How students are victimized by standardized testing

This article offers a radical perspective on how standardized tests administered today have become too much of a burden and measuring stick for today's students.

http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/edweek/staiv.htm

Explained here are why standardized tests are such a burden with so many being used to evaluate students, as well as how preparing students for these tests undermine instruction on the subject being taught. According to this article, there are many so-called "indisputable" facts about the effects of standardized tests. One that I found disturbing is that many teachers are getting out of teaching due to "accountability" and "tougher standards". These tests place high demands on schools, administrators and teachers to perform and their measuring stick for high-level performance is primarily test results. Many of those getting out of it, which are among the best according to this article, are fed up with the frustration brought on by test performance pressure. They just do not feel that it is fair to the students to have so much pressure to perform on these tests given once in a school year; the scores do not account for any other factors than how a student performs on that given day. However, the author does go on to mention that even though test scores tend to be the lowest in low-income schools in urban and rural areas, those schools were in bad shape to begin with. You can only teach and prepare your students the best you can with the resources you are given, which is determined by how much money the school can allocate for those resources. This is where the concept of instructional quality declining the most for those having least factors in. The more resources you are given to teach with and prepare your students, the better they will be prepared for the tests. So naturally, those in affluent to middle class schools will inevitably perform better than those in low-income schools. Unfortunately we live in a society where the government is willing to allocate more funding for high to middle-income schools than to low-income schools where it should be the other way around.