Standardized tests

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 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 or lead to teacher firings and school closures, while high scores can ensure continued federal and local funding and be used to reward teachers and administrators with bonuses.[6] [8] [9] [10]

Early history

It is difficult to say how and where the first standardized exams arose, but they played a significant and early role in Chinese history, among the ruling class. The famed “Eight-Legged Essay,” so-called because of the essay’s eight parts, became a fixture of the Chinese empire in the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). The essay was a standard part of civil service tests for government positions that tested the applicants’ rote learning of Confucian philosophy. The exam was used until 1901, when it was roundly criticized for hindering Chinese originality and contributing to the country’s cultural stagnation and backwardness.[16] [70]

Written exams became popular in the West too, especially due to technological innovation. “In Europe, the invention of the printing press [in the 15th century] and modern paper manufacturing fueled the growth of written exams,” explains education columnist Jay Mathews.[15]

Further technological development spurred still a greater need for testing and standardized exams. The Industrial Revolution (mid-1700s to the early 1900s) encouraged school-aged farmhands and factory workers to go to school. 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 test a student’s knowledge and to provide a “single standard by which to judge and compare the output of each school.” In other words, as education professor William Reese explained, the goal was twofold: to garner both “precise measurements of school achievement,” for assessing the quality of schools and their teaching, and “positive information, in black and white,” on what exactly students knew. Boston’s program was soon adopted by school systems nationwide. [18] [4]

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]

This criticism of standardized testing mirrored the criticism in China of the rigid Eight-Legged Exam: such testing stifled creativity, stunted real learning, and encouraged the mere memorization of answers to pass exams.[19]

The Kansas Silent Reading Test (1914-15) 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. World War I (1914-18) also played a key role in popularizing standardized testing in the United States. Given to new recruits, the Army’s “intelligence tests,” developed by Princeton psychologist Carl Brigham, were deeply biased, reflecting the prejudices and racism of the day. “During World War I,” argued John Rosales and Tim Walker, “standardized tests helped place 1.5 million soldiers in units segregated by race and by test scores.”[20] [74]

This wartime emphasis on standardized tests influenced the founding of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) in 1926. Created by Carl Brigham for the College Board for the expansion of access to higher education, the SAT became a standard exam for acceptance into college in the post-World War II era. “In 1926, a group of 8,000 students took the SAT,” explained historian Genevieve Carlton, and “by the 1950s, half a million college-bound seniors sat for the SAT every year.” The ACT, the American College Testing exam, was established as a rival of the SAT in 1959.[14]

In 1934, International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) hired teacher and inventor 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 from this period, since modern scanners’ optical mark recognition (OMR) technology can recognize marks made by pens and pencils alike.[21] [22] [23] [24]

Modern testing

The modern testing movement began with the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), enacted by Pres. 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 Pres. 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 the release of A Nation at Risk. George H.W. Bush’s America 2000 plan (announced in 1991) aimed to achieve the world’s best math and science test scores, all by the turn of the millennium (2000), but it became mired in the U.S. Congress. Pres.Bill Clinton’s Goals 2000 Act and Improving America’s Schools Act (IASA), passed in 1994, had the same aim of making American students the top in the world in math and science by 2000. Many of its principles reflected an outcome-based approach to education, which has been criticized for over-emphasizing standardized test scores, leading to the negative consequences associated with high-stakes testing, such as narrowing the curriculum and “teaching to the test” at the expense of art, music, or social studies. Clinton’s 1997 Voluntary National Test initiative, which provided standardized benchmarks for student performance, 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”

Clinton’s Goals 2000 Act is often seen as the precursor to Pres. George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), which passed with bipartisan support in the U.S. House of Representatives (381-41) and in the U.S. Senate (87-10), and was signed into law on January 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 3-8 and again in grade 10. 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 percent 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. The difficult targets, and the severe penalties possible if the school targets were not met, led to “gaming the system,” such as “teaching to the test” and the “creative reclassification” of high school dropouts as “transfer students” to mask the negative metrics and to prevent schools and school districts from being punished.[28] [30] [31] [32] [33] [34] [13]

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 percent increase). Combined state and federal government spending on education totaled $600 billion per year.. [35] [36]

On February 17, 2009, Pres. 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 Bush’s No Child Left Behind, 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 October 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 January 2009 memo uncovered in April 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” in 2008 alone. 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 January 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 April 2013 that 18 D.C. public school teachers were found to have committed “‘critical’ violations of test security” in 2012. [45] [46] [47]

In August 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 3-5), 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 percent 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]

No Child Left Behind goals questioned

On March 9, 2011, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan told Congress that 82 percent of American schools could fail to meet NCLB’s goal of 100 percent 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, said the study, was the poor results on standardized tests by English Language Learners and children in low-income families. [52]

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 interpreted as a top-down intervention without sufficient teacher input. [87]

The 2019 Nation’s Report Card (National Assessment of Educational Progress) reported that fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math scores had remained largely the same for a decade, despite stronger academic standards. In 2019, only 35 percent of fourth graders were proficient in reading and 41 percent were proficient in math, while 34 percent of eighth graders were proficient in reading and 34% in math. [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 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 November 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 pandemic. The tests usually take place every two years and were scheduled for 2021 for fourth- and eighth-grade students. [55]

The Biden Administration announced on February 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 show the lowest math scores since 1990 and the lowest reading scored 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.[75]

A February 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]

The 2024 NAEP results in fourth-grade math showed minor improvement from 2022 (up three points), but scores had not yet rebounded to pre-pandemic rates. Overall, only 39 percent of fourth graders performed at or above the NAEP “proficient” level in math. Eighth-grade math scores remained at 2022 levels, which were lower than pre-pandemic scores. Overall, only 28 percent of eighth graders performed at or above the NAEP “proficient” level on math. [12]

Reading scores for both fourth and eighth graders continued to decline post-pandemic (down two points for each), with only 31 percent of fourth graders and 30 percent of eighth graders performing at or above the NAEP “proficient” level. [11]

By late 2025, it was clear that a post-pandemic rebound was still not happening. The NAEP’s “Nation’s Report Card” found a decrease of four points in eighth-grade science scores since 2019, and a three point decrease in 12th-grade math and reading scores. Compared to the 1992 reading assessment, 12th grade average scores were down 10 points, a historic low. Karyn Lewis, of K-12 testing and research organization NWEA, explained,

Academic recovery has been slower and more uneven than expected, and research funding is increasingly constrained. Schools need evidence-based insights to make decisions through this complex landscape.[1] [2] [3]

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Discussion questions

1. Do you think standardized tests improve education? Why or why not?
2. Think of the standardized tests you have taken. Did they accurately reflect your knowledge of the topics being tested?
3. If standardized tests were eliminated, how do you think students should be assessed and graded?
4. What questions do you have after reading the debate above? Where might you find answers?
5. What was the most interesting thing you learned from this debate?
6. Consider how you felt about the issue before reading this article. After reading the pros and cons on this topic, has your thinking changed? How and why?. If your thoughts have not changed, explain how and why you better understand the other side of the debate.
7. Push for the position and policies you support by writing local officials, U.S. senators and representatives, or other people in a position to make the change you champion.