized testing. Even at the kindergarten level children are tested on their “skills” and “ability to learn.” By looking at the origins and continued legacy of standardized testing in America, we can see that it replicates certain inequalities in our society. This is important because it often prevents people from succeeding. As mentioned in the article Asinine Assessment: Why High Stakes Standardized Testing is Bad for Everyone, Including English Teachers, “We have yet to reconcile the historical racism, nativism, and eugenies that lay at the roots of high stakes standardized testing.” America has a long history of racism and other forms of discrimination and therefore it is not entirely surprising that standardized testing is still such a cornerstone of the educational system.

Pitfalls of Standardized Testing

America seems to be obsessed with standardized testing. as exclaimed in Standardized Testing: Meritocracy’s Crooked Yardstick, “How has the standardized testing paradigm managed to stay entrenched, despite the many criticisms leveled against it? Like a drug addict who knows he should quit, America is hooked, we are a nation of standardized test junkies.” The American public is seemingly aware of the pitfalls of standardized testing, but are perhaps unaware of its problematic origins. Or, maybe the public is aware of the origins of standardized testing but the efficient system continues to entrance us. To suggest that the American public would reject standardized testing even if they were aware of its roots would be to “underestimate once again the near magical power that quantification, standardization, and the measuring of minds continue to have over Americans.” The article goes on to prove that standardized testing scores are indicative of nothing, “In short, scoring high on standardized tests is a good predictor of one’s ability to score high on standardized tests.” 

“Standardized testing can help show that the system is broken, but in a sense, standardized testing is the system,” states Joshua P. Starr in The Paradox of Standardized Testing. This brings up an important point, that the American education system is deeply flawed even outside of the problem of standardized testing. The system caters to some people more than others and is extremely unequal. This is a whole topic on its own but it is nevertheless important to keep in mind while speaking about the issue of testing as the two are linked. 

Aside from the issue of how deeply flawed and unfair the actual standardized tests are, there is the issue of how they have shaped the learning methods taught in schools today. The Perils of Standardized Achievement Testing highlights what has become of learning in America, “a graduate at the University of California at Berkeley has stated that what got him through “Cal” in the 1950s were the three Rs: read, remember, and regurgitate. What he regurgitated was knowledge at the lowest possible level.” This shows us the perils of standardized testing that are separate from the actual scores, and this was all the way back in the 1950s so it can only have gotten worse since then. 

Many of us are familiar with the term “teaching to the test” which is the way that most schools in America now operate, teaching the students what they need to know in order to pass whatever standardized test they need to take. But what happens after the test? Students are learning the act of learning in a very narrow way, only focusing on testing. This is not to say that test scores are not important though, they actually decide quite a lot about a person’s life- even though it maybe should not be this way- standardized test scores can decide things like what programs students can enter, say where students are placed, and also determine the “quality” of teachers and even whole schools. This is another field that standardized testing has infiltrated. 

“Critics contend that standardized tests are ultimately flawed, biased against historically disadvantaged groups, and thus have the pernicious effect of reinforcing social advantage and disadvantage.” Say the authors of Testing and Social Stratification in American Education. But why is this? To understand the modern dangers of standardized testing we first need to look at the origins of standardized testing. One way to look at this is to see the things that have an effect on standardized testing scores, as demonstrated in Standardized Testing, Meritocracy’s Crooked Yardstick, “In a March 1993 report to the Graduate Record Examinations Board, the ETS’s Lawrence Streiker and Donald Rock concluded that ‘it is striking that parental education generally had the most consistent and strongest associations’ among several variables, including sex, ethnicity, geographical location, and age.”  This means that the thing that had the most effect on the test scores were the test takers' parents' education. However this is not to say that those other factors do not have effects on test scores. A 1995 study notes that, “Because standardized tests reflect the majority culture, minority student performance on them may not yield a fair representation of what these students really know and can do, given their economic and educational disadvantage.” 

Student Experiences of Standardized Testing

It is of course important to look at all of this research and these studies, but it is even more important to hear what current day students who are grappling with this topic have to say about it. I interviewed three of my peers about standardized testing and these are some of the things they had to say. When I asked what comes to mind for people when they hear the term standardized testing the response was overall very stressed: “being in a room, filling out pieces of paper, I don't like it, definitely negative feelings like stress, and sort of like pointlessness.” says Ana Blumberg. Many also said that their experience with standardized testing has been bad so far in their lives, “for me, standardized testing has not been easy, due to a lot of them having words they use kind of confused in my head sometimes, so for me I've not always done the best on them, but I’ve gotten better over time.” says Toby Hilton. Ana Blumberg also says that, “I just feel like it doesn't make any sense, and I don't know why it exists and if there was a time when it made sense then great, but I don't know what it's still a thing.it's stupid and I find it really frustrating.” These students also back up the fact that standardized testing starts very early in education, Toby says that his earliest memory of standardized testing is “third grade, for me it was the ERBs, and they'd break it up no like, I don’t know if it was like 45 minutes for each one but we’d do it like sit the whole day or like two days , and everyone would just be sitting there with their folder, and it would be just nonstop circling or just writing.” 

Anyone who has met a third grader knows that they are not built for this kind of activity, and it is unreasonable and unrealistic to expect to get any sense of their knowledge or abilities from this kind of situation. But of course these harmful experiences don’t stop after third grade, “I took the SAT recently, a few weeks ago,” says Adrie Young, “I think the tests just promote a hostile competitive culture because some people tell each other their scores, some people don't. I've also heard situations of people telling their scores and complaining about them being low and then other people getting lower scores and that's kind of like an uncomfortable situation to put them in. There's never an even playing ground for everyone involved, and they just promote really hostile environments between kids.” Clearly the consensus from the people these tests affect the most is that these tests simply don’t work, Toby says, “they're the worst and they suck.”