Making abortion illegal

Standardized Testing Problem Speech Outline

Policy Proposition:

A federal law should be passed that eliminates the requirement for K-12 students in the United States to take standardized tests.

Definitions:

1. Standardized tests: A test administered and graded in a consistent manner.

a. In California, we’re mostly familiar with the STAR program that administers some large-scale standardized tests for our state.

2. No Child Left Behind Act: Law passed in 2001 that established a requirement for students to be tested in reading and math during grades 3-8 and one time in high school.

3. Teaching to the test: devoting extra time and attention in the classroom to the skills needed on standardized tests

Background:

1. When the No Child Left Behind Act was introduced in 2001, standardized testing became an important tool in evaluating both student and national progress in education. More pressure was put on students and teachers to perform well on these tests because it became the main way of determining a schools effectiveness.

2. In 2009, the Race to the Top program was introduced which would pit schools against each other, with the schools that have the best student test scores receiving increased funding.

3. The No Child Left Behind Act’s goal of reaching “100% proficiency on standardized tests by 2014” failed (ProCon.org).

4. In 2019, the Nation’s Report Card reported that in the last ten years proficiency scores in math and reading remained almost the same even though higher standards of academics were imposed (ProCon.org).

5. In March 2020, the Education Secretary temporarily waived the requirement for standardized tests for the 2019-20 school year due to the pandemic, stating that students should be “focused on staying healthy and continuing to learn” (ProCon.org).

Inherencies

Structural: Federal laws like the NCLB require standardized testing for students during most of their years in K through 12 education. An additional structural inherency that also should be noted is that there currently isn’t a law that mandates less standardized testing.

Attitudinal: According to a poll conducted by Education Next, 66% of parents and 67% of the general public support testing (Henderson) because they believe that it measures the performance of schools and students well.

Claims

1. High stakes testing has a negative effect on students’ mental health/performance

a. Because of the laws and programs that tie incentives and punishments into standardized tests, there is an increasing pressure on students to perform well on these tests. This leads to anxiety, stress, sleeplessness, and other health issues in young children.

b. A poll in 2019 by PDK international found that “50 percent of responding teachers see pressure on their kids to do well on tests” (Dean).

c. “A pediatrician reports witnessing an ‘incredible’ increase in anxiety over five years.” During heavy testing months, “she sees a new patient each day complaining of stomach aches and panic attacks brought on by test anxiety” (Dean).

d. 61% of students becoming more anxious, increasing stress for children at a young age (Abrams et al.).

2. Standardized tests are leading to less curriculum teaching and more teaching to the test

a. 62% of teachers spending more time for test preparation, curriculums have started to be abandoned and instead, a focus on “teaching to the test” has emerged (Robelen).

b. An investigation on teachers’ views of standardized tests, done by educational researcher Lisa Abrams, concluded that the faculty was altering their teaching styles to become more test-oriented, causing “increased attention toward tested content” and “a decreased emphasis on non-tested curricular areas” (Abrams et al.).

c. A study done by the National Research Council of the National Academies of Science in 2011 had 17 social scientists that “assessed [the] value of tying test scores to incentives… The panel concluded that test-based accountability led to score inflation, to gaming the system, and to behaviors that undermined the value of the scores” (Ravitch).

d. For example, one school in Texas was dissatisfied with how their students performed on the state standardized test, so the school “[skimmed] minutes off each period of the day to create a new test-preparation period” (McClaskey).

3. Standardized tests have not led to improved student achievement.

a. As stated in the background information portion, barely any improvements have been made in student performance after standardized testing has been emphasized.

b. “the New York Times recently reported, the latest results of an international exam show no improvement from American teens in reading and math since 2000” (Dean).

c. In the Program for International Student Assessment, which is a worldwide survey that compares education performances between countries, ranks the U.S. as “average in science and reading and below average in math.” This means that out of 72 countries, the U.S. is roughly in the middle of the ranking. A country like Finland doesn’t even have annual standardized tests but has still remained a top performer for the past 15 years (Dickenson).

4. Counterargument: On the other hand, some parents and some of the general public will say that standardized tests are needed as a tool to measure student learning, but in reality, they are not a reliable method of tracking performance.

a. Education Researcher Gerald W. Bracey explains that standardized tests cannot measure a lot of important qualities that make education meaningful. Some of these qualities that are not measured include critical thinking, creativity, resourcefulness, and awareness (ProCon.org).

b. Most of the standardized tests are comprised of multiple-choice questions which inefficiently gauge a student’s knowledge because these types of questions promote memorization and guessing rather than analyzing the reason behind the student’s choice. These questions do not assess a student’s critical thinking skills and therefore standardized tests do not measure educational knowledge in this way.

c. Some students in the higher grades, like juniors in high school, know that these tests won’t affect their grades and therefore don’t take it as seriously. There have been students who just randomly guess just to finish the test and do something else.

Conclusion

The increased emphasis on standardized tests for young students in America has led to negative mental health complications, less knowledge about the curriculum and more about the tests, stagnant improvement for student’s academic performances, and an unreliable tool for measurement.

There should be a federal law passed that abolishes the requirement of annual standardized testing for K-12 students in order for students to have better mental health, more knowledge, and increased improvement in their performance.

Bibliography

Abrams, Lisa M., et al. “Views from the Classroom: Teachers' Opinions of Statewide Testing

Programs.” Theory Into Practice, vol. 42, no. 1, 2003, pp. 18–29., doi:10.1207/s15430421tip4201_4.