Millennial Debate Standardized Testing Debate



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Academic Achievement




Students in schools with standardized tests achieve more

Debbie Thompson, 2009, Why Standardized Testing is Important in the Homeschool Environment, http://www.triangleeducationassessments.com/standardizedtesting.pdf DOA: 10-25-15


Thirdly, the most controversial and least known benefit of

standardized testing is that these tests can actually



improve achievement. Richard P. Phelps has found an

abundance of evidence demonstrating that students in

schools with testing programs learn more than their

counterparts in schools without testing mandates. An

objective instrument and/or an outside source of

assessment that is independent from teachers’

observations helps give a positive influence on teaching

methods and children’s achievements. Teachers work

harder to teach and students work harder to improve

their scores or to show their accomplishments when they

know they are being assessed.

Tests motivate students to perform better

Dr. Herbert Walberg is a senior fellow with The Heartland Institute and chairman of its Board of Directors. He is also a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and a member of the Koret Task Force on K–12 Education, and a professor emeritus and University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research focuses on educational productivity and human accomplishments, August 1, 2011, Stop the War Against Standardize Tests, http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-submission/2011/08/01/stop-war-against-standardized-tests DOA: 10-25-15

The chief problem with U.S. schools apparently isn’t high dropout rates or underqualified teachers but standardized testing. This is the only conclusion that can be drawn from the push by parents and teachers in Buffalo, Philadelphia, Seattle and elsewhere to help students opt out of taking standardized tests.

Members of this burgeoning anti-test movement fail to grasp testing’s valuable role in motivating and guiding students and teachers. Preparing young Americans for success in the global economy will require our schools to improve, not abolish, academic standards.


Minority and Disadvantaged Students




Testing and reporting critical to ensure minority students receive adequate educations

Sophie Quinton, January 23, 2015, National Journal, Is Standardized Testing a Civil Rights Issue?, http://www.nationaljournal.com/education/Is-Standardized-Testing-Civil-Rights-Issue DOA: 10-26-15

Nineteen groups, including the NAACP and the Children’s Defense Fund, recently released a statement backing the law’s core testing requirement. “ESEA must continue to require high-quality, annual statewide assessments for students in grades 3-8 and at least once in high school,” Wade Henderson, head of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said at a Senate hearing on Wednesday.

Tests should track students’ progress toward state standards, said Henderson, and those standards have to align with what students need to know to succeed in college or in the workforce. Without data to show that students are on track, it could be all too easy for disadvantaged children to receive a substandard education.



Gifted Enrollment

Standardized testing important to determine prediction and selection for gifted programs

Debbie Thompson, 2009, Why Standardized Testing is Important in the Homeschool Environment, http://www.triangleeducationassessments.com/standardizedtesting.pdf DOA: 10-25-15


Secondly, standardized tests can improve prediction and

selection for gifted programs, college, scholarships, or

employment. Results can be highly effective in

identifying needs of exceptional students. Standardized

test scores are an additional source of information to

assess academic performance and a student’s

coursework, day-to-day test scores, homework,

portfolios, and projects are other means of assessment.

Achievement and ability tests can help describe a

student’s learning abilities, academic accomplishments

and give reliable predication for college success

Communicating Assessment of Academic Skills




Standardized testing is needed to communicate an honest assessment of academic skills to parents

Lelac Almagor, September 2, 2014, Boston Review, The Good in Standardized Testing, http://bostonreview.net/us/lelac-almagor-finding-good-in-standardized-testing DOA: 10-25-15

I was still in college the first time someone cried in a parent-teacher conference with me. I had found a summer job at a free enrichment program for public school students. One of our students had just taken her first-ever standardized test, a practice version of the entrance examination for an elite magnet high school. She had scored in something like the fourteenth percentile.

“I don’t understand,” her mother told me. “She does all her work in school. She does her homework. She does extra. I stay on top of her grades from the beginning. Always, she is getting As. Always, I think she is doing well.”

Even then, at the beginning of my teaching career, I could see how this had happened. A quiet, diligent, well-behaved girl who turned in all her assignments—of course her grades were great. But she couldn’t read grade-level texts. Neither could many of her classmates at their majority-minority, wrong-side-of-the-tracks public school.

Our summer program offered open enrollment and free enrichment; it tended to attract motivated students with motivated parents. The kids largely earned decent grades. Still, we took for granted that most would need remediation, extra support in basic skills they should have mastered long before middle school. Our strongest students would have qualified as just barely at grade level relative to national norms. What we called striving for excellence was really a pitched battle to break even.

Without standardized testing—and lacking any other basis for comparison in their own educational experience—the students’ families had no way of knowing what I had assumed was obvious: that eighth graders on the other side of town were well past working on multisyllabic words or improper fractions. They had no way of knowing that their hardworking, solid-GPA kids were already far behind.

Six months later, when President George W. Bush proposed the No Child Left Behind Act, which made standardized testing mandatory beginning in the third grade, I imagined this mom as the beneficiary. Someone should have told her years ago that her daughter wasn’t reading well. She should have known what her daughter’s teachers understood: that her daughter did well relative to her classmates but lagged behind the more privileged kids with whom she’d never go to school. She should have known that the gap would only widen over the years—that school wasn’t fixing the problem but allowing it to fester.

I don’t know what she would have done about it. But she had a right to know.

Standardized testing communicates an honest assessment of students’ skills

Lee Binz, The HomeScholar is a dynamic homeschool speaker and author. She is an expert on how to craft a winning homeschool transcript, 7 Surprising Benefits of Standardized Testing, http://theendinmind.net/benefits-standardized-testing/ DOA: 10-25-15

One benefit of testing is to help you get a realistic perspective of your student’s academic abilities.  Scores of parents have complained to me about how poorly their child is doing in school, only to be completely surprised by their results on a standardized test.  One mother was flabbergasted to see that her child’s overall California Achievement Test score was 99%!  The score helped her relax and get a little perspective on her concerns.

We see our child’s failures up close and personal every single day. Testing also helps you assess your child’s relative strengths.  As parents, we are tempted to dwell on our children’s weaknesses and we lose sight of their strengths. Constantly focusing on weaknesses keeps us from affirming their strengths – strengths they might not even realize they have.




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