High Stakes Testing
In 1997, President Bill Clinton stated that the United States needed, “ a national crusade for education standards - not federal government standards, but national standards, representing what all our students must know to succeed in the knowledge economy of the twenty-first century”(http://books.nap.edu/books/0309062802/html/13.html). The way to succeed in this journey is through standardized testing that results in consequences for teachers and students.
Throughout this paper, I will be discussing how important high stakes testing is to our country. First, I will show how these tests prevent students from moving on to the next grade level or graduate without the skills necessary. Secondly, I will discuss how they improve students’ achievement. And lastly, I will describe how these tests keep teachers and schools accountable.
High stakes testing prevents students from being promoted or given a diploma without the necessary knowledge. The National Academies Press states, “unless we test student’s knowledge, how will we know if they have met the standards? And the idea of accountability, which is also central to this theory of school reform, requires that the test results have direct and immediate consequences: a student who does not meet the standard should not be promoted, or awarded a high school diploma”(books.nap.edu). Social promotion is allowing a student to move up a grade just because of their age. Standardized testing is helping students by keeping them back a grade or having them attend summer school in order for them to learn the skills they need in order to succeed in school and life. Recent facts have shown how often children have been promoted without the necessary knowledge. ...
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... National Academies Press. Retrieved November 10, 2002 from the World Wide Web: http://
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3. National Academies Press. Retrieved November 10, 2002 from the World Wide Web: http://
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4. National Academies Press. Retrieved November 10, 2002 from the World Wide Web: http://
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5. Aims Performance Standards (High School). Arizona Department of Education. Retrieved
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http://www.ade.state.az.us/standards/aims/PerformanceStandards/hsperformancestan.asp
6. What’s Wrong With High Stakes Testing in General and AIMS in Particular? AZ Standards.
Retrieved November 10, 2002 from the World Wide Web: http://www.azstandards.org/protestmaterials.htm
Students dread the time of the year when they stop with their course material and begin to prepare for test. Everyone is in agreement that some type of revolution is needed when it comes to education; eliminating standardized test will aid the reform. The need for standardized testing has proven to be ineffective and outdated; some leading educationalist also believe this because the tests do not measure a student’s true potential. This will save money, stop labeling, and alleviate stress in students and teachers.
International organizations such as NATO and the UN are essential not only for global peace, but also as a place where middle powers can exert their influence. It is understandable that since the inception of such organizations that many crises have been averted, resolved, or dealt with in some way thro...
This is precisely the problem. Standardized tests are old and outdated, and the harm they cause to America’s education system by far outweighs the benefits. These tests were intended to monitor and offer ways to improve how public schools function, but instead they have impaired the natural learning ability of students and imposed upon the judgment of experienced educators. Although a means to evaluate the progress of public schools is necessary, it is also necessary to develop more modern and effective ways of doing so. Standardized testing mandated by the federal and state governments has a negative effect on the education of America’s youth.
The reason for high stakes testing in schools was to see where students stood academically. It was made to check on the progress and status of whether teachers and staff were doing their job as they are responsible for a child’s learning. In 2002, George W. Bush passed the No Child Left Behind Act. Each state had to come up with their own testing systems for students to meet certain standards. This was influenced by Red Paige who was superintendent at Houston I.S.D. Accountability was their main goal with this kind of testing. Texas tests are created by Sandy Kress who teamed up with Pearson. The current test outraging the opposed side is the STAAR (State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness) test. Kress came up with this test because people felt that the previous TAKS test was not helping students with college readiness. The STAAR test counts towards 15% of a student’s grade (Blakeslee 126). It is a harder test and Texas is a state with the most exit level exams as it is. Even though people disagree with this test even more, Kress and his followers believe that the test is not failing students, but their teachers are. Defenders can be pretty harsh and blunt about why the STAAR should stay. Bill Hammond made a stat...
Evans, Donia. "The Case Against Standardized Tests." The Meridian Star. 24 Nov. 2013. The Meridian Star. 01 Dec. 2013 .
Sleep, as a bodily function, regulates how the body heals itself and how people process events in their lives. Disruption of sleep can cause mild symptoms such as dizziness to a slight loss of fine motor skills to full on hallucinations. It is in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth that sleep plays very different roles in order to influence the plot; in this Scottish play, sleep, in its absence, is a way to express thoughts about troublesome events, a way of showing that a man has gone made, and a way to reveal truths about characters.
