On Standardizing Education

The most common way of measuring students’ progress is standardized testing. No student is the same, and yet we make the effort to put all students on the same page as each other. How can we groups kids to be measured on classroom performance when education is based on so much more than what the teacher can provide to the students. No students have the same resources at home. Some are more financially well off than others. But somehow we expect that this is no explanation for a student’s poor performance in the classroom. Once a student is put in slower paced classes based on testing, it is too difficult to return that student to a normal placed education system.

What’s more of a flaw within standardization is the way we make testing fair. Why should time be the same for every student? Students do not think, write, and perform at the same pace. This creates unnecessary stress and anxiety for some students who may not perform well under timed tests. The most effective learning environment is the one where the student is given every opportunity to find out the answer, not the one where the student is timed with limited resources.

Finally, the worst thing of all is the way standardization grades and compares students. Students are graded on results. Most content covered in a classroom will never be retained and instead it is the process of memorization until that test day that students master. If students are to perform effectively in the work force, it is essential that they are graded on the skills of attainting and retaining the knowledge they gain. In a multiple choice test, there is no way to grade the quality of a student’s effort to evaluate the problems given to the student. Process must always come before results and if results is the only aspect of learning that is emphasized, then the value of efficient work process will be lost. Students cheat because students understand that process is not valued when graded. By teaching students the value of effectively approaching a variety of problems, rather than finding the solution itself, students will be able to perform better in their post public education world, whatever it may be.

The solution to all of this? Scrap standardized testing as we know it. We cannot group students solely based on age and yet set the curriculum based on grade level. Either reform the way students are placed in classroom based on performance, or create a more diverse curriculum that allows for different levels of students at the same age be able to achieve standards set by the teacher, not by the state or country. The way to fund this is state and national tax dollars. States should send grant money straight to teachers, not through the bureaucracies of districts and school boards. Let school districts receive a separate fund to deal with managing classroom sizes and any other business not related to classroom education. No Child Left Behind should be scraped and those funds should be direct payments to teachers to be able to receive better resources to assess their students’ needs in order to better insure there is a reward for every student’s hard work across the country.