The American Obsession of Testing

This week, I read an article in the New York Times that states that New York public schools will start having standardized tests for teachers in an attempt to improve education. This is a byproduct of President Obama's new initiative, "Race to the Top", to create a competitive edge into the learning process. The city will spend over $25 million dollars to formulate these new tests for teachers. Personally, I believe that this is not addressing the fundamental problems of an American obsession.

At the core of American education is standardized testing. On the surface, what's not to like? Standardized tests give students, schools and the government scores on where they are compared to the rest of the country.  However, attempting to find bad teachers does not fix the problem of a broken education system in America. As a society, we keep looking for an inexpensive and scientific way to evaluate teacher quality because we don’t trust principals - and certainly not the children - to tell us who is doing a good job. We look for a measure that is seen as fair and objective. Standardized tests seem to provide that. Additionally, it is very interesting to compare the United States to other countries on a global scale. The United States is test-crazy; our nation's youth are being forced to fill in bubbles since 3rd grade. Standardized tests have pushed teachers replace creative, imaginative lessons with timid and defensive ones. This is not how learning should be taken place. Nations such as Finland and Korea traditionally score best on worldwide assessments, while the United States is near-average. These countries have dropped testing in favor of unique teaching styles that better improve the learning for students.

I believe that we can improve education by simply trusting the principal and the teachers. This is what Finland and Korea do. The principal specifically can interface with teachers on a much more personal level, such as sitting in on classes and talking to students about the teacher's performance. If we give principals this power, we would not have to worry about spending millions of dollars for teachers to simply take tests. With this trust, hopefully it will carry over to the teachers as well. If this happens, we could put faith back into our education systems without driving our students into Scantrons (while saving a lot of money as well. This way, we can put improving our education back into the American equation.