Debunking Opposition Standardized Testing/Why is Standardized Testing Necessary?

Standardized testing is a topic I disagree with many fellow Democrats on. Democrats tend to be heavily in favor of the Teachers Union, which generally opposes standardized tests. The criticisms of standardized tests usually are that they teach to the test, they do not test for important things, they unfairly punish teachers, they are stressful for students, and so on. Are any of those things true? Not to me, which I will explain in the next few paragraphs.

I find the argument that standardized tests "teach to the test" to be particularly weak. For one thing, teachers themselves give students tests all school year round. Is that also teaching to the test? Additionally, how is teaching to the test necessarily a bad thing? If the test is on subjects that are useful to have knowledge of, perhaps teaching to the test is good thing.

Topics like math, science, and reading comprehension are all topics many of us struggle with, but they are important and they are based on objective truth. Many say that those things are not as important as creativity, confidence, and other similar skills, but those are highly subjective. There is no objective way to measure how confident or creative someone is. Plus, confidence is not always good. For example, one might be highly confident that they can do a certain dangerous thing, but that does not necessarily mean they can safely do that thing. So high confidence in that type of situation might not be safe, and therefore is not particularly good. Plus, those things are used quite regularly in our everyday life, making knowledge of them quite beneficial.

Standardized tests are meant to measure how much the teachers are teaching their students, which I do not see as particularly unfair. Indeed, a teacher's job is to teach their students. It is arguably a burden on teachers, though that is a normal part of having a successful job. If someone feels it is too difficult for someone to teach the necessary subjects to their students, then teaching is probably not a good job for them.

There are lots of academic expectations placed on students that cause stress, from tests, all the way to homework and classwork. To say that standardized tests are stressful for students is true, but it does not hold as an argument against standardized testing unless those who make that argument also believe that homework, classwork, and all the school year round tests should no longer be part of academics.

The reason standardized testing is necessary is that when it comes to education, there needs to be an objective way to measure if students are being taught the necessary subjects. As I previously said, a teacher's job is to teach, so it is basic common sense that we require there to be a way for us to objectively measure whether they are doing that job well. Also, teachers can and do have biases that cause them to give certain students certain grades. For example, a teacher might give a student who is a member of a minority a good grade simply because they want minority students to have good grades, regardless of whether they actually do well with their work. Likewise, a teacher could have a bias that makes them give student who is part of a minority a low grade because they want them to fail, as shown in the link below. So having standardized tests helps ensure that teachers hold everyone to equal standards when it comes to teaching the topics of importance. There are of course students who struggle in certain subjects, as well as students who might struggle in general due to things like poverty and disability, but it is still the job of teachers to hold those students to a fair and equitable academic standard.

https://www.thegraidenetwork.com/blog-all/2018/8/1/teacher-bias-the-elephant-in-the-classroom

In the end, there is truth to some of the criticisms of standardized testing, but none of them are good arguments against it. They all are either not exclusively true about standardized testing or simply untrue. Because of that and the potential for teachers to be biased in their grading in such, standardized testing is necessary. Perhaps we can discuss whether the standards in standardized tests should be changed in some way, but the solution to any problems we have with standardized tests is certainly not to abolish them.