Former President Bush signed an innocent bill on January 8, 2002 that has been slowly destroying the American education system. The bill, noted as the “The No Child Left Behind Act,” (NCLB) amplified testing in American schools and has been restricting the amount of information and time teachers have been allowed to spend in class truly delving into their content area (Klein para. 6, lines 26-37). The world before NCLB was mostly test-free and included only minor standardized tests. James D. Kirylo, associate professor of education at the University of South Carolina explains that “Prior to the 1950s, students who completed high school took approximately three standardized tests through their entire K-12 experience . . . [t]oday, upon completion of their K-12 school experience, students can take anywhere between 60 and 100 standardized tests” (Kirylo para. 2, lines 3-4 ). The life of an American child in school before NCLB, juxtaposed to the life of an American child in school after NCLB is dangerously different. Klein also shares that “[u]nder the NCLB law, states must test students in reading and math in grades 3 through 8 and once in high school” (Klein para. 7, lines 38-39 ), but no one imagined that a simple act to improve education would leave the American education system in the distraught state it is in today with standardized testing. By looking at the volume of standardized tests the schoolchildren in America are forced to complete, the misunderstanding of true student success, and the interference happening between standardized testing and student learning, one can see that actions against standardized testing are necessary so that standardized testing no longer harms education in America. This is important because standardized testing is not the most effective way to truly measure students or teachers in how well they perform and educate. 

To begin, standardized testing in America has increased substantially simply because the government mandated it. “’A typical student takes 112 mandated standardized tests between pre-kindergarten classes and 12th grade,’ a new Council of the Great City Schools study found” (Layton para. 2, lines 5-6). It is truly disheartening to imagine all of the learning and discoveries that could have taken place in the hours those 112 mandated tests took up in a child’s education. The possibilities for American schoolchildren are endless until policymakers place roadblocks of mandated tests that are overwhelming to schoolchildren and take up precious learning time. Not only have students suffered from the sheer volume of standardized testing, but also teachers have suffered from this increase. The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) shares that, “ . . . roles played by teachers have changed. Specifically, teachers’ institutional tasks have increased because they are expected to take up work related to testing in addition to their regular teaching duties” (NCTE para. 2, line 13). If teachers cannot offer all of their focus to their students and their subject area, how can they achieve as educators in their classrooms? It is a set up for failure. Also, according to the NCTE, teachers roles beyond simply teaching to the test and administering the standardized tests include, “collecting, organizing, and analyzing data associated with tests, grouping and regrouping students according to test performance, developing vertical articulation of the curriculum to align with tests, and coordinating students’ assignments, based on test scores, to remedial programs” (NCTE para. 3, lines 17-20). With teachers spending more time on these tasks, they are losing valuable time that they could be using to better themselves in their subject area for the betterment of their current students and future students. Even with all these efforts, as a study shows, the efforts teachers make to complete these tasks might not even matter: “ [i]n 40 percent of districts surveyed, test results aren’t available until the following school year, making them useless for teachers who want to use results to help guide their work in the classroom . . .” (Layton para. 21, lines 81-83).  Yet again, by forcing teachers to participate in such strategic and tedious tasks to learn from their testing, it is pulling them away from keeping focus on what matters most—their students and their true impact as teachers. Coming from an education major myself, when I complete my career, I will not remember the score reports I receive for standardized tests, but I will remember my students and the lasting memories created in my classroom. I will remember my students as individual people, and not numbers and scores on a meaningless test. Although it is a point that “[s]uch testing gives the teacher important diagnostic information about what the child is learning . . .”(Gross para. 2, lines 12-13, the results are based on a one time test where the student could have been having a bad day. While the volume of standardized testing is overwhelming for students, and it is pulling teachers away from the true profession of teaching, the true meaning of success is blurring as well. 

