Belmont Stakes

college, it has an effect on people. High school students have many difficult decisions to make throughout their four years. In fact, stress on students has increased due to parents pushing kids harder, stricter guidelines to get into college, and ‘high stakes’ testing in schools. Parents are pushing their kids harder now than ever. Over the years, parent’s expectations have increased, therefore increasing stress on their children. For example, a seven year old boy was left in tears after both…

grew in popularity in the twentieth century. The Army Alpha and Beta Tests identified and separated the slower learners from the highest achievers. The Scholastic Aptitude Test, or SAT, began in the 1920’s and is still prominent today. These high-stake tests hold a heavy weight of importance and can be the determining factor for many students in their educational advancement throughout their entire life. What was…

Students have been taking standardized tests since their early elementary school days. The number of tests students must take is overwhelming. On average, those in 3rd through 8th grade, grades that are mandated to have annual testing by federal law, take about 10 standardized tests each school year. Some communities that have a greater number of district mandated tests have students take up to 20 tests a year (Lazarin 19). Education policies such as the No Child Left Behind Act and the current…

problems that standardized testing affects non-language speaker, or the special needs, “Decades of research has demonstrated that black, Latino, and Native American students, as well as students from some Asian groups, experience problems with high-stakes testing. For many of these students, there is no pathway to success under our current test-driven system, and as a result, they are most definitely being “left behind.” (McKnight) Most children that speak a different language will have a…

The last four decades in American education have been influenced greatly by standardized testing; in return, creating an environment of stress and pressures on teachers, administrators, parents and most importantly our children. The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) was put into place in 2002. This Act seeks to increase student achievement by requiring schools to raise their standardized test scores or face consequences, including closure. (Clemmitt, 2015). The NCLB Act is supposed to help ensure…

1.6 million students sat down and took the dreaded ACT in the year 2013. Of those 1.6 million at least a few questioned the origin and reason of a four-and-a-half-hour test. (NYT) The answer is simple. The first record of standardized tests came from China to test knowledge on “Confucian philosophy and poetry.”() It was introduced in the Western world as a result of the Industrial Revolution and the increased number of children coming into the schools. ()For almost every student in the 1.6…

Truthfully, the effects of high-stakes testing may be evident in the morale of teachers and schools, but the evidence of this testing is most evident in the students the testing was designed to help? Has Texas seen an increase in student achievement in all areas, not just state mandated testing? In 2002, President George Bush, speaking in Hamilton High School, Hamilton, Ohio, made the following statement in regards to NCLB legislation passed months earlier. “We 've got large challenges here in…

few miles of each other could differ as much as having an un-safe learning environment to educating students with advanced curricula. Many factors lead to this inequality in the education system, however it is highly influenced by funding and high stakes testing given to these students. One huge socio-economic inequality that is found in public education today are the facilities themselves. The schools depicted in Kozol’s The Shame of the Nation are astonishingly deprived of the most basic…

Eliminating the achievement gap has also become a common topic in society. The Boston Globe newspaper has an article by Martin Scanlan and Rebecca Lowenhaupt, professors at Boston College’s Lynch School of Education, that considered the opportunity gap and how it coincides with the achievement gap. Their view is that if we focus on resolving the opportunity gap issue, and the achievement gap will fix itself. They say, “We can build educational equity in our school communities by turning…

Standardized Testing Albert Einstein once smartly enlightened, “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish for its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life believing that it’s stupid” (qtd. in Pettigrew). Every individual learns in his or her own way and holds genius talents that are unique to them. That being said, it is unfortunate that our society would judge each child, adolescent, or adult by the same national standards through standardized testing. Each student has a…