Medina, Jennifer. "New Standards Mean More F's In State Testing." The New York Times. The New York Times, 28 July 2010. Web. 19 Apr. 2014
Testing is a way to measure what students have learned from their teachers. Standardized/High-Stakes testing is a tool used to measure the performance of students and the quality of teachers in public school systems. High-Stakes testing is an inaccurate measuring stick of teaching quality and thus is detrimental to the educational system.
Best Buy has grown steadily and improved its business and customer’s experience in many ways throughout its journey from 1966 until 2011. The company’s main objective is to focus on making the customers visit to the store as pleasant and as informative as possible. The company is on its steady path of revolution and innovation by implementing customer driven and technology powered strategies. When any new business is setup, it faces its preliminary phase challenges and so has Best Buy but now the business is booming in the world of technology. It’s well known to be a one stop shop for all technological needs.
Over the years the endurance of NATO has led to closer ties among its members and to a growing community of interests. The treaty itself has provided a model for other collective security agreements. NATO activities are no longer small only to Europe. In
(In this play, there are many main characters that are unable to sleep because of their uneasy mental state: Banquo is dreaming of the witches’ prophecy; Lady Macbeth is sleepwalking due to her overwhelming guilt; Macbeth is not able to sleep because of several issues he had faced.) (In the world of Macbeth, the motif of sleep was mostly associated with guilt and fear. As the characters experience these things, they were usually restless to show the extent of their guilt and fear.) (Sleeping, as we know, is one of the most basic and natural thing human beings have to do in order to survive. Only with applying this concept to Macbeth, can we fully understand the horror of inability to sleep suffered by characters in the play.)
“If my future were determined just by my performance on a standardized test, I wouldn't be here. I guarantee you that.” This quote by Michelle Obama illustrates the idea that standardized testing should not have such a large influence on education in America. However, a majority of people are under the impression that standardized tests are an accurate method to measure a person's intellectual ability. I believe that standardized tests have developed into a very critical part of the American education system; that is hindering the growth of students and teachers instead of providing a tool that can accurately measure knowledge.
The author addresses paper and pencil tests with no special accommodations, and analyses trends throughout past decades. He also writes of the new era of standardized testing and accountability. Stiggins suggests that while standardized testing may be useful and effective in some aspects, most are not used correctly and that the high-stakes put intense pressure on teachers, making it difficult to actually complete their job which is to teach students new skills. They simply spend their time reviewing already learned skills to ensure good scores on exams.
International organizations are instruments of international action and have the competences, systems, and numbers that lend legitimacy for them to take up action. The development of the European security and defense policy (ESDP) as an advancement for the European Union (EU), evolved into the Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP), and acts as an agent for a common European defense structures and cooperation between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the EU. The common defense policy was put into action through the signing of the ‘Berlin Plus Agreement’ in 2003. This protocol allows the EU to use NATO structures and assets to carry out military operations, if NATO is not partaking. An EU planning cell in now in full operation at SHAPE, NATO’s military epicenter.1 Ideas harbored and contrived from cold war rhetoric argue that cooperation between NATO and the EU will not last. Some players with in the organizations even have the attitude that the two organizations should not work together. However, in a world where military means alone will not resolve conflict and maintain peace, EU civilian capabilities working in tandem with NATO military expertise is the answer to managing crisis and perpetuating liberal democracy and content stability. Investigating this postulation will require an answer to three key questions: can these two organizations work together towards a common security defense policy? Are the goals, values and structures of each organization too fundamentally different for cooperation? Will the CSDP undermine the capabilities of either organization? The purpose of asking these questions is to undermine the assumptions that NATO and the EU cannot work together and to break down the base pillars for ...
Based on the Programme for International Student Assessment’s 2012 results (PISA), the United States has ranked 30th in comparison to other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) participating countries. The United States, a country that has once held the ideal for educational standards, has now ranked just slightly above other countries that are just being developed. By using high-stakes test statistics to drive America’s educational standards, classrooms are beginning to lose their meaning of helping students to learn and grow as individuals. Because of classrooms just teaching the test are beginning to lose the meaning of helping students to learn and grow as individuals, results of high stakes testing which can be affected by the minutest details, are not a reasonable way to judge overall student competency; a better alternative would be by performance based assessments. “Test developers are obliged to create a series of one-size-fits-all assessments. But, as most of us know from attempting to wear one-size-fits-all garments, sometimes one size really can’t fit all.” (Popham, James W.). High stakes tests are not a reasonable way to judge overall student competency because educators can not expect to have accurate and precise results in just one sitting for 12 years of learning. Although tests pose an important role in education, they should not be given such high stakes of determining if a student should be rejected from a college “based solely on the fact that their score wasn’t high enough” (Stake, Robert.).