Adding to the sheer volume of standardized tests, standardized tests have completely changed the mindset of how student success is measured. The No Child Left Behind Act placed fear into schools all over the nation because “ [s]tates that failed to make academic progress faced a series of consequences. States and districts responded by adding new tests during the school year to ensure students were on track,” (Layton para. 27, lines 104-106). Because of the fear of not progressing, student success has changed from learning a new life skill or learning how to spell a new word to simply making a certain score on a test. This is a major problem for the American education system. If students can only receive praise from making a certain score on a certain test, it trains them to believe that exemplary scores are the only way to be successful in life. Phillip Harris, highly involved with the Association for Educational Communications & Technology shares that, “[c]ontrary to popular assumptions about standardized testing, the tests do a poor job of measuring student achievement” (Harris para. 2, lines 9-10).  He also states, “ . . . the scores don’t provide very much useful information for evaluating a student’s achievement, a teacher’s competency, or the success of a particular school or program” (Harris para. 3, lines 17-19).  So the question is, why are not standardized tests valuable tools to measure student success and achievement? Brandon Busteed, an expert in education shares that, “ . . . although we need to test certain competencies and intelligence, it is becoming quite clear that there are many kinds of competencies and many forms of intelligence that we are not picking up on with our current testing approaches” (Busteed para. 5, lines 44-48). Gerald Bracey, extremely active in American education, also shares with us a “list of some of the biggies that we generally don’t even try to use standardized tests to measure: creativity, critical thinking, resilience, motivation, persistence, curiosity, endurance, reliability, enthusiasm, empathy, self-awareness, self-discipline, leadership, civic-mindedness, courage, compassion, resourcefulness, sense of beauty, sense of wonder, honesty, integrity” (Harris para. 8, lines 69-90). Student success is mastery of new characteristics and lifelong skills listed partnered with successes in academics—not one or the other. To point out the irony in the situation, a future employer is most likely going to hire an individual that has all of the above qualities, not a candidate that got a decent score on a standardized test. From a personal point of view, I was a straight “A” student my entire time in grade school. I graduated with a 5.01 GPA as well as fifteenth out of my entire graduating class of over four hundred students, and I could only score an 1180 on the SAT, and a 25 on the ACT. Sadly, because of my low standardized testing scores, I could not receive many scholarships to help with finances in college. It is saddening to see the hypocrisy between our modern society attempting to persuade children, mostly young girls, that numbers do not matter, yet in school, the anxiety and stress of making a certain score is constantly on the minds of schoolchildren. The only solution to this is to “ . . . end our obsession with standardized testing” (Busteed para. 1, line 1). If the American education system continues down the path it is on with standardized testing, the definition of student achievement will forever change.  Simply stated, “’[a]chievement’ means more than a score on a standardized test” (Harris para. 4, line 26). We must make this known in our education system here in America before it is too late, and test scores permanently define schoolchildren. While this is a large problem with standardized testing, interfering with student learning might be the largest of all the issues.

Along with blurring the lines of true student success, standardized testing has interfered greatly with actual education and learning time in the classroom. Not only does it keep teachers from teaching what they believe to be valuable to students for their academic career, but also standardized testing forces students to learn only what is for the test instead of something they feel may benefit them more. On a firsthand account, a high school teacher shares that “ . . . ‘my honors English curriculum now contains only two books instead of the 12 I used to teach . . . [a]ny books I teach outside of the curriculum will harm my students’ scores on the tests that evaluate them and my performance’” (Williams para. 11, lines 57-58, 60-61).  Because standardized tests evaluate teachers’ performance in the classroom more so than students, teachers feel the need to do what is necessary for the test rather than for the betterment of the education of the students. While it can be said that teachers can “ . . . use the test format as a catalyst to both examine teaching pedagogy and evaluate student performance” (Gross para. 8, lines 47-50), a standardized test given to an entire state or the entire nation should not determine one teacher‘s certain teaching pedagogy. Teachers are hired into schools to benefit the students in a certain school and a certain area, and some regions in the nation different support than others. Brandon Busteed shares that, “Gallup’s work on strengths development has shown that every human on the planet has a unique talent signature . . . [a]nd we’ve found that each person’s success is best determined by how well they leverage their unique talents on a daily basis”(Busteed para. 6, lines 49-53). Each teacher that is hired into the profession is meant to find said unique talent in the student and help the student nurture and blossom into the successful academic student that the teacher knows the student can be. It is in no part the teacher’s job to teach to the test to get a certain score rather than help the students’ in their unique talents.  