In 2002, President George W. Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act into law. Under the act’s regulations, schools had to give yearly tests in reading and math, as well as introducing the pressure to reach a “proficient” score in these tests by 2014. In addition, No Child Left Behind tied school funding to students’ performance on these standardized tests. Since its signing, the act has had an immense impact on teaching, learning and school improvement, as well as becoming increasingly controversial with teachers, students and the public.
For my own primary and secondary education, the impact of The No Child Left Behind Act was not just immense, but catastrophic, leaving me to shore up a shoddy foundation of knowledge I should have gained in high school at the same time as building my college courses on top. I still feel the shockwaves of the act into my college education and see that my peers are feeling similar.
In concept, I understand why standardized tests seem like a good idea. They set a clear standard of student performance across different school districts, and hold schools accountable for the education they provide. Every student has the same amount of time and the same multiple choice or true/false questions, which helps provide decently fair and accurate results in the education system. As well, a student’s test scores can guide teachers in addressing specific knowledge or achievement gaps that appear in the test results.
In practice, however, I think standardized testing detracts from education and has compressed the subjects that I was supposed to get a full education on into their most basic forms of dates, names and only the most important topics. Standardized testing forces a practice in every class of “teaching to the test,” where the limited time and resources in a school day leave teachers with little to no room in their plans to teach anything more than the test material.
Honestly, why would the teachers do anything else? When student performance on standardized tests is made part of the system that rewards and punishes teachers and schools, the teachers’ priorities become clear: serve the needs of the school and not the students.
This classroom culture also has unseen downsides. Because there was always a correct answer — at least what the test said was right — discussion was stifled in my high school classes. Few people wanted to share their opinion because it had a high chance of being shot down by the teacher, and being told you were wrong may as well have been social suicide. I can see these lasting effects throughout some of my college classes. Even with an environment that is more accepting of differing opinions, so many of my classmates are scared to speak up.
I have been left with a mind that has been conditioned since childhood to memorize facts and regurgitate them onto a multiple choice test sheet. I feel massive whiplash going from high school readings of 20 pages with highlighted keywords, large section dividers and in-text footnotes to college readings of 40 pages without any indication of what information is important. When students don’t have any concept of reading and forming conclusions for themselves, work becomes something to finish as quickly as possible, without any thought as to what you are supposed to be learning from it.
This system of education I learned to navigate in high school has interfered with my transition to college and the different ways higher education teaches students. College expects its students to display and use critical thinking and problem-solving skills, be able to work with their peers and apply what they learn in the classroom to real-life, practical settings. This has been a serious challenge for me, and I would imagine for any other students whose learning experiences have revolved around testing. We’ve been rewarded throughout our middle and high school education for doing well on standardized tests and are now faced with extreme dissonance when we are expected to think critically, contextualize class lessons and read and write insightfully about what we have learned in class.
When we present education as a checklist to complete, classes as work to slog through and test our students to a single, inflexible idea of “proficient,” we do them an incredible disservice by depriving them of the ability to think creatively and dream of other ways to live.