destroy a child’s early life all due to a junior and senior-level exam to take in almost ten years.
At last, the SATs can have a devastating impact on the people who give the children education. Standardized tests are not just to compare the US with other countries and how students are learning in different schools - they also compare teachers in different schools and how they respond to the pressure of SATs. To begin with, the University of Maryland discovered that teachers under pressure to “teach to the test” had started “declines in teaching higher-order thinking, in the amount of time spent on complex assignments, and in the actual amount of high cognitive content in the curriculum.” Fearing for the sake of their jobs, teachers start losing the ideals of challenging their students to think critically by compelling them into earning high grades via challenging assignments that take up time for the students’ own creative and cognitive thinking. This pressure to live up to the NCLB requirements can also lead to the dreaded act of cheating on exams. Test scores are used to “reward and punish teachers,” which led to 1,610 suspicious cases in schools that had an increase of scores from USA Today investigating six states and the nation’s capital. The increase of cheating can be evident when examining teaching in schools. SATs do not accurately measure teaching performance, but that does not take away their rewarding and punishing active teachers, as the Annenberg Institute for School Reform reported that “over 17% of Houston teachers ranked in the top category on the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills reading test were ranked among the two lowest categories in the equivalent Stanford Achievement Test.” SATs, in an attempt to grade teachers on teaching performance, can never give an accurate account of teaching skills and student learning because every teacher and school program is different, so trying to compare other teachers and their student education results is just useless. SATs can damage teachers simply by the “reward and punish system,” pressure to reach the requirements of an educational act, and unfair and inaccurate national teacher comparison.
The SATs, a waste of time in education and school, draw the flawed American educational system because of the negative impact they have on America. The pressures for children to reach academic expectations, teachers to be “rewarded” or “punished” based on how well their students learn, and the way the US is shown when compared to international lands can all point to exams that barely work for anything except college applications. The SATs should be stopped and not viewed as a life-or-death exam before more children, teachers and the country suffer the humiliating truth that the “world’s greatest country” does not have the best educational program.
Houston teachers ranked in the top category on the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills reading test were ranked among the two lowest categories in the equivalent Stanford Achievement Test.” SATs, in an attempt to grade teachers on teaching performance, can never give an accurate account of teaching skills and student learning because every teacher and school program is different, so trying to compare other teachers and their student education results is just useless. SATs can damage teachers simply by the “reward and punish system,” pressure to reach the requirements of an educational act, and unfair and inaccurate national teacher comparison.
The SATs, a waste of time in education and school, draw the flawed American educational system because of the negative impact they have on America. The pressures for children to reach academic expectations, teachers to be “rewarded” or “punished” based on how well their students learn, and the way the US is shown when compared to international lands can all point to exams that barely work for anything except college applications. The SATs should be stopped and not viewed as a life-or-death exam before more children, teachers and the country suffer the humiliating truth that the “world’s greatest country” does not have the best educational program.