Purpose of Education and Standardized Testing

      In class, we have spent a great deal of time talking about what we think the purpose of education is, and how the standardized tests given in schools contribute, or otherwise do not contribute, to the purpose of education. After discussing and hearing many people’s ideas on the purpose of education, I believe I have confounded my own purpose. The purpose of education should be to not only measure skills and intelligence in certain subject areas that children need to help them succeed to the next step, such as reading and math, but it should also be to learn about social interaction with peers and how to work with authority. It should be about learning responsibility, organization, and time management so when we enter the next stage of our lives, we gradually become more competent in those areas. However, if standardized testing is continually growing in popularity with more and more time being spent in the classroom preparing for these intelligence tests, are we missing out on a vital part of our education process?

        The following link leads to an article titled, “Why Standardized Tests Don’t Measure Education Quality,” and it highlights why these tests are done, and why they do not necessarily measure the quality of education. (http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/mar99/vol56/num06/Why-Standardized-Tests-Don't-Measure-Educational-Quality.aspx)The article states that the tests can be helpful in determining a child’s strengths and weaknesses in certain subject areas, as well as their improvement or weakening in those subjects over their years in school. These are very valid points, but I agree with this article’s arguments on why it does not measure an education’s quality. The article says that many schools are now using tests to determine the quality of the educators and the quality of the school itself, which is not a correct assumption due to standardized tests being used to only measure a students gained intelligence. In my own opinion of the purpose of education, I suggested that acquiring an education is not entirely about the material and knowledge we gain on subjects, but also about the lifelong skills we gain. Those skills, such as interactions and responsibility, cannot be measured or tested.Therefore the quality of an educator or school should not be decreased due to standardized tests because not all areas of education are being equally tested, only the certain subject areas. Teachers are not only teaching us how to write and work math problems to send us off to our next level in school, but they are teaching us responsibility and time management, too. If there was a way to measure or test how much a student has learned about those qualities as well as the subjects in themselves, perhaps a standardized test would be able to determine an education’s worth.