There has been an unsuccessful reform in the testing industry in the past decade, which has had destructive effects on America’s education system. Since the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002, testing has become unrewarding and harmful for both students and teachers. The testing industry has become privatized and biased toward suburban, middle class school systems. Even though that may be the middle ground for education, those school systems do not accurately represent all the school systems in the United States. Common Core standardized testing should be revoked because of the inaccurate representations of students’ aptitude, the monopolized textbook companies, and the unfairness of the testing to the low-income schools. 

The reform initiative came from the No Child Left Behind Act, established in 2002. The act rewrites the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (Linn, 3). This new act had the hopes of reforming the United States’ education system fundamentally. The old act set standards and boundaries for public schools, but each state had no correspondence to the next. The law declares that “states are required to develop a set of high-quality, yearly student academic assessments that include, at a minimum, assessments in reading and language arts, mathematics, and science. Each year they must report student progress in terms of percentage of students scoring at the ‘proficient’ level or higher (Abedi, 4).” The act aims to elevate test scores throughout the United States, which is an achievable and reasonable goal; however the way in which specific actions were taken to achieve this goal were unsound. The No Child Left Behind Act specified that tests needed to be more universal across the states in order to accurately compare scores and avoid misrepresentation. The overall goal to this act was to have all students in the United States at or above the proficient level within twelve years. That means all students would be expected to be at or above this level by the 2013-2014 school year, which not all schools in the United States achieved (Linn, 4). The objective of the act initially seemed achievable because twelve years is an adequate amount of time to complete reforms and improve test scores. Since it is now the 2016-2017 school year test scores have proven that almost nothing has changed since 2002. The government now has to recognize that there is a major flaw in this lacking system. These flaws deter improvement in the way America’s students are learning and preparing for college. 

The main objective of the education reform for the past fifteen years is meant to increase test scores and provide a more intense learning experience to better prepare students for college level classes. In fact, it can be a way to collect data easily to evaluate and either merit or demote teachers and students. It is “one tool that a teacher uses to diagnose her students’ teaching needs, so that an individual and child-centered curriculum can be developed (Gross).” Though this system is ideal in helping each student and teacher achieve their best every day, there are inevitable flaws that need to be addressed; especially since these faults have not been improved upon since the No Child Left Behind act was established. There is a widespread epidemic of teachers who are “teaching to the test” in order to help their students achieve higher scores, therefore, raising their salaries. This is viewed to the public and many “old-school” educators as a lousy teaching method. However it can be effective in some ways because it focuses on basic skills and educational requirements students need to move on to the next grade. Opposing opinions say that it eliminates time-wasting activities and games in the classroom (Barth and Mitchell). This method can be useful in some classrooms where the students do well with structured and concrete learning, rather than singing songs and instituting games where the student is still unsure of the main objective, they only understand that the game is fun. This method is more straightforward and will help students learn more information in a shorter amount of time. One source says, “the key to testing is to test twice each year, both spring and fall, to prepare children and to communicate to them that this is just one vehicle to help assess the achievement (Gross).” This is the ideal way for the standardized testing system to function, only two tests a year one for a preliminary exam, and one for a post-exam to assess the learning progress of each child. Most children in the United States average five or six tests per year, causing more stress and test preparation than necessary. At this point, testing has become highly stressful and useless when shortly after one test, a student does not have much time until he or she must begin preparing for the next one. 

