Persuasive Essay On Standardized Testing

Education has slowly become less about educating and more about producing students who can take standardized tests. The classroom has become less of a place about learning and more of place that is used to prepare students for tests. Conversation in the classroom is limited, discussion with other classmates in most scenarios is prohibited, and when a student enters school, they are often entering a place with more rules and restrictions than a prison. Teachers often teach to tests rather than the real world. Rather than school being a place of free thought and discussion, it becomes a place that doesn 't have students thinking, but memorizing facts so that they can regurgitate them later on a test. Education “reform” has created a factory that

Standardized tests in particular “contain too few items to allow meaningful within-subject comparisons of students ' strengths and weaknesses” (Conchar) meaning that even if a student has great ability at a particular subject, a standardized test does even properly measure that students ability in that subject. Two students may get an equal score, but one could be significantly stronger at different types of math that are not even on the test. The best way to get students to learn is to make them do tasks that can be repeated in the real world. In fact, “ workers charged with loading quarts and gallons of milk into crates had no more than a sixth-grade education” but were able to outperform the “better-educated office workers [who] filled in for them” (Green). Meaning that dropouts performed exceptionally better at basic skills than those who are considered to be educated and smarter. The reason that those who are educated performed worse, even when the odds are with them, is because when it comes to the real world, its not a word problem on a piece of paper, its the actual thing and school doesn 't prepare you for

In order to have a successful education, students need more than just a diploma at the end of their high school and college careers. They need life skills, values, and the ability to apply the skills they “learned” in school. Right now, education doesn’t properly educate students for the real world. There is a lack of problem solving, and an abundance of tests that merely simulate what is reality. There are alternatives to tests, lectures, and bore fests in the classroom. It’s time that teachers are allowed to use these methods rather than being forced into the standardization that is our education