Regardless of where in the country you attended elementary or high school, you likely spent a good amount of time taking dreaded standardized tests. Now, President Obama is calling for putting a limit on the amount of classroom time spent taking these exams.
The Council of Great City Schools conducted a study to find out just how much of an investment schools must put into standardized testing, and found that students spend 20-25 hours on these tests every school year—That’s about 2.3% of total classroom time, and doesn’t included preparation and practice time. The study found that the average student will have taken 112 standardized tests by the time they finish high school.
The excessive testing comes as a result of two main reasons: the No Child Left Behind law and the Common Core. No Child Left Behind was enacted in 2002 under the Bush administration, in an effort to assess learning progress and to lessen achievement gaps. More recently, the Common Core was established in an effort to create nationwide achievement standards in reading and math, which has ultimately resulted in—you guessed it—more tests for students. Worse yet, the Council of Great City Schools found that students and teachers often must wait two to four months to receive test results, making it difficult for teachers to identify and work on problem areas for students.
To start resolving the problem, the Obama administration has enlisted the Education department to ease up on federal testing mandates. Administration officials are also looking into eliminating tests that are repetitive, unuseful in assessing learning or irrelevant to a school’s current curriculum. For example, the Council’s executive director Michael Casserly noted that many schools require both end-of-year and end-of-course exams in the same subjects.
Obama does believe that standardized testing is necessary to a degree, and that it will not be going away altogether any time soon. Still, “learning is about so much more than just filling in the right bubble,” he said in a video shared through Facebook. “So we’re going to work with states, school districts, teachers, and parents to make sure that we’re not obsessing about testing.”