Argumentative Essay On Standardized Testing

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After President George W. Bush passed the No Child Left Behind legislation, standardized tests began to make an appearance in most United States’ public schools. The purpose of No Child Left Behind was to ensure students from elementary school through high school are tested in math and reading. In an attempt to make sure that all children were receiving fair and equal educational opportunities, as well as, determining if students were successfully mastering content knowledge, students began being forced to take standardized tests during elementary, middle, and high school. Standardized tests such as the ACT and SAT require that all states set a standard of achievement for all students. Additionally, standardized testing requires that all test takers to answer the same questions or a selection of similar questions from a common source. In today’s public school systems, the concept of standardized testing has multiple goals: to show the federal and state government how the students are being taught in …show more content…

However, if educators and administration are focused on making the students scores better, the focus is taken away from how much the student is retaining the information. Administrators focus would be more on better scores for standard testing than students learning lessons. Journalist Quinn Mulholland states, “[t]his increased focus on test prep has had a profoundly negative impact on the quality of education many students receive.” By stating this, Mulholland implies that standardized testing is a test on the students ability on test taking, not the information they retained from their academics. When preparing for standardized testing, it is felt by educators that they have to stop in the middle of a lecture to focus more on strategies to obtain a better score on the

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