Even the Federal government agrees that, contrary to some teachers’ beliefs, there is such a thing as too much testing. In addition to causing unnecessary stress and determining a large portion of a student’s grade, tests can be detrimental to learning. A new federal program called the Testing Action Plan aims to combat excessive standardized testing by putting in place guidelines that define excessive testing and giving schools resources to reduce the amounts of tests they give out.
Testing hurts more than it helps because it encourages teachers to focus on the subjects that are going to be covered in the test rather than subjects that the teachers or school want to cover. Standardized tests used to assess how schools are performing can influence their financing and whether or not they continue to operate. As a result, they have far more weight than any other tests that schools offer, and have much more class time devoted to them. Oftentimes the tests are assessing skills that are less relevant to success than the skills they are eclipsing.
Teachers who are not teaching test subjects are also hurt by this. Teachers are sometimes evaluated using scores on a subject that is completely unrelated to the content that they are supposed to be teaching, such as art teachers being assessed by English scores. This is ludicrous since art teachers are not trained to teach English, they are trained to teach students art. Art teachers’ reputations for how well they can teach should not be affected by the bad English teacher down the hall.
Standardized testing also favors more privileged individuals since they have more resources, such as private tutoring, available that allow them to prepare more effectively for the tests. As a result, individuals in higher-income families tend to perform better that those from lower-income households on tests.
Although tests are a way to assess how well a student is doing, there are alternatives out there that are better for students and teachers alike. Alternative methods include: standardizing curriculum requirements across states, just having less tests in the first place, or revising tests so that they are more in line with what students actually need to know. The Testing Action Plan does at least one of these and as a result should be considered a step in the right direction.