Pro: No more standardized testing for students Con:

Institute, parents can use these tests to judge a school's success rate of teaching their children. If a school district's average test scores are favorable, parents would likely be more inclined to enroll their children there.

major cities, including LA: a lack of funds to buy books.

“Unlike college professors, who simply assign books and leave it to the students to buy them, K–12 teachers have to provide students with books. But it’s not a simple matter of ordering one book per student per subject,” the article says. “Based on the schools I visited and the teachers I interviewed, each student needs at least one textbook and one workbook per class, plus a bunch of worksheets and projects the teacher pulls from assorted websites (not to mention binder clips and construction paper and scissors and other project-based materials). Books can be reused year to year, but only if the state standards haven’t changed—which they have every year for at least the past decade.”

Which only makes it that much harder for disadvantaged students to compete with those from districts that can afford the resources.

As for those who create the tests; Harcourt Educational Measurement, CTB McGraw-Hill,

Riverside Publishing (a Houghton Mifflin company), and NCS Pearson. Each one selling their own books about studying for the very same tests they make.

Standardized tests, since their inception, have also been linked to racism. Take for example the SAT.

In an article written by John Rosales and Tim Walker of NEA News for the National Education Association from March 2021, during the early 19th century, millions of European immigrants came to the U.S., and there was a growing concern amongst the leading social scientists of that time about the “infiltration of non-whites into the nation’s public schools.”

The NEA News article mentions how psychologist and eugenicist Carl Brigham in his 1923 book, A Study of American Intelligence, wrote “African-Americans were on the low end of the racial, ethnic, and/or cultural spectrum. Testing, he believed, showed the superiority of ‘the Nordic race group’ and warned of the ‘promiscuous intermingling’ of new immigrants in the American gene pool.”

That same Carl Brigham would go on to aid in the development of aptitude tests for the U.S. Army during World War I and would later be commissioned by the College Board to develop the Scholastic Aptitude Test, which made its debut in 1926.

This is the very same test that evolved into the SAT we know of today.

However, this continued debate over whether standardized tests are synonymous with racism and classism has reached a turning point.

During the height of the pandemic in 2020, more than 100 colleges and universities in California opted to suspend SAT and ACT testing requirements, according to Lauryn Schroeder of the San Diego Union-Tribune in association with the LA Times in 2021.

“The decision helped level the playing field for students who have traditionally been disadvantaged in the college application process, Gomez said, and for the first time in its history, the school admitted more nonwhite students than white students,” according to Schroeder

In fact, schools reported receiving “more applicants, better academically qualified applicants, and a more diverse pool of applicants” when they exempted SAT/ACT submissions, according to Schroeder.

So what should we prioritize over standardized tests?

Grade Point Averages.

According to Tony Pals of the American Educational Research Association, in a study published by Educational Researcher, a peerreviewed journal of the AERA, students’ high school grade point averages are five times stronger at predicting college graduation than their ACT scores.