No Child Left Behind and Standardized Testing Is Not Working

Standardized testing has become something of a norm under the No Child Left Behind Act. It has left the student and teacher responsible in having high test scores and has forced teachers to teach directly by the curriculum. What standardized testing does do is help develop memory, but at the cost of creativity (Emanuel 9-10). This is the problem behind standardized testing is that it has become linear and obsolete (Emanuel 9-10). It has been noticed by many for example Sir Ken Robinson said,” Testing in principal is a logical way of measuring student knowledge”, but he continues by saying that, “In practice it creates a very dry learning environment”. This shows that the No Child Left Behind Act and standardized testing is not working, but why and how can it be fixed.

In teaching to get an ‘f’, the writer, Steven Slon, tells a story of how he almost killed his son’s teacher. Why you ask, well she single handedly killed the student’s appetite for learning. He immediately had the principle change her curriculum to a more flexible one, this lead to the increase in curiosity of the child to want to learn again and gain knowledge (Slon 47-49). What this shows is that a teaching with a curriculum that takes the fun out of learning can be detrimental to a child that wants to learn and can push them away from school. The same can be said if you bombard students with testing, doing that will have the same effect as the boring curriculum. Now that we know that testing is not working why do we still do it? Sir Robinson brings an interesting idea, which is that it is all a political game. He says,” that education should be taken out of the hands of Politian’s, because they do not have an interest in education, all they want is to have hig...

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.... Starko also explains that students should study the lives of creative in order to understand what inhibits creativity. Finally the last step is to teach the creativity in each subject. Not all ideas of creativity work for different subjects so it is important to show which are known to work best in each subject.

Standardized testing shows that it takes more than just giving students test to see who has the higher grade. Students must be allowed to grow and take an interest in education by guiding them and not forcing them to have higher test grades. Taking standardized testing is like how Stephanie Schneider puts it, its “like checking if a plant was growing by ripping it out and checking” (Schneider, and Christison 30-32). The United States used to be a country of originality, but now they have swapped it out to have a competition on who can have a higher score.