Isaac+G’s+Final+AmEx+Speech+2016


 * Assembly Line Education **

Three weeks ago, I took AP tests. Two weeks ago, I took another AP test. Last week, I took SBAC testing. This weekend, I'm taking the SAT. I imagine I'm not the only one in the room with this schedule. In this nation standardized testing is out of control. This is in part due to President George W. Bush's "No Child Left Behind" policy, instituted in 2002, that raised the number of federally mandated tests from 6 through the course of a child's education to 17 during the same period of time. Over the course of a student's journey from elementary school through high school, they will take an average of 113 standardized tests.

Now, to be fair to standardized testing, proponents will claim that standardized testing is necessary for many noble goals, such as progress towards racial equality. This can be explained rather simply; American schools in predominantly non-white areas tend to be more underdeveloped, understaffed, or otherwise inadequate. Standardized testing provides a metric by which the quality of education a school offers can be measured, and for resources to be reallocated more equitably. To quote Stanford University's Center for Education Policy Analysis, "the quality of public schools... may play important roles in reducing or exacerbating racial achievement gaps." The only problem with this is that standardized testing is conclusively a terrible method of determining the quality of a school. Case in point, Foothill always performs fantastically on standardized testing. The inefficiency of this method of evaluation can be seen statistically; A 2013 study by the previously mentioned Center for Education Policy Analysis found that standardized testing has done next to nothing to lower racial and class achievement gaps in the last decade in 28 states, with 19 states making progress "slowly" and three states making negative progress. However, the same study found that racial achievement gaps have narrowed up to 40% since the 1970s. In other words, the nearly tripling of mandated standardized testing as a result of No Child Left Behind did nothing to lower racial achievement gaps, and may have slowed the rate at which they were shrinking.

Another argument in favor of this barrage of standardized testing is that it is an effective method for objectively evaluating the quality of teachers. According to TIME magazine, at least 16 states now base a significant portion of the evaluation of a teacher's quality on the test scores their students achieve, as compared to student's previous scores as part of president Obama's Race to the Top initiative. This sort of teacher analysis is called Added Value analysis, and is supposed to make teachers more accountable for effective teaching. In theory, it sounds nice. However, just like nearly everything involving standardized testing, Added Value analysis falls flat in practice. As well as rare accounts of students' projected scores being higher than the highest scores achievable on individual tests, due to an expectation that students improve their scores every year, Added Value analysis is too situational to be valuable in general. For example, last year at Nathan Hale High School in Seattle, every single junior opted out of Smarter Balanced Testing. Added Value analysis fails spectacularly to account for outliers. Furthermore, even ignoring the problem inherent with basing the worth of a teacher on the scores of their students on what could amount to a single test, there is abundant evidence that standardized test scoring is not a uniform process. The largest test manufacturer in America, Pearson, at nearly 40% of the market share for production of standardized tests, was caught in 2013 hiring potential test graders off Craigslist. These graders, who were required only to have a bachelor's degree in any field, were responsible indirectly for writing what is effectively being used in many areas as performance reviews for teachers. Pearson is infamous for a 2012 New York Test involving a talking pineapple. I actually have a friend who took this test, and this is how he described it to me: A pineapple challenges a rabbit to a race. Other animals, including a moose, believe the pineapple must have some trick up its sleeve, and begin to become fearful of what will happen during the race. An owl points out that pineapples don't have sleeves. The rabbit wins the race because the pineapple cannot move, and the animals eat the pineapple. The moral of the story is listed; "Pineapples don't have sleeves". Questions based on this short story included "Why did the animals eat the pineapple" and "Which animal spoke the wisest words". The company that wrote this test, and distributed it throughout the state of New York, distributes 40% of standardized tests in the United States. Even well written tests are not good indicators of anything significant. Todd Farley, author of "Making the Grades" and former standardized test grader claims that workers are given 2 minutes to read essays and 5-10 seconds to read and grade short answers

The term scientifically based Research appears more than 100 times in the No Child Left Behind Act, so one may begin to wonder how exactly what has been so clearly a scientifically inefficient system has fallen into place. I'm sure you'll all be absolutely shocked to learn at this point that companies that write standardized tests, including Pearson, have spent more than 20 Million dollars lobbying for pro-testing policies in five years. If you have kept up with the election, I'm sure you will have heard wild accusations of corruption flying every which way, directed at both political parties. With standardized testing, there is a clear case of corporate money being donated to political campaigns, and politicians passing policy that unduly benefits these corporations. Unfortunately sacrificing the quality of American schools for money seems to be one of the only things with bipartisan support. Corporate lobbying of tens of millions of dollars has perpetuated policy that is detrimental to the state of education. For the sake of integrity, intellectualism, and education I want to grow old in an America that has seriously redesigned its standardized testing system.

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/talking-pineapple-question-state-exam-stumps-article-1.1064657 Sawyer Harrington Verb, victim of the above described test http://cepa.stanford.edu/educational-opportunity-monitoring-project/achievement-gaps/race/ http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2015/05/04/john-oliver-rips-standardized-testing-with-help-from-a-dancing-monkey-on-last-week-tonight/ http://www.greatschools.org/gk/articles/no-child-left-behind/ http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/talking-pineapple-question-state-exam-stumps-article-1.1064657 http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2020867,00.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2013/01/16/pearson-criticized-for-finding-test-essay-scorers-on-craigslist/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/03/30/report-big-education-firms-spend-millions-lobbying-for-pro-testing-policies/
 * Sources **