Marcus Brown
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A great deal of commotion has come about because of a recent drop in U.S. test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The assessment serves as a sort of benchmark for the nation’s overall education performance, because it is distributed to samplings of students across various demographics over time.

The specific drop in math scores on the assessment is the first of its kind “since the federal government began administering the exam in 1990.” As a result, the scores have become fodder for anyone with objections to imposed changes to academic infrastructure such as the Common Core. However, the results of this year’s assessment should not turn the conversation of educational reform into a blame game with a preoccupation on finding flaws in any attempt of a reform made.

A difference of 2 points in math scores appears to be all it takes to ignite doubt and skepticism across the nation, but to assume that massive education reforms can be implemented and show immediate progress is simply unrealistic. The drop in scores is cause for concern, but it does not mean that new initiatives must immediately be derailed and reformatted.

It is appealing for the hesitant and reticent to cite the first sign of impending failure as motivation for pre-emptively discarding a newly implemented strategy, but that paradigm will result in a perpetual state of inactivity. Time must be given for new changes to reach fruition and for enough information to be collected in order to form a holistic evaluation of success or failure.

Reluctance to accept change is natural and expected, but it also serves to bar any form of meaningful change when comparing complacency felt toward the status quo to potential failure in an unclear future.

Furthermore, in the realm of education, the stakes have been raised to such exorbitant heights that any type of deviation from the status quo appears to be a gamble too large to make. Resistance to the Common Core in Iowa stemmed from a fear that the state’s schools would become puppets of the bureaucracy in Washington and stripped of their autonomy.

Ultimately, it is too early to tell whether or not the Common Core and other recent policies will be the death of the education system as we know it, and even still, would that be such a bad thing? Granted, standardized testing is the most realistic way of evaluating student achievement through a variety of demographics and locations. But placing too much of an emphasis on test results detracts from the attention that should be placed on what is actually being tested.

The purpose of an education is not to force information down the throats of students to later be regurgitated on neatly lined scantron sheets, nor is the purpose of education reform to ensure every student regurgitates that information in the same manner regardless of ethnicity or domain. The purpose of an education is to prepare students to make meaningful contributions to society and realize their potential. A standardized test does little to shed any light on either of those criteria, so why should the supposed effectiveness of a school system rest on the result of standardized tests?