Standardized Testing
Legislative Process to restrict the amount of standardized testing
What change do want and why?
Rationale
Standardized tests are notorious among young people as being unhelpful and restricts the education system from moving forward with society. The Council of Student Advocates (CSA), works on improving the lives of high school students and believes that the students should have the right to decide how they want to be educated. Afterall, they are the ones taking the tests. As members of the Council of Student Advocates (CSA) Research Staff and Chief Lobbyist group, we want to put a stop to standardized testing because of this. The CSA believes that standardized testing is irrelevent and an out dated system of educating young children. These kids need an education that treats them like they are the future rather than treating them like employees and factory workers. According to an article written by Concordia University of Portland they say, “The SAT that we know today was first introduced in 1926 by the College Board. It contained 315 questions covering areas like vocabulary, analogies, and math proficiency, fairly similar to what modern students have to do.” This prooves that high school students are testing as if they still live in the 1900’s. The fact is, standardizaed testing does not allow for students to gorw and become the leaders of the next generation. In addition, many of these tests restrict teachers from teaching the lessons that they want to teach. For exmaple, teachers are now teaching for the test rather than teaching their own style of teaching. Futhermore, “With so much riding on the results, teachers often feel compelled to teach to the tests. In some schools, less time is being spent on the sciences, social studies, and the arts to prepare students to take the tests in math, reading and writing” (education.cu-portland.edu). Teachers are therefore not as motivated to teach and students are not as motivated to learn. This makes the education entirely useless because the students are only learning for tests rather than retaining long-term information. Essentially, these high school students are lab rats. Although standarized testing does not help high school students to become future leaders of theri genderation, some may argue that standardized testing is benificial. Some claim that “For many students, standardized testing provides them with a valuable outlet to set themselves apart from their high school. Tests like the SAT and the ACT give students the chance to show that, even if their high school didn’t offer a large number of Advanced Placement courses or extracurricular activities, they’re still bright and motivated students with a lot of potential” (education.cu-portland.edu). Although this may be true in some cases, standarized testing just does not prove how smart someone is and how much “potential” they have. Everyone learns differenty, however, school only caters to thoes who can learn in the type of environment. If the school teaches in an environment that only teaches for the test, the students who do not do well in these school environments cannot prove their true potential on a piece of paper nor can they do that with good grades. The education system needs to rethink how they are teaching students and how standarized testing not only affects students, but the teachers as well. This form of regugitating information is outdated and not useful to kids of today’s genderation. Although we cannot ban standardized testing, we can still do something about this issue.
What will our bill say?
Declarations
HR-2315: Legislate supplementary advanced regulations of testing by incorporating testing qualities
such as creativity, self-discipline, leadership, etc. And lesser stricter regulations throughout all the
states.
- No more than 5 tests on a standard subject per week in every state.
- A mandatory test given yearly to ALL state and districts schools that examine and assess high critical thinking such as creativity and persistence. This will be in a separate set of testing at the high school level and instead administer the SAT, ACT or other “nationally recognized” assessment.
- A maximum amount of tests per week and no time limit on a state or district mandated test.
- Establish new and multiple methods of testing, in order to develop a higher level of thinking in creativity, persistence and critical thinking in a student.
Legislative Strategy
Should we send our proposal to the Senate, House of Representatives, or both? Explain.
We shoudl send our bill to the House of Representatives because it consists of primarily democrats. Since democrats are more open minded and agree that our education system needs to change, they would be willing to pass our bill. They would also be a good candidiate because there are also many deocmcrats that advocate for better education systems and better education in genderal. If they see the CSA’s ideas they probably will be more willing to pass the bill and rethink standardizaed tests. However, there are also many senators and republicans that might also want to hear our bill as well.