These tests are making too large of an impact on today’s youth. Students should be learning for the purpose of being able to apply knowledge to life after school, not to be able to score proficiently on the next benchmark test. “Given the high stakes and the accompanying pressure, people will game a system (Jouriles).” Over the years, students and teachers have done such as that. It has gone as far as teachers helping students to cheat in order to score well on the tests. The tests have corrupted students and teachers to contradict their integrity for a mere number that is supposed to accurately reflect one’s intelligence. In the far more mild cases of “gaming the system”, many teachers evolve their lesson plans to the tests. “Critics say the new tests put too much pressure on kids, waste instructional time and encourage educators to emphasize remote memorization- teaching to the test- in lieu of meaningful learning (Lewis).” This means that teachers derive lesson plans for what will be on the test in a few weeks time. Lewis claims that on average, students will take 112 mandatory standardized tests between preschool and high school graduation, so with these tests being plenty and not far between, that doesn’t give much time for the lessons and required information to be processed into long-term memory. Teachers must force a surplus of material into the student’s fast-adapting brains in a matter of three or four weeks, and this means each student must rely on pure memorization of facts to do well on the test. Not all students do well learning this way; some prefer a more hands-on or visual way of learning but, of course, there is no time to do this and be able to learn all of the material. This could also be the reason that today’s youth despises school so much. A majority of students today dread going to school each day because when they get there, all they do is write notes and recite bland information and facts. The psychological effects of these tests on students and teachers are not worth the benefits that these tests do provide. Jouriles claims that teachers have been saying that they do not see how looking at a score could improve their every day teaching methods, because it is just a number. They cannot even discuss the information that is on the test. This creates a problem for teachers who are still trying to keep students engaged with learning, even with the corrupted testing system. The tests seem to be forcefully constituting a new and standard method of teaching and learning that is only fit for the highest scoring students, while hindering the potential of the lower scoring students to succeed. 

Standardized testing is not a government-regulated activity. By the decade, education is becoming further privatized, but not in a good way. Education is slowly being taken over by for-profit companies by relying on the always-decreasing national budget for education. There are only four companies in the United States who provide materials needed for a school to succeed in benchmark testing: Harcourt Educational Measurement, CBT McGraw-Hill, Riverside Publishing, and NCS Pearson (Frontline). The largest and most well-known of these companies is Pearson which, according to Spencer, is the largest backer for the common core standards initiative. Pearson is also in control of grading SAT tests. While this may seem harmless, the company scored over 4,000 SAT college admission tests incorrectly in 2004 and 2005 (Spencer). The monopoly Pearson has over the United States’ education is directly effecting test scores in a negative way. Textbooks have gone up exponentially in price in the last thirty years, nearly 812 percent (Spencer). While there has been a standard rate of inflation in the United States, that rate does not match up with the inflated rate of textbooks. These privatized companies are making a well-rounded education, by their standards, attainable by only those who can afford it. “Harcourt, CBT McGraw-Hill, and Riverside Publishing write 96 percent of the exams administered at the state level. NCS Pearson, meanwhile, is the leading scorer of standardized tests.” (Frontline) This means all of the information in the textbooks is the exact information on the tests. It seems logical if the schools have access to all of these textbooks, but unfortunately most schools do not have access to every textbook needed to score well on the tests. Along with the increasing prices for textbooks, the company continually publishes new editions of textbooks every year, with only slight and insignificant changes from the last one (Spencer). This further shows that the companies distributing the textbooks and tests are not interested in providing equal opportunities for quality education, but are further interested in the profit they make from the top one percent of the financial population purchasing every new edition. 

The corrupt textbook companies provide an unfair advantage for school districts with greater budgets. Since these companies also make the tests, the majority of the material from the tests come verbatim from the textbooks. For inner city schools, it is difficult to attain the materials that are needed for students to perform well on standardized tests. “The average school (in Philadelphia) has only 27% of the books in the district’s recommended curriculum (Broussard).” If the students do not have the funding to get these books, it is inevitable that they will not score well. With the textbooks that the schools do have, there are very strict rules about where and when students can have access to them. One parent of a student in the Philadelphia school system says, “my daughter is not allowed to bring her textbook home because they don’t want it to get lost (Broussard).” This prevents students from being able to access the information at home and better prepare for tests. Students are only allotted the hour and a half they are in class to utilize their textbooks to properly prepare for these rigorous test, which is not the way a student should have to study. Also with constantly decreasing budgets for school systems, textbook budgets per student are being cut drastically every year. Broussard found that in the 2012-2013 school year, Philadephia school systems allotted $30.30 per student for textbooks. Then in 2014 the textbook budget was completely lost, meaning each student was budgeted zero dollars for books. This is almost impossible because each student needs a textbook and a workbook for almost every single subject and the monopolized companies are pricing them at over $100 a book. Where there are cuts in funding for textbooks, there are cuts in funding for other things, such as staffing. Lack of staffing makes it easier for records and books to be lost. In one school, brand new textbooks were just sitting in a supply closet instead of being used because a lack in bookkeeping staff. If there is more funding for areas such as textbooks and bookkeeping, it will be beneficial for students in the long run because in turn, higher test scores will accumulate more funding for schools.

