Introduction
of the students and their parents was that these routine tests would provide valuable information to teachers and schools about the students’ achievement. Since tests were not administered every year, individual teachers were not held directly responsible for yearly progress. The whole testing process usually took a few days of class time in the spring. It was tedious and almost boring for many students, but it didn’t create a lot of stress since there were few consequences. (My testing experiences in a middle-class, semi-rural neighborhood school with few minorities did not represent a diverse population. I understand that the stress levels may have been different among various socioeconomic groups.) Then, the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act launched new and increased uses of norm-referenced tests to evaluate student achievement and school programs in the United States. In 1983, the 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 U.S. education and an urgent need to raise academic standards. Reform advocates pressed for stricter accountability measures, including increased testing (Strauss, 2021). As I taught school in the 1980s and 1990s, the tests became more frequent and comprehensive. The test results carried a greater impact on a school’s recognition as well as its funding. Teachers were provided more in-depth training in test preparation to ensure that they readied their students with the skills and knowledge that the tests demanded. Schools’ test scores were published in the local newspaper, and education funding began to be tied to results. At the time, my mom was a local real-estate agent, and she often reported about new buyers who requested to see the three neighborhood schools’ test scores so they might select in which area to live. People wanted to buy houses nearest the highest-performing school because they believed the test scores were crucial, and the best ones represented significantly better teachers and even smarter students. Testing practices worldwide have continued to evolve over the last few decades. In England, Dylan Wiliam, professor emeritus of educational assessment at the University of London, notes, that by the age of sixteen, students will have taken fifteen to twenty high-stakes exams that determine whether they’ll graduate from high school (as cited in Turner, 2014). In Japan, students take high-stakes exams just to get into high school (Turner, 2014). India’s high school completion exams, called board exams, have become so high stakes that nearly five hundred students were expelled from the tests in 2015, after parents climbed a wall to help them pass. Not only do these students take tests to graduate from high school but they also take dozens of exams to get into college (Lakshmi, 2015; Salaky, 2018). In the United States and Canada, standardized tests vary by state or province, but most students are required to take at least one test per
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