Many people who support standardized testing have good intentions: they would like an objective way to evaluate how well schools are serving their students. They would also like to use the results to help figure out which schools need help. They have an admirable central goal - to ensure that all students are learning.
 
It might seem that standardized tests are objective measures of how much students are learning, because they have only right or wrong answers. But this is not really the case. Multiple-choice questions with right or wrong answers cannot tell anything about students’ thought process. They cannot reveal whether or not students can justify their answers or even understand the question. They cannot measure real, deep, critical thinking. They also cannot measure how well students can collaborate with others. Quite simply, standardized tests tell us nothing about whether or not real learning is occurring.