Ms. Scarbary’s class

Generally, we are opposed to the current growth in standardized testing and the belief that increased testing in synonymous with increased learning. (155) – Janet Alsup and Jonathan Bush, But Will it Work With REAL Students?

I agree with Alsup and Bush here. I believe the VAST majority of teachers in our public schools are against the amount of standardized tests we subject our students to. Moreover, the decreases in physical education, art and music, and technology electives in favor of test taking strategy classes have reached the level of the absurd. My personal biggest complaint about such tests, which Alsup and Bush don’t really address, is that these tests only look at system or state “cut scores” and passing and failing, as opposed to percentage of betterment. Aside from these multiple choice tests generally being inaccurate assessments and predictors of learning and knowledge, we don’t even look to them to chart growth from year-to-year. If kids have to take the CRCTs every year, why don’t we monitor “failing” children’s progress? And why should individual teachers be judged on the performance of a class he/she was handed? Isn’t that basically judging teaching ability by the students’ ability to rote memorize? In addition, as we have read in Unrau’s Content Area Reading and Writing, standardized tests are created and constantly revised to reflect an average. These “standardized” predictive tools by their very nature create a median, which means that there will always be 50% of our students “below average.” As overall scores improve, the average moves higher, so in order for an individual to show improvement, he or she must improve by a greater percentage than his/her peers. This type of labeling and competition, ocurring as early as Kindergarten, can be extremely harmful to children’s psyches.

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My one criticism with the lead sentence is that the authors need to be more careful with their language- increased testing is synonymous with increased learning? Not exactly. Increased testing is synonymous with increased accountability, and performance on standardized tests is synonymous with learning. Both of those perceptions are wrong, of course, so the sentiment of the sentence is preserved, but I believe it could be better phrased.