As a student, I was always quite good at standardized tests. I scored 1200/1600 on the SAT in middle school, got a 35/36 on the ACT, and got perfect scores on my SAT Subject Tests in World and US History. While I have always been a strong test-taker, I've never seen standardized tests as very useful. The main reason I was able to do well on tests wasn't as much due to my content knowledge as it was my development of a degree of skill specifically with taking standardized tests. Instead of really knowing my math, I was able to eliminate one or two options and then make a guess, often without really knowing what I was doing. This is my main problem with standardized testing: instead of gauging how well students know content, it measures how skilled they are at taking those sorts of tests.
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This gives them a limited utility, and I feel that these sorts of tests should not be used to determine what students know.
Given my opinion of how useful these tests are, I agree with Wagner's point about their exaggerated importance. His complaints about how these tests are used would be illogical even for appropriate assessment results. He says that NCLB’s flaws include "a highly punitive approach toward students, teachers, and schools in terms of the consequences for poor performance on the tests… [and] the lack of any assistance for schools that are not making ‘adequate yearly progress'". These tests aren't useful for gauging student learning, but even if they were, removing all support from those who need it most seems at best neglectful, and at worst actively hostile to those students who struggle most. I hope that Common Core assessments are both better measures of student learning and are connected to funding and resources in a way that makes more sense than NCLB-era assessments.
As someone who was very successful in the NCLB era but recognizes the uselessness of many of the assessments used at that time, I feel that our education system needs to take a new approach to how we measure student learning. One of Wagner's other complaints is about the lack of any standardization between states, and this piece is one where I am more conflicted. He believes that it's important for states to have very similar standards, so that a diploma from a high school in one state is of equivalent worth to one from another. I agree with this idea, but at the same time I recognize that this is a virtual impossibility in the US at present. With the massive disagreements between regions and states within those regions regarding evolution, the role of religion in schools, bilingual education, ethnic studies, and a variety of other topics, I don't see it as practical to create national standards. I feel this way especially because I believe that the creation of any such standards would compromise some of my core beliefs about education (although to quote Neil Degrasse Tyson, "The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it").
Wagner, Tony. Global Achievement Gap : Why Even Our Best Schools Don't Teach the New Survival Skills Our Children Need--and What We Can Do about It. New York, NY, USA: Basic Books, 2010. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 24 March 2015.
Given my opinion of how useful these tests are, I agree with Wagner's point about their exaggerated importance. His complaints about how these tests are used would be illogical even for appropriate assessment results. He says that NCLB’s flaws include "a highly punitive approach toward students, teachers, and schools in terms of the consequences for poor performance on the tests… [and] the lack of any assistance for schools that are not making ‘adequate yearly progress'". These tests aren't useful for gauging student learning, but even if they were, removing all support from those who need it most seems at best neglectful, and at worst actively hostile to those students who struggle most. I hope that Common Core assessments are both better measures of student learning and are connected to funding and resources in a way that makes more sense than NCLB-era assessments.
As someone who was very successful in the NCLB era but recognizes the uselessness of many of the assessments used at that time, I feel that our education system needs to take a new approach to how we measure student learning. One of Wagner's other complaints is about the lack of any standardization between states, and this piece is one where I am more conflicted. He believes that it's important for states to have very similar standards, so that a diploma from a high school in one state is of equivalent worth to one from another. I agree with this idea, but at the same time I recognize that this is a virtual impossibility in the US at present. With the massive disagreements between regions and states within those regions regarding evolution, the role of religion in schools, bilingual education, ethnic studies, and a variety of other topics, I don't see it as practical to create national standards. I feel this way especially because I believe that the creation of any such standards would compromise some of my core beliefs about education (although to quote Neil Degrasse Tyson, "The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it").
Wagner, Tony. Global Achievement Gap : Why Even Our Best Schools Don't Teach the New Survival Skills Our Children Need--and What We Can Do about It. New York, NY, USA: Basic Books, 2010. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 24 March 2015.