Speech at a community gathering

Eliminating Standardized Testing – A Call for Holistic Assessment Your Name Subject and Section Professor’s Name March 16, 2025 Good evening, school board members, educators, parents, and students. I have come to present my case about standardized testing, which is an urgent problem within educational systems today. We have been using high-stakes tests for decades to judge student achievement, and we trust these tests to demonstrate objective educational performance. Standardized testing produces more negative effects than positive effects in actual practice. Standardized tests suppress innovative learning by causing excessive stress during assessment and only measure limited student abilities. The Problem with Standardized Testing When using standardized tests, the educational system converts students into numerical values that do not acknowledge their individual strengths and abilities. These assessments create an overwhelming situation that pushes students to memorize information while they learn to think critical...