Standardized Tests

Although standardized tests have been a part of American education since the mid-1800s, their use skyrocketed after the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), mandating annual, standardized testing of reading and math proficiency in all 50 states. However, problems continued to plague American education. In fact, some observers began to blame standardized testing itself as a source of these problems, as the newly regulated schools began lowering standards and eroding the quality of teaching in an urgency to “teach to the test” and “make the grade.”

Standardized tests are defined as “any test that’s administered, scored, and interpreted in a standard, predetermined manner,” according to by W. James Popham, former President of the American Educational Research Association. The tests often have multiple-choice questions that can be quickly graded by automated test scoring machines. Some tests also incorporate open-ended questions that require human grading. [5][6][7]

High-stakes achievement tests have provoked the most controversy. These assessments carry important consequences for students, teachers, and schools: low scores can prevent a student from progressing to the next grade level, or lead to teacher firings and school closures, while high scores ensure continued federal and local funding and are used to reward teachers and administrators with bonus payments.[6][8][9][10]

(This article first appeared on ProCon.org and was last updated on Feb. 28, 2024.)

Early History

The earliest known standardized tests were administered to government job applicants in 7th Century Imperial China. The tests, built upon a rigid “eight-legged essay” format, tested the applicants’ rote-learned knowledge of Confucian philosophy, and were in widespread use until 1898.  “The invention of the printing press and modern paper manufacturing fueled the growth of written exams,” writes Jay Mathews.[15][16]

In the Western world, the Industrial Revolution ushered in a movement to educate school-age farmhands and factory workers. Standardized examinations enabled the newly expanded student body to be tested efficiently. [15][16][17]

In the mid-1800s, Boston school reformers Horace Mann and Samuel Gridley Howe, modeling their efforts on the centralized Prussian school system, introduced standardized testing to Boston schools. The new tests were devised to provide a “single standard by which to judge and compare the output of each school” and to gather objective information about teaching quality. Boston’s program was soon adopted by school systems nationwide. [18]

Concerns about excessive testing were voiced as early as 1906, when the New York State Department of Education advised the state legislature that “it is a very great and more serious evil to sacrifice systematic instruction and a comprehensive view of the subject for the scrappy and unrelated knowledge gained by students who are persistently drilled in the mere answering of questions issued by the Education Department or other governing bodies.” [19]

The Kansas Silent Reading Test (1914-1915) is the earliest known published multiple-choice test, developed by Frederick J. Kelly, a Kansas school director. Kelly created the test to reduce “time and effort” in administration and scoring.[20]

In 1934, International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) hired a teacher and inventor named Reynold B. Johnson (best known for creating the world’s first commercial computer disk drive) to create a production model of his prototype test scoring machine. The IBM 805, announced in 1938 and marketed until 1963, graded answer sheets by detecting the electrical current flowing through graphite pencil marks. The contemporary use of No. 2 pencils for exams is a historical holdover, since modern scanners’ optical mark recognition (OMR) technology can recognize marks made by pens and pencils alike.[21][22][23][24]

Modern Testing Begins

The modern testing movement began with the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), enacted by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965, which included testing and accountability provisions in an effort to raise standards and make education more equitable. [19]

The 1983 release of A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, a report by President Ronald Reagan’s National Commission on Excellence in Education, warned of a crisis in American education and an urgent need to raise academic standards. The report’s portrayal of an education system that had “lost sight of the basic purposes of schooling, and of the high expectations and disciplined effort needed to attain them” rallied reform advocates to press for stricter accountability measures, including increased testing. [25][26][27]

Successive administrations attempted to implement national school reform following A Nation at Risk‘s release. George H.W. Bush’s America 2000 plan aimed to achieve world’s best math and science test scores by the turn of the century, but became mired in Congress. PresidentBill Clinton’s Goals 2000 Act and Improving America’s Schools Act (IASA), passed in 1994, instituted a voluntary system of testing and accountability, but few states complied. Clinton’s 1997 Voluntary National Test initiative languished in Congress and was abandoned after $15 million and over two years had been spent on its development.[28][29]

No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) passed with bipartisan support (381-41 in the House of Representatives and 87-10 in the Senate) and was signed into law by President George W. Bush on Jan. 8, 2002. The legislation, modeled on Bush’s education policy as governor of Texas, mandated annual testing in reading and math (and later science) in Grades 3 through 8 and again in 10th Grade. If schools did not show sufficient Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), they faced sanctions and the possibility of being taken over by the state or closed. NCLB required that 100% of U.S. students be “proficient” on state reading and math tests by 2014, which was regarded as an impossible target by many testing opponents. [28][30][31][32][33][34]

According to the Pew Center on the States, annual state spending on standardized tests rose from $423 million before NCLB to almost $1.1 billion in 2008 (a 160% increase compared to a 19.22% increase in inflation over the same period). Combined state and federal government spending on education totaled $600 billion per year, while all-time philanthropic contributions to U.S. education total less than $10 billion, according to a 2011 statement by tech maverick and philanthropist Bill Gates. [35][36]

On February 17, 2009, President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top program was signed into law, inviting states to compete for $4.35 billion in extra funding based on the strength of their student test scores. On March 13, 2010, Obama proposed an overhaul of NCLB, promising further incentives to states if they develop improved assessments tied more closely to state standards, and emphasizing other indicators like pupil attendance, graduation rates, and learning climate in addition to test scores. Testing opponents have decried both initiatives for their continued reliance on test scores, a complaint Obama seemed to echo on March 28, 2011, when he said: “Too often what we have been doing is using these tests to punish students or to, in some cases, punish schools.” [37][38][39]

