Even before President BushÆs No Child Left Behind policy increasing accountability for student performance and, thereby teacher and school program performance, swept American schools. High-stakes standardized testing has become a major issue in the educational arena, partly because of demands for improved student achievement and learning outcomes and partly in order to determine whether or not school programs are succeeding. At schools across the country, the new tests are being employed in an effort to capture measures of student achievement and school efficacy. There are benefits of such standardized testing, such as measuring which programs are effective and, subsequently, merit funding or deserve to be modeled. There are also negatives associated with standardized testing, such as their impact on limiting what is taught since many teachers teach to what is being tested and not critical, creative, or analytical thinking and writing. Despite the cons of using standardized tests, the argument herein is that, despite their flaws, standardized tests are useful indicators of student achievement and school efficacy.
One of the positives of standardized tests is their ability to be used as measures of student performance and school efficacy. When schools demonstrate significantly improved test scores, they are often eligible for additional funding for what are viewed as successful programs. Schools where test scores do not meet expectations are often in danger of losing funding or even being closed if test scores do not improve. According to Posner (2004), such use of standardized tests has led teachers to allocate an enormous amount of time and resources toward preparing students for information on such tests, ôThis phenomenon is called æteaching to the testÆö (749).
Proponents of standardized tests argue that they measure the effectiveness of curriculum and, therefore, teaching to the test is teaching to the curricul...