As the school year draws to a close all around America, many students are tasked with taking the dreaded end-of-year test. For many students, being stuck at a desk, with no sound in the room but the clock ticking and the footsteps of the test administrator as they walk around, the long, monotonous hours of taking a test with roughly 50-70 questions are nowhere near the ideal school day.
Many students would love to see a world where end-of-year tests, or tests as a whole, were entirely eradicated. A world where the stress of tests isn’t an ever-present worry on everyone’s mind, one where going to school is solely for learning and not to memorize facts for a test.
Although, as much as people may wish, many have never considered this to be a viable option. Tests are seen as the standard to show how well students are performing, if teachers are teaching effectively, and provide useful metrics to colleges to decide who to accept into schools. However, schools around the country are starting to change how they are structured, hoping to change how schooling is perceived. Many people are picking up on the idea that neither education nor students are positively impacted by standardized tests, and a future without testing would be a better one.
Standardized testing was widely used in the United States during the Industrial Revolution. There was a growing need to educate factory workers and farmhands, and standardized testing provided a good way to test the increasing student population. In the mid-1800s, Horace Mann and Samuel Gridley Howe introduced testing to Boston schools, hoping to have a single standard to judge all schools, which was a system that was quickly adopted by the rest of the states. Testing continued to become more commonplace with presidents like Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan, who hoped to raise education and strengthen the nation.
In Texas, annual testing of students became mandatory with the Texas Assement of Basic Skills (TABS) test, starting in 1980. At the time, many states were starting to implement mandatory testing, and the Bush administration further pushed for mandatory testing, with the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, making testing not only a state requirement but also a federal requirement.
The NCLB Act hoped to improve education and provide an adequate way to measure schools’ ability to teach students. This act required that each school provide students with an annual test, and schools would provide Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). Schools that didn’t provide the information would be shut down or taken over by the state, creating a pressing importance on good grades on testing.
Because of standardized testing’s roots in the industrial revolution, they don’t often show an accurate picture of students as they once did. Standardized tests were built in a school structure that prepared students for a workforce that relied on conformity and efficiency. However, today’s workforce is much different from that of the past. Many jobs require skills like creative thinking and communication, something that most state standard tests don’t evaluate, providing a weak metric for how intelligent a student truly is.
Tests also fail to prove that a student is growing in intelligence. Many students are influenced by other factors that can affect test scores. Hunger, sleep deprivation, and the testing environment can all cause students to do poorly on a test they would otherwise do well on, and many students are affected by anxiety while testing, which has been shown to overwhelm parts of the brain necessary for test taking. Furthermore, students are only tested on information they have learned in the past year, meaning that tests don’t show that students are learning and retaining information, just proving that students can memorize material for a short time.
Testing could be eliminated to improve the lives of students; the question left is how students will be properly assessed without testing. Students could have student portfolios, which would provide an overview of how students are doing in schools and provide metrics of how well the students are performing over time. Some schools in the US have growth transcripts, a sheet of metrics that show non-testable qualities, like mindset, skills, and creativity, which can be better metrics for how a student will succeed than tests. Other schools still require tests, although they come in a different form, allowing students to demonstrate they know the skill by completing projects that require those skills, rather than testing.
Standardized testing in the US has been a part of history for a long time, however testing might not be the best for students to measure success and show their learning abilities. American schools could be greatly improved with new systems in place that could replace or change standardized test.
