Anyone who made it to a college is classroom is way too familiar with standardized testing: every state, from Alabama to Wyoming has some version of standardized testing, and when high school hits, students get to start worrying about the next step in exams — the Scholastic Aptitude Test or ACT college readiness assessment (or both, if you’re brave). But a new wave of standardized testing is being pushed into the curriculum, and many are fighting hard against it.
These new tests are called the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or the PARCC, and they’re being given in schools across the country starting this week. They’re designed to assess whether or not students are learning in sync with the Common Core standards, an invention of the U.S. President Barack Obama administration designed to ensure that students are ready for entry-level careers and the rigor of first-year college courses.
The tests are known to be difficult and more in-depth than old versions. They’ll require students to use critical thinking, including a multimedia component, written essays and those dreaded questions that will require students to explain the reasoning behind why they got their answer, The New York Times reported.
In accordance with No Child Left Behind laws, Common Core tests will be given annually from third to eighth grade to test proficiency in math and reading. However, many in the U.S. Congress wish to rewrite the law to make standardized testing not required by the federal government. Those in opposition of the tests say that students are being tested too much and that it’s unfair that Obama is offering money to states that comply. Conservatives see the new standards as the government having too much interference in education.
But it’s not only politicians fighting against these tests. Many parents are fighting the new standards as well. Parents across the country have started movements to allow their children to opt out of Common Core testing, and now, almost every state has an option to opt out.
Teachers’ unions also advocate against the tests now that they’ve become a method that states use to evaluate how well their teachers are teaching. Steve Wollmer, director of communications for the New Jersey Education Association, the New Jersey teachers’ union, told the Times that the group does not oppose teacher evaluations, but they believe that teaching is being replaced by test preparation. Union members are also concerned that poor students will be at a disadvantage because the tests are taken on computers, leaving those without computers at home lagging behind, he said.
In Bloomfield, New Jersey, the opt-out movement is strong: about 97 of 6,200 students chose not to take the tests, the Times reported. Not even the superintendent of the school district wants to give these tests.
“Our board of education has taken a very strong stance against standardized testing,” superintendent Salvatore Goncalves told the Times, adding that students are being over-tested.
There are consequences to these opt-outs, though. If more than 5 percent of students at a school or in a district choose to not take the test, the school is in danger of losing funding or risking greater monitoring. James Crisfield, a former superintendent of schools in Millburn, New Jersey, allows opt-outs, but said the movement is frustrating.
“What you have is a right to free public education, and here’s the package we have for you. You can’t choose to have P.E. on Tuesday and every other Thursday. You can’t choose not to take the calculus test,” Crisfield told the Times. “I just worry about opting out as a conceit, that if it extends beyond PARCC, it will start eating away at the strength of public education.”
On the one hand, these tests are meant to see where education stands so that it can someday be improved. Schools are not testing to the Common Core to penalize students. They’re doing it to help them. So why are parents completely refusing the rests? The end result is to create data that is standardized across the country that will serve as a means of comparison state-by-state, and eventually improve the education system for these parents’ kids. When you view it like that, it’s hard to be in support of the opt-out movement.
However, there is a lot of validity to the opposition, with perhaps the strongest argument coming from teachers. The state providing incentives, such as pay raises, for teachers whose students do well is not a good system. There will always be students who don’t take standardized testing seriously, so basing a teacher’s salary on students’ performance on these tests is unfair. In addition, it makes teachers inclined to teach to the test, so to speak, and consider their own employment and salary before students’ educations.
Standardized testing in general is something that rallies most people together in opposition, especially students and many in the education industry. A student’s ability to do well in school is still based on a test administered by the state or the federal government, even though it’s been proven that not everyone learns at the same pace and that standardized tests aren’t good ways of assessing knowledge. The same issue people take with standardized testing, they also take with Common Core in general: it’s a deeply flawed system. But if people opt out altogether, rather than work with their school districts to find solutions, the benefits of standardized testing may someday be lost altogether.