In a Ted Talk given by Kandice Sumner, she explains how she grew up in an inner-city school system but had the opportunity to attend a suburban school with more funding. At a younger age, she explained how she found it strange how her friends in her neighborhood did not have so many books, or how her friends did not have a music or art class. She called it “survivors guilt” of inner-city school systems because she could travel to the suburbs and receive a better education than her school district was able to offer. She found as she grew up to become an educator herself that a lack of supplies and resources directly correlated to low test scores. Students today are growing up believing that they need all of the updated and expensive textbooks to have a valuable education because of the Common Core standards. A valuable education means that a student has the means and the ability to learn all that they can. This does not mean they must learn the specific information verbatim from a textbook. Sumner grew up to become a teacher herself in the same underfunded school district she would have gone to. She believes in teaching to students from the available resources and trying to give them the best education possible with that the schools have to offer. Even with her superb teaching techniques for inner-city kids, it still is not even a match to the Common Core standardized testing system. The tests are made for the students who have access to the specific materials to succeed. The tests are designed so that lower income schools who typically have the lower scores are essentially forced to buy the materials from the textbook companies to avoid closure or sanction from the government. Many lower income schools are closed yearly because of low test scores. This causes a trend in which people associate low-income with not intelligent, which is not true in the slightest. Bright students come from all over the country and from many different families, but some of these bright students’ intelligence becomes hindered because of the stigma of low-income school systems and lack of resources to get a well-rounded education. This brings about the new movement sweeping the nation, which is the “opt-out” movement.

More and more students are finding that the tests are “irrelevant and disconnected from class (Rizga).” These students are choosing to not take the test. “’Our movement,’ (Cindy) Hamilton said, ‘is civil disobedience against the gathering of all this data by for-profit companies that doesn’t help students learn’ (Rizga).” These biased, solely multiple choice tests are the only thing keeping teachers teaching or getting them demoted. One teacher was downgraded from “highly effective” to “effective” on the official record and his paycheck decreased by $1,100 and another one told his student who was planning on opting out, “Please take this test. My paycheck depends on it.” (Rizga). This is a difficult decision for students because benchmark and End-of-Year testing counts for a grade, and some students are not willing to risk the grade to prove a point. A majority of the students participating in the movement come from inner city schools where the tests are graded unfairly anyways. “One recent study found that urban high school students spend 266% more time taking district-level exams than their suburban counterparts (Rizga).” Students of these urban schools have had enough of the unfairness of the Common Core standards for testing. Students are failing tests and having to be put in remedial classes where they are drilled on basic skills, further setting them back from the rest of the students in their class. It is a good thing that students are taking a stand against the unfair testing because the corrupt system should not be running our nation’s education. 

McNeil said, “we need another reform for the reform.” This is a simple, yet true statement. The idea behind the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 was and effective, but the corrupt system it became was the exact opposite. They test to make sure funding is put to good use, but schools are not provided proper materials in the first place. It is an inescapable cycle where schools are constantly scoring below “proficient”, thus receiving even less funding to purchase proper materials needed to pass. There is a need to deprivatize standardized testing. This way, there will be no financial corruption of for-profit companies doing whatever they can to increase revenue, furthering the opportunity for all students throughout the United States for a better and equal education. 
