RE: Standardized Testing Today

In her recent blog post titled "Standardized Testing Today," Katherine Vasicek points out some major flaws in the standardized testing system we use in Texas schools. Specifically, Katherine attacks the STAAR (State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness) exam, which is the current standardized test that the state gives to all students to make sure they are learning all the skills they need.

One major problem with standardized tests, as Katherine points out, is that they are expensive. Not only do they cost a lot of money, but they don't produce a profit, and they don't increase students' knowledge. In other words, they are a waste of money. I agree with Katherine, and I would add that these standardized tests show that our state is not focused on the real issue, which is that we provide our kids with one of the worst educations in the nation. Instead of spending our money on checking the progress of our failing education system, we should go ahead and spend the money on the education itself. What we're doing now makes as much sense as a football team paying for a really nice scoreboard instead of a good coach that would give them a satisfactory score to put on their scoreboard.

Katherine also mentions that these tests put a lot of pressure on students and teachers to make sure everyone passes the tests. This is a problem because high school is supposed to prepare students for college, not the STAAR test. Unfortunately, more emphasis is put on passing this one test than actually learning the material. I agree that this is a major problem, and would also like to add, that I've personally seen some great teachers get laid off because they wanted to make sure their students learned things that would be useful in college, even if those skills weren't needed to pass the state's standardized test. Now that I'm in college, I realize just how little those standardized tests cover compared to what I'm expected to know now, and I'm very grateful to have had those teachers that truly cared about my education.

The bottom line is, there's no way a simple standardized test can tell how much knowledge a student has on a subject. Even if it could, all it would show is that Texas is very far behind other states when it comes to education, which we already know. I completely agree with Katherine on this subject, and I also believe getting rid of the STAAR exam and spending our money more wisely would result in an improvement of our education.