Standardized Testing

My feelings regarding standardized testing have changed over the years. As a child, I remember my first standardized test as being rather exciting. I was an extremely eager student, and treated the whole thing as some challenging game to show off all I learned. I was lucky to have had a parent at home who taught me to read at an early age, and pushed the importance of school.  I easily excelled at that first test, and throughout my education I never really had any trouble with things until I got to high school and the SAT.

The SAT was a whole other animal, because suddenly the stakes on the results seemed immediately and painfully high. How could it be that one score could determine what colleges I got into, what financial aid I could get, and in general, my entire immediate future? I ended up doing decently on the SAT, with high scores in some areas (800 on reading!) but unexpectedly low scores on others (my lowest score was a 560 in writing).

I struggled throughout high school with the high pressure brought upon by this endless standardized testing, and I know I was far from alone. Today, there is so much riding on the results of these tests, whether it be college admissions, advancement to the next grade, teacher job security, etc, and it is having a negative impact on our students, teachers, and administrators. What’s worse, it is having a negative effect on education itself, as the curriculum becomes more and more centered on teaching to the test, rather than teaching students lasting concepts, or relevant information that is not tested on.

To fix it, I think we need to cut back severely on the number of standardized tests we require of students, in favor of letting teachers monitor their own students, and create their own assessments to best suit those students’ needs. In addition, I think that the whole concept of “teacher pay revolving around test results” needs to be nipped in the bud. Plainly speaking, perfect test results are just not attainable in every situation, for every group of students, and teachers should not be penalized for not meeting impossible expectations. Rather, there should be an emphasis on growth, meeting the students where they are, and helping them to improve as much as they reasonably can.

Schools and teachers should be held accountable for giving their students a quality education. That being said, I think standardized test results are a lousy way to judge student learning. Assessments on the curriculum and the quality of the instruction need to be flexible, and suited for the particularly demographics and environment of each school. Teachers and schools should still be responsible for student learning, but the logistics for monitoring that should be much more personalized, and local in nature.

In my future career, I will have to deal with music’s own version of standardized testing: band contest. Although I disagree with the overly competitive influence that this brings to my field, I will do my best to help my student achieve excellent performances and ratings. However, I will not have it be the focus of my curriculum. I believe in creating a great student experience, and teaching them how to be thoughtful, expressive musicians is much more important to me than contest results ever could be. Once I get into the field, I hope that I will stick to my stance, however idealistic it may be.