In relation to No Child Left Behind the youth of America is REQUIRED to take many different types of standardized tests that have no realavency to the curriculum and cannot measure what a student has learned. In my state these are called ISATS, im not sure if its the same in other states but I have taken these tests and they do not benifit students in any way. I say these are senseless and pointless because they only cause stress and fear among students and this is not healthy in a "learning" atmosphere. What does everyone else think?
- Sign in or Sign up to post comments
- send to friend
- report as spam
We do have an PSAT and an official SAT in my school... possibly the whole state, and those tests are completely optional. A student can take the PSAT for free but the SAT actually costs a fee...
Then there is standardized testing called "STAR" in the state I live in. The purpose of these tests, which, by most of our standards are a waste of time, is for the nation to be able to get a good look at the "level" our students are at. It checks their progress. The problem with the standardized testing is that a lot of kids do it to get it over with, and are told that the tests are not going to affect their grade, so they do not take them seriously. This makes the results of the tests unreliable, so the nation thinks our kids are a lot dumber than they are. This is why they keep lowering the standards, which, I feel is a terrible mistake on their part.
The standardized testing doesn't seem to stress the students I've known. They consider testing week(s) a time to screw around and not do any real work. It makes school that much longer and it doesn't even properly measure our students' abilities. It seems to me like a large waste of time. All the testing REALLY does is waste a week of their everybody's lives every year.
Most of the students I go to school with are apathetic about tests and therefore bring down thier grades and then the teachers are pressured by the district and it doesnt have a good turn out the weeks after testing, mostly because the teachers inform the parents and the parents get pissed at the kids and its just not pleasent.
As someone being in a school with excessive testing i can agree (and admit) that the testing weeks are never taken seriously by any of us, although almost all the people that i associate with dont need to worry about the standardized testing. I have proven that i can not really worry about this with my scores (2080 on the SAT on 1st try, no preparation other than the PSATs), but there are many, many students who do not have that luxury and it is sickening that the stupid No Child Left Behind Act is punishing us because of the 70% of the school who just could care less about the rest of us.
Ambition is a poor excuse for not having enough sense to be lazy. - Stephen Wright
I am the mother of an autistic child in TX. Even he has to take standardized tests! I had to take many standardized tests when I was in school as well. The teachers are very concerned about the tests and don't teach children to think, just to memorize. Children and teens need to be challenged and encouraged to go for more than the status quo. Teachers need to be free to teach actual thinking. Education is supposed to open the minds, not freeze them. I feel testing has ruined the education system.
Take standerdized tests that test nothing, and ban them from our schools. Simple enough. No cathch, no exception. And colleges will by law not be allowed to take into consideration the scores of students who have taken ACT/SAT, nor what their scores are.
______________________________________________________________________
"The harder the conflict the more glorious the triumph," Thomas Paine
You may know that under the No Child Left Behind Act states will receive more federal money if their students improve on their standardized test scores. What you may not know is that many states deliberately make their standardized tests easier each year so that their students will always score higher. Essentially, they just lower the standard in order to get more handouts from the federal government. I can say from experience that the exam in my state of RI was a joke compared to the one I took years ago. No one took the exam seriously. I had about 40 minutes of extra time than what I needed to finish it, and I did not rush one bit. The one that I took years ago was much more challenging. This just shows how No Child Left Behind has been such a terrible failure, and how standardized tests are such a waste of time. The Colbert Report was where I first heard about this ridiculous practice.
I am currently a high school student and have passed my CIM, the standardized tests in my state.
In fact, I passed it two years early as a 10th grader.
It used to be in my school district that in order to graduate, one MUST pass the CIM. Unfortunately, too few students could pass and so graduation rates were dropping. So the state dropped the requirement. Now, I will receive an "Honorable Mention" and tassel when I graduate in '08. Spectacular.
The only thing these tests do is alienate students and teachers. Teachers are forced to relinquish valuable class time for these tests, must teach to the test, and are punished when students who do not care enough to try or test poorly for whatever reason, lower their school's funding simply because "Just a Few Children Left Behind" was poorly implemented.
These tests just go to show that the old saying "Any plan is better than no plan" had yet to have been tested. Please, trust the teachers to teach.
The standardized tests are very uneffective in my school, but that may be because most of my schoolmates are potheads. Only about 100 out of 1200 bothered to take the SAT, and my grade lost 50 students this year. Because it's either the tests are boring and easy, or they're impossible to pass and they just give up after failing it. The school system could use a reform, if you ask me.
a comment about kinda about tests from Einstein........
One had to cram all this stuff into one's mind for the examinations, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect on me that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year.
- Einstein
Administration is not teaching.
Parenting is not education.
Give teachers more authority over what they teach, and students will be educated.
Refuse to trust them and you have the world as we see it now.
It's because teachers are not trusted that our educational system is weak.
I can understand why lawmakers put in the requirement about testing. They are trying to find a way to measure student progress and that means assessment needs to be done. The easiest, but not the best, way to assess anything is to standardize it. Unfortunately, as previous posters have mentioned, it's only standardized within the states and states do tweak their tests in order to comply and receive federal funding.
That said, I think there are better ways to improve the school system. Teachers are now spending weeks preparing for standardized tests, using sample test questions, and teaching specifically to the tests. This destroys room for creativity in the classroom. If the teacher is not allowed creative thinking, how will he or she be able to teach creative thinking?
One of the most disturbing things I see with my students (I am an orchestra teacher, so do not have to deal with standardized testing, but am involved in some preparation exercises for said test) is that they are not thinking critically. In some cases, I wonder if they are able to think at all. It feels as if they need to be told everything before making a decision, and even then, they want the "right" answer. How many decisions did you make today that had no right or wrong answer? Music is a great area to teach because of the integration of all subjects, plus it involves a whole level of interpretation that has no real rules. Yes, there are guidelines, but no "right" or "wrong" way to interpret when performing. When I give my students the opportunity to interpret the music any way they want to, they are genuinely terrified of being wrong.
Fixing education in this country is going to take a lot more than just testing. We need to completely restructure our middle and high schools to mirror the elementary schools where the subjects are integrated. I HATE the comment from my students when I tell them that they must use correct spelling, grammar and punctuation on an essay, "But this is MUSIC, not English." Wrong. It's life. You need to communicate in all subjects and you need to do it well. However, students think of the world as being compartmentalized in the same way their subjects are taught. Some are able to make the connections on their own, but most will walk out of science and leave all science in that classroom. I think this separation of subjects, combined with our acceptance of adolescence as being a time where students can't control their behaviors, is why our test scores drop dramatically from 4th to 8th grade when compared on a global scale.
Restructure the system
Drop standardized testing as THE assessment
Integrate subject matter
Teach critical thinking skills with creative solutions