Also along these lines, “ . . . teachers and principals are caught in a hideous bind of having their own teaching methods squeezed out . . .” (Williams para. 13, lines 77-78). With teaching methods being eliminated, along with course work being eliminated, this binds the hands of teachers and keeps them from performing to the best of their ability in the classroom. According to the NCTE, “ . . . [i]nstruction is also diminished by mandatory curricula that have been developed to prepare students for standardized tests. Such curricula require teachers to use prepared materials which they did not develop and which may not address the needs of actual students in their classes” (NCTE para. 5, lines 25-28).  This, in return, affects the students greatly. The NCTE shares that, “standardized tests limit student learning because they focus only on cognitive dimensions, ignoring many other qualities that are essential to student success” (NCTE para. 9, lines 80-82). Because teachers focus on these cognitive points, students are missing out on other opportunities for instruction due to teaching to the test. Dr. Gail Gross, a family and education expert argues that, standardized testing can lead to “ . . .better teaching shills, as teachers will be held accountable to help their student meet these standards” (Gross para. 4, lines 21-23). Although Gross has a strong point, Mary Elizabeth Williams argues that, “[a]bsolutely, there are broken schools and faulty teachers who are failing our children every day. But building a better system of public education . . .takes creative and innovative approaches, tailored to individual communities. Learning is not a one-size-fits-all proposition” (Williams para. 18, lines 132-136). Focusing more on student learning, the NCTE also shares, “[a]nother limitation on student learning results from the negative perceptions standardized tests can give to students about themselves and their own abilities”(NCTE para. 10, lines 98-100).  Students lose self-confidence when receiving back standardized test scores. It is much different than receiving an unsatisfactory grade on a test given by the teacher. Students are able to see questions, see answers, and make the connection between right and wrong—they are able to learn from these kinds of tests which is very different from the results of standardized tests. According to Chris Tienken, “[t]he results from these tests are not formative, they’re summative; used to monitor, not educate” (Tienken 1:03-1:10). Through standardized testing, most of the time, teachers are not truly sure why a student received the grade they did. Also along the lines of this, “[s]tudent learning is also limited by testing’s inflexible sorting of students into categories of proficient or non-proficient. It can be very difficult for students designated as non-proficient to imagine themselves as effective readers and writers”(NCTE para. 11, lines 108-111). Yet again, this categorization discourages students from learning if they are preemptively stereotyped into a group by one or two tests. Coupled with harming student learning, “[s]tandardized tests inadvertently create incentives for students to become superficial thinkers,”(Harris para. 10, lines 99-100). With simple multiple choice testing, students learn to have one-track thinking—not promoting creative thinking or critical thinking. Brandon Busteed shares, “[t]he biggest problem with standardized testing is that it seeks standardized answers. We’re not just overinvesting in standardized testing, we’re actually testing standardization”(Busteed para. 5, lines 39-41). 

Through the insurmountable amount of standardized testing, the confusion of student success, and the pitiful nature of student learning, standardized testing has shown the American education system all of what it is capable of. The question arises: why are we continuing on with standardized testing? Dr. Kirylo shares that “ . . .the American Educational Research Association, the National Association for the Education of Young Children, and the Association of Childhood International have denounced the overuse of standardized testing”, (Kirylo para. 5, lines 21-23) and this is coupled with “ . . . the powerful results of a new survey of 2,586 superintendents: the leaders of our K-12 school districts just essentially voted ‘no confidence’ on GPA and standardized tests as strong predictors of college success” (Busteed para. 3, lines 14-17). If the large majority of people truly involved in standardized testing do not feel that standardized testing is important, we should not continue with it. James Kirylo shares the answer to why it is still a major issue: “[o]f course, we aren’t able to constructively work on solutions unless we recognize that there is an awareness of the problem. Unless policymakers and other decision-making entities realize that a test-centric environment is ultimately unhealthy for our youth, we will continue down this spiral of alienating many of them from opportunity, equity, and a developmentally appropriate educational experience”(Kirylo para. 7 lines 32-35). We must convince policymakers that it is necessary for standardized testing to take the backseat in American education. Busteed shares, “[t]o be clear, this is not to suggest that we wholesale abandon standardized testing. These tests should be part of a much more balanced scorecard that includes many other more important measures. But we do need to greatly deemphasize the role these assessments currently play”(Busteed para.8, lines 65-69). It is imperative we convince policymakers in America of this reduction of standardized testing before proper American education is left behind forever. 
