Inner-city schools aren't the only ones experiencing testing woes communities and wealthy suburbs have their own complaints. In New York, a college-oriented community, parents organized a boycott of the eighth-grade standardized tests. Of 290 eighth-graders, only 95 showed up for the exam. In Miami protests erupted when over 12,000 Florida were their denied high school diploma, and in Massachusetts, local school boards defied the state and issued their own students they believed were being unfairly denied their high school graduation because of the state-mandated test. Teachers in California and Chicago refused to give tests and faced disciplinary action. Why are teachers, students, and parents protesting? What's wrong with measuring academic progress through standardized tests? Here are some reasons why high-stake tests are problematic
First, using the same tests for all students, those in well-funded posh schools along with students trying to learn in under-funded, ill-equipped schools is grossly unfair, and the outcome is quite predictable. Since students do not receive equal educations, holding identical expectations for all students places the poorer ones at a disadvantage.
Grade-by-grade testing and graduation tests actually increase school dropouts. A Harvard University study found that students in the bottom 10 percent of achievement were 33 percent more likely to drop out of school in states with graduation tests. The National Research Council found that low-performing elementary and secondary school students who are held back do less well academically, are much worse off socially, and are far likelier to drop out than equally weak students who are promoted. Retention in grade is the single strongest predictor of which students will drop out stronger even than parental income or mother's education level
As schools struggle to avoid the "underperforming label, entire subject areas such as music, art social studies, and foreign languages are de-emphasized. What is not tested does not count, and 85 percent of teachers believe that their school gives less attention to subjects that are not on the state test. One teacher had this to say about how the timing of state tests drives teaching: ‘’At our school, third- and fourth-grade teachers are told not to teach social studies and science until March’’ As ’’real learning’’ takes to test learning. challenging curriculum is replaced by multiple choice materials, individualized student learning projects disappear, and in-depth exploration of subjects along with extracurricular activities are squeezed out of the curriculum
Tests themselves are often flawed, and high-stakes errors become high-stakes disasters. When Martin Swaden's daughter failed the state math test by a single answer, Swaden requested to see the exam so that he could help his daughter correct her errors and pass the test next time around It took a threatened lawsuit before he was able to meet with a state official to ex-amine the answers. Together they made an amazing discovery: six of the sixty-eight answers were keyed incorrectly, not only for his daughter, but for all the students in Minnesota. Jobs had been lost summers ruined, the joy of graduation turned to humiliation for those students who were misidentified as having failed.
Last but not least, while teachers support high standards, they object to learning being feeling by a single test. Not surprisingly, in a national study, nearly seven in ten teachers reported test-stress, and two out of three believed that preparing for the test took time from teaching important but non-tested topics.