The makers of standardized tests have made several unfortunate assumptions:  every student learns the same way, every student learns all the same things, and every teacher teaches the same thing.

    According to the Huffington Post over 1.7 million dollars are spent on standardized testing on a yearly basis.  This seems like an excessive amount of money considering there are many ways in which this money could be better spent, like teacher salaries.  In fact, HCPS teachers have not seen a salary increase in seven years. That 1.7 million dollars could go a long way in paying teachers what they’re worth and that might just help student achievement more than any standardized test.  

    About $27 are spent on each student per test, so picture North Harford, a school of 1300 students and think of how many standardized tests students take in a week, in a year, now multiply this by the ten schools in Harford County: that is insane!       

     Using standardized test scores as part of a student’s overall grade can affect them negatively.  As a result, many teachers and parents are rising up to take a stand against the nearly one billion standardized tests students in the US take each year.

      Parents of northwest Washington kept hundreds of kids from testing. In New York City, several hundred parents and kids protested outside the Pearson Education building, who is the largest test maker, chanting rhymes such as “one, two, three, four, kids are not a test score.”   North Harford parents are also growing frustrated, along with parents from all over the country. Kris Miller, a North Harford parent, thinks that the school system should have tests, but they should not count towards the students’ grade; instead these tests should be used as a measuring stick for progress.

     It is not just the parents causing uproar about standardized testing. Veteran Superintendent Paul Vallas calls the tests “not useful”. He does not think they should cancel all testing but that they should implement a system where they test every six week; he believes that giving students a single high stake test is “a big mistake.”

    Other teachers are putting their careers on the line in order to put a stop to testing students to death. A group of Seattle teachers put a stop against standardized testing and are risking suspension, saying that this test produces “meaningless results”.

   The people in charge of standardized testing are interested in only one thing:  data.  What they are not interested in is what is truly important:  intelligent dialogue, valuable analysis, and meaningful lessons on the part of students and teachers. There’s a whole lot more going on in classrooms across the country that is valuable, inspiring, meaningful, powerful, and none of it is measured on a test and all of it is far more important than a score.