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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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
To teach to the test or trust the child; is the question in today’s education. Over the past twenty years state curriculum standards have changed. Teachers need to make the choice on how to teach the children in their classroom. In today’s society where testing runs the educational world, a teacher must decide how to prepare students for standardized testing.
“The Most Dangerous Game”, written by Richard Connell, tells a story about the concept of natural selection between the predator and the prey. The short story starts off with the main character, an American hunter named Sanger Rainsford traveling via yacht to hunt jaguars in the Amazon with a friend. Eventually, after his friend has gone to bed, he goes to investigate a series of gunshots he heard in the distance and eventually falls off the yacht, leaving him stranded in the Caribbean Sea. Rainsford keeps calm, despite his troubles, and swims toward where he had heard the gunshots. He soon found an island and, after sleeping off his exhaustion from his swim, began to search for the men who shot off the gun he had heard, in hopes that he will
Richard Connell’s short story, The Most Dangerous Game is about a famous hunter named Rainsford who falls off of a yacht and ends up on an island called Ship-Trap Island. Later, Rainsford encounters another man named; General Zaroff who he later finds out likes to hunt humans, as he became bored hunting animals. Zaroff later announces to Rainsford, that he is the next player for his hunting game, and so Zaroff tells Rainsford that he is going to hunt him, and if Rainsford survives for 3 days without being killed, he can leave the island. Throughout this short story there is a continuous theme about the two classes of people in the world, the hunters and the hunted. General Zaroff as well as Rainsford find themselves apart of these roles during alternate times, as the hunting game progresses. Thus, in this short story, Connell portrays the idea that there are two classes of people in the world, the hunters and the hunted, in relation to Rainsford and Zaroff, through the use of foreshadowing.
Since the U.S. Congress passed the No Child Left Behind program, standardized testing has become the norm for American schools. Under this system, each child attending a school is required to take a standardized test at specific grade points to assess their level of comprehension. Parents, scholars and all stakeholders involved take part in constant discussions over its effectiveness in evaluating students’ comprehension, teachers’ competency and the effects of the test on the education system. Though these tests were put in place to create equality, experts note that they have created more inequality in the classroom. In efforts to explore this issue further, this essay reviews two articles on standardized testing. This essay reviews the sentiments of the authors and their insight into standardized examination. The articles provide sufficient evidence to demonstrate that standardized tests are not effective at measuring a teacher’s competency because they do not take into account the school environment and its effect on the students.
A fact known about the suspenseful short story "The Most Dangerous Game” is that it was also known as "The Hounds of Zaroff", by Richard Connell, published on January 19, 1924.This short story’s genre is known as an ‘Adventure Fiction’ that counters a hunter named Rainsford from New York who falls off his ship and swims to an island in, where he is hunted by a professional Cossack hunter named Zaroff. Today “The most dangerous game” is known for its close calls and thrilling moments within the story. Overall, this suspenseful short story has a point that shows the true relationship of the hunter and the
Standardized testing is not a new concept; it has been in use since the mid to late 1990’s. However the “high stakes” focus on standardized testing is. The practices that accompany standardized testing have long been in debate. Those in favor of standardized testing will argue that the testing creates a system that increases grades and accountability among teachers, students and school districts across the country. On the other hand those that oppose standardized testing will argue the ill effects that standardized testing can have on students, teachers, and schools. There are numerous ways in which standardized testing has gravely impacted education, some of which are high stress levels of students and teachers, the hindrance on educational instruction, high monetary costs of testing as well as inadvertent discrimination and bias. Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota stated “Far from improving education, high-stakes testing marks a major retreat from fairness, from accuracy, from quality and from equity.”
As child growing up some of the frightful memories include a visit to the dentist; an evil man with scary drill whose solve purpose is to hurt you or the first day in elementary school you finally leave all behind the cozy classrooms and nap times of kindergarten and enter the big leagues. All of these are considered a cakewalk compared to standardize testing. Since the start of elementary school students in the United States are taught to test. In many instances students are held back or placed in remedial classes because of lower grades. But many don’t realize that some students are not great at testing taking and because of the lower grades some educators believe that these students are lower achievers. This leads to lower self-esteem and encourage students to drop out in later years. Also students are forced to memorize information merely as facts without sparking their creativity or enhancing their knowledge.
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“Sleep is the best meditation” –Dalai Lama. This idea of sleep as being peaceful and calm is nowhere to be found is Shakespeare’s play Macbeth. The normally accepted belief of sleep being associated with relaxation is reserved. Peaceful sleep is disturbed by horrific deeds that occur at night. From the night, one will see that sleep imagery shows acts of unnaturalness. By examining Shakespeare’s image of sleep, one can determine that sleep reinforces the idea of evil.
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Stecher, “The net effect of high-stakes testing on policy and practice is uncertain. Researchers have not documented the desirable consequences of testing—providing more instruction, working harder, and working more effectively—as clearly as the undesirable ones—such as negative reallocation, negative alignment of classroom time to emphasize topics covered by a test, excessive coaching, and cheating. More important, researchers have not generally measured the extent or magnitude of the shifts in practice that they identified as a result of high-stakes testing.” Which means that in completion no test is truly valid or reliable for there are too many mistakes to be had by either the test takers or the Test
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Macbeth is a well known, famous story by William Shakespeare which is about the tragedy of ambition and how it destroys Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Both are forever damned to a state of fearful awareness, and insomnia as a result of murdering King Duncan. This sets off an unstoppable chain of events which ends in Macbeth himself being killed and Lady Macbeth committing suicide. In the play the lack of sleep becomes fatal, as a result of the murder they committed, and the awareness is terrifying because of the continuous agony of recurring nightmares of their deeds.
While reading The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell I got chills going down my back. Seeing how a man like General Zaroff a man that has hunted all his life and has had more experience hunting men could have been defeated, by Rainsford, a man that hunts animals. I personally was hooked on since the beginning because this story reminds me of a movie I saw so it was quite interesting to read this story. In the beginning of the story we see Rainsford that is in a yacht with what we can his friend, they are just cruising towards Rio de Janeiro. Whitney which is Rainsford friend tells him about the island in which all the sailor dislike and try to avoid. However, Rainsford has only one thing on his mind and it’s the hunting trip that his friend