We also have come to recognize that merely by changing principals, school scores can rise or fall dramatically. This phenomenon suggests that the synergy created by high-quality leadership (or the dysfunction of bad leadership) may have a significant impact on teacher ratings.

Of course, the tests are problematic for students as well as teachers. Just one example: Standardized tests are generally given in the spring, disrupting weeks of learning.

Fourth, the tests are too narrow in scope. They largely focus on math and reading, which obscures the value of elementary teachers who do a great job teaching history, science or music, and makes evaluation of secondary teachers of non-tested subjects like "apples" in comparison with math and English teacher "oranges."

Teachers oppose the tests because they radically limit their ability to adapt to learner differences; encourage use of threats, bribes, and other extrinsic motivators; wrongly assume that what the young will need to know in the future is already known; emphasize minimum achievement to the neglect of maximum performance; create unreasonable pressures to cheat.

Teachers oppose the tests because they provide minimal to no useful feedback; are keyed to a deeply flawed curriculum adopted in 1893; lead to neglect of physical conditioning, music, art, and other, non-verbal ways of learning; unfairly advantage those who can afford test prep; hide problems created by margin-of-error computations in scoring; penalize test-takers who think in non-standard ways.

Teachers (at least the ones the public should hope their taxes are supporting) oppose the tests because they focus so narrowly on reading and math that the young are learning to hate reading, math, and school; because they measure only “low level” thinking processes; because they put the wrong people — test manufacturers — in charge of American education; because they allow pass-fail rates to be manipulated by officials for political purposes; because test items simplify and trivialize learning.

As the American education system continues to place more emphasis on standardized testing to measure academic achievement, critics have argued that it can be more harmful than helpful to students’ development in the long run.

Even though the public supports testing and accountability, many worry that there is excessive testing, burdening teachers and students.

Some observers have found that teaching informed by the test focuses the curriculum on essential content and skills, eliminates activities that don’t produce learning gains, and motivates teachers and students to exert more effort.

In the classroom, every teacher grades differently, with different standards for evaluation. When all admissions committees can see is the overall GPAs, nuances between teachers with lower and higher expectations are lost. As such, standardized testing acts as somewhat of an equalizing force, providing colleges with the only relatively objective data point with which to compare prospective students.

When a problem exists in Philadelphia schools, it generally exists in other large urban schools across the nation. One of those problems—shared by districts in New York, D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles, and other major cities—is that many schools don’t have enough money to buy books.

“My daughter is not allowed to bring her textbook home because they don’t want it to get lost.”

This is because standardized tests are not based on general knowledge. As I learned in the course of my investigation, they are based on specific knowledge contained in specific sets of books: the textbooks created by the test makers.

The study found no correlation between the amount of testing in a district and the way its students perform on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a federal test given every two years that is the only consistent measure of student achievement across state lines.

Testing tends to be concentrated between February and May. The council’s study found numerous examples of redundancy, with students often taking an end-of-course test, an Advanced Placement test and a final exam for the same course.

Standardized testing has caused intense debate on Capitol Hill as lawmakers work to craft a replacement for No Child Left Behind. Testing critics tried unsuccessfully to erase the federal requirement that schools test in math and reading. Civil rights advocates pushed back, arguing that tests are an important safeguard for struggling students because publicly reported test scores illuminate the achievement gap between historically underserved students and their more affluent peers.

Standardized tests are an imprecise measure of teacher performance, yet they are used to reward and punish teachers.

Standardized tests measure only a small portion of what makes education meaningful.

Failures in the education system have been blamed on rising poverty levels, teacher quality, tenure policies, and increasingly on the pervasive use of standardized tests.

Such relative inferences about a student's status with respect to the mastery of knowledge and/or skills in a particular subject area can be quite informative to parents and educators. For example, think about the parents who discover that their 4th grade child is performing really well in language arts (94th percentile) and mathematics (89th percentile), but rather poorly in science (39th percentile) and social studies (26th percentile). Such information, because it illuminates a child's strengths and weaknesses, can be helpful not only in dealing with their child's teacher, but also in determining at-home assistance. Similarly, if teachers know how their students compare with other students nationwide, they can use this information to devise appropriate classroom instruction.

Standardized aptitude tests predict how well students are likely to perform in some subsequent educational setting.

The folks who create standardized achievement tests are terrifically talented. What they are trying to do is to create assessment tools that permit someone to make a valid inference about the knowledge and/or skills that a given student possesses in a particular content area