The Dangers Of Standardized Testing In Schools

The danger of cultivating a culture that measure success and achievement in school-aged children based on high-stakes test scores is the production of a society who care more about grades and scores than they do about the development of true mastery in any given area of academia. Standardized testing has been a part of the American school system since the mid 1800’s. The use of them skyrocketed after the No Child Left Behind Act went into place in 2002. The tests then became annually mandated in all of the 50 states.
Standardized tests can be defined as any form of a test that requires all test takers to answer the same questions, or a selection of questions from a common bank of questions, in the same way, and that is scored in a standard or consistent manner, which makes it possible to compare the performance of individual students or groups of students. While different types of tests and assessments may be “standardized” in this way, the term is primarily associated with large-scale tests administered to large populations of students, such as a multiple-choice test given to all the eighth-grade public-school students in a particular state, for example.
While standardized tests are a major source of debate in the United States, many test experts and
Professor Wendy A. Patterson shares that “Education professionals suspect the state and federal academic standards placed on schools and teachers to be the cause of an increased amount of stress experienced in the classroom throughout elementary, middle and high school.” According to Denise Clark Pope in a February 2005 Stanford University report, the pressure that students feel from parents and schools raises stress levels so high that some teachers regard student stress to be a "health epidemic." To cope with the pressures, Clark Pope explains, some high-achieving students resort to