A recent article published by CNN discusses the stressed out students of this country and how relief is on the way. 
The Obama administrations announced last week that there will be new guidelines toward standardized tests “kids spend too much time taking unnecessary exams in schools”.
President Barack Obama revealed in a Facebook video message that he hears from parents who worry about “too much testing, and from teachers who feel so much pressure to teach to a test that it takes the joy out of teaching and learning”. He has chosen to fix that.
The Department of Education said “the Administration bears some of the responsibility for” the issue, releasing a “Testing Action Plan” outlining new principles for measuring student aptitude. The current plan policies have led to “unnecessary testing” with “not enough clarity of purpose.”
The new guidelines will be recommendations for school districts to follow but are not binding regulations. The administration has not indicated which specific tests should be continued or scrapped, and will leave that decision up to the districts as testing differs from state to state. The guidelines do not replace those that are part of No Child Left Behind, however if Congress chooses to alter that law to include the Obama administration’s recommendations, districts would then be required to follow them.
The president’s new guidelines call for, only taking the tests that are worth taking, those which are high quality, and are aimed at good instruction to ensure students are on track. The plan recommends that students spend no more than 2% of classroom time taking tests, and that parents will be notified if their child’s school exceeds this limit.
Testing shouldn’t “crowd out teaching and learning” and should just be one of many tools to measure how students and schools are performing, says Obama.
The Washington-based Council of Great City Schools recently stated in a report that “there is no correlation between mandated testing time and reading math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress”. In other words, there’s no evidence that adding test time improves academic performance.
In my opinion, standardized testing has been around since I was a child. I think it will always stay around, but the important part to this article is that the goal of testing is linked to achievement rather than results. My hope is that it will be more content based rather than random articles. For example, in third grade they should be learning about our President, and leaders of the world, as part of their Social Studies education. Tests should reflect knowledge based learning to increase exposure and a solid foundation for bigger principles that will be tested in High School Regents exams which many students are struggling to pass and have to take more than once.
What do you think of the new coming standards and how do you feel about the old ones?