D.C. and Los Angeles Controversies

The 2010 documentary Waiting for Superman gave the testing and accountability movement a nationally recognized spokesperson in Michelle Rhee, then-Chancellor of Washington, D.C., public schools. Rhee, appointed by D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty in June 2007, became a lightning rod for testing opponents after she enacted a strict policy of teacher and school accountability based on standardized test scores. By the time she resigned her post in Oct. 2010, she had fired 600 teachers and dozens of principals, closed 23 schools, and introduced $25,000 bonuses to teachers receiving high evaluations, based in part on standardized test results. [40][41][42]

D.C.’s student test scores rose under Rhee’s reforms, but in March 2011, a USA Today report uncovered scoring irregularities (high numbers of answers that had been erased and replaced with correct answers) in 103 D.C. public schools during the 2008-2010 school years. Rhee responded by saying “the possible misguided actions of a few individuals do not cloud the incredible achievements of the majority of hard working educators who serve our children,” and touted nation-leading gains by D.C. students on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). [43][44]

Despite claims by D.C. public school officials that the anomalies were in fact limited to one school, a confidential Jan. 2009 memo uncovered in Apr. 2013 revealed that the problems may have been more widespread. The memo, prepared by an outside analyst hired by Rhee, noted that 191 teachers in 70 schools were “implicated in possible testing infractions.” Nearly all the teachers at one D.C. elementary school “had students whose test papers showed high numbers of wrong-to-right erasures,” according to USA Today. However, on Jan. 7, 2013 the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Inspector General said an investigation had found no evidence of widespread cheating on the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System tests from 2008-2010. The cheating scandal continued after Rhee left her position. The Washington Post reported in Apr. 2013 that 18 D.C. public school teachers were found to have committed “‘critical’ violations of test security” in 2012. [45][46][47]

In Aug. 2010, the Los Angeles Times spurred a national debate when the newspaper published the names of about 6,000 Los Angeles elementary school teachers (grades three through five), alongside calculations of their students’ gains and losses on standardized tests during the school year in a publicly searchable database. Known as the “value added” method of evaluating teacher effectiveness, it has been mandated by several hundred school districts in some 20 states. For example, up to 40% of New York teachers’ evaluations were tied to value-added test score analyses, as of the 2011-2012 school year. The Los Angeles Times story was simultaneously praised for transparency about teachers’ scores and scorned for reducing teachers to one number among many evaluative methods. [48][49][50][86]

NCLB Goals Questioned

On March 9, 2011, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan told Congress that 82% of American schools could fail to meet NCLB’s goal of 100% proficiency on standardized tests by 2014. Duncan proposed reforming NCLB to “impose a much tighter definition of success” that supports “our fundamental aspiration that every single student can learn, achieve and succeed.”[51]

Individual states have cast similar doubts on their ability to satisfy NCLB’s Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) goals. A 2008 study published in the peer-reviewed journal Science forecast “nearly 100 percent failure” of California schools to meet AYP in 2014. The primary reason for failure, the study concluded, would be poor results on standardized tests by English Language Learners and children in low-income families. [52]

Peaking in 2015, parents staged an “opt-out movement” across the country in which parents did not allow their children to be included in standardized testing and children as young as 11 were protesting testing. The movement coincided with more rigorous Common Core aligned testing that parents thought too difficult and teachers thought a top-down intervention without regular teacher input. [87]

The 2019 Nation’s Report Card (National Assessment of Educational Progress) reported that fourth and eighth grade reading and math scores have remained largely the same for a decade, despite stronger academic standards. In 2019, 35% of fourth graders were proficient in reading and 41% were proficient in math. 34% of eighth graders had reading proficiency and 34% had math proficiency. [53]

COVID-19 Interrupts Testing

On March 20, 2020, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos announced that states could cancel standardized testing for the 2019-2020 school year due to the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic related school closures. As DeVos stated, “Students need to be focused on staying healthy and continuing to learn. Teachers need to be able to focus on remote learning and other adaptations. Neither students nor teachers need to be focused on high-stakes tests during this difficult time. Students are simply too unlikely to be able to perform their best in this environment.”[54]

On Nov. 25, 2020, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) announced that National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading and math tests would be postponed until 2022 in light of the ongoing COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic. The tests usually take place every two years and were scheduled for 2021 for fourth and eight grade students. [55]

The Biden Administration announced on Feb. 22, 2021, that states must resume annual math and reading standardized testing in spring 2021. A letter to state school chiefs and governors stated that it is “vitally important that parents, educators, and the public have access to data on student learning and success.”[85]

Post-Pandemic Testing

Standardized testing scores suffered after the pandemic. The tests given in the fall of 2022, the most recent results available, show the lowest scores in math since 1990 and the lowest in reading since 2003 for 13-year-olds on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Experts are split on the gravity of the results, with some worried about the decline and what it means for students’ advancement while others brushed off the scores as not correlating to what was taught in class.[90]

A Feb. 7, 2024, Forbes report found that students in Massachusetts, Utah, New Jersey, New Hampshire, and Connecticut maintained the highest scores from fourth through eighth grade. Mississippi, Alabama, West Virginia, New Mexico, and Oklahoma showed sharp declines in scores from fourth to eighth grade. The authors point to “rigorous academic standards, adequate funding, student-to-teacher ratios, professional development and successful education policies and reforms” as common denominators in states with high scores, while states with lower scores suffered “lower socioeconomic status” that leads to “challenges such as resource allocation to education or limited resources.” [89]