The ideas of Hillocks (2002), McNeil and Valenzuela (2001), and Ravitch (2011), who are all experts on this topic, will help to establish my credibility. .
Everyone is affected by the strength of our educational system, from the students themselves and their ability to succeed in college and in the workplace, to the employers who hire them "and everyone in between. Every taxpayer is a stakeholder in education, because these tests are paid for by tax dollars, and the return on investment in education is not where it should be. Standardized tests should be abolished and replaced with end-of-year subject tests because they will save time and money, lead to increased mastery of core subjects, and diminish dropout rates. This problem resulted on the one hand from national concern with global competition. When Sputnik rose into the sky in 1957 and Americans were concerned that the Russians were outgunning us in the Space Race, millions of dollars were poured into math and science programs to bolster teaching and resultant learning in these subjects. The 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act helped to fund these efforts. .
Confidence in our educational system was renewed when Americans set foot on the moon in 1969, but by 1983, it had eroded. Its quality so alarmed the government that its 1983 report, A Nation at Risk, warned that a "rising tide of mediocrity " would undermine this country's place in the competitive 20th century (as cited in Zhao, 2006, p. 28). By 2001, the Bush administration authorized the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, which began in 2002 and runs parallel in thinking and intent to the Race to the Top (RTT) initiative, started under the Obama administration in 2009. NCLB mandated high-stakes tests for all states, and imposed a carrots-and-sticks strategy of rewards and punishments if test scores were not consistently high.