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to try. A teacher would love to capitalize on such opportunities, but cannot, for they must adhere to the test topics.

Standardized tests are not designed with special learning needs in mind. The assumption is that anyone can read a question and bubble in an appropriate response. Anyone who ever struggled with standardized tests knows this to be false. Teachers also know it. They know that the same student, asked the same question three different ways, will often not give the same answer to each. For many students, "objective" tests are the hardest of all. There is no room for expressing what they actually think or understand - only a choice of which answer they think is best. There is no partial credit, no scaffolding to help them make that final step when they almost know the answer, and (from many students' perspectives) no hope of passing. The teacher must focus on teaching "test-taking skills" to help the students succeed at taking a test over material that is far below what they could have been learning. The irony, of course, is that objective tests are all but absent in the adult world. There, actual performance and spoken and written communication play much more vital roles. Again, the teacher is thwarted in her responsibilities to the students - forced to cater instead to the test.

Standardized testing is a tool that allows monitoring of schools for any number of purposes. It provides an objective evaluation, as no opinions are involved in the scoring of such a test. This is a small positive, since it prevents abuse of funding systems. Unfortunately, "objective" is not synonymous with "accurate" or "meaningful". By stifling the learning environment, standardized tests limit what teachers are able to help their students achieve. The tests' very presence makes schools less effective. They establish lower goals than any teacher would set for her students, and they make it more difficult to meet those goals by restricting the evaluation to a single instrument - the test itself. More than just a thorn in the side or a stone in the shoe, standardized testing is more than a nuisance to teachers. Standardized testing does nothing less than cripples a teacher's ability to teach.

Learn more about this author, Ernest Capraro.
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