One of the most basic criticisms of assessment driven education is the cost of standardized testing.The cost of administering and grading a standard test depends on the type of test. A simple multiple choice test can cost mere pennies to grade while a test that includes essay questions may cost $5. When schools are on tight budgets there is a great temptation to make tests easier and less expensive to administer. Some states, such as Connecticut, state that government funding for standardized tests does not cover the cost of more complicated or advanced testing and so the assessment driven approach of the No Child Left Behind Act may actually lower education standards. Many also feel that the money spent on standardized testing would be better spent elsewhere.
In "Can We Fairly Measure the Quality of Education" Eva L. Baker of UCLA's Center for the Study of Evaluation argues that current testing methods are questionable in their ability to evaluate anything. Baker points out that testing should allow for a variety of different ways for students to demonstrate knowledge, and that the tests must ultimately be focused on serving the interests of students, not the teacher, the school or the education system as a whole. She points out that the drive for assessment driven education comes from "the realm of economic indicators such as the Gross National Product, unemployment figures and the Dow Jones Average" and that, when it comes to education, even dropout rates from one state to another cannot be compared because of the different ways they are calculated by the different states.
With the reputation and sometimes the funding of a school and its teachers directly impacted by student performance on standardized tests there is sometimes great pressure to "teach to the test." In some cases this can be a good thing. Because tests are designed to assess a student's knowledge of the curriculum, teaching subjects that will be on the test is expected. In certain situations, though, where there is a concern of poor performance, there is pressure to teach only what will be on the test and teach it in a way that is only designed to ensure good test scores. In other words test performance, and not actual learning, becomes the objective. As Lloyd Bond of the Carnegie Institute points out "... we want to infer that students can solve not only the particular set of math problems on a test, but that they can solve an entire class of problems. Drilling students on a specific set of test items destroys our ability to generalize to this larger domain."
Assessment driven education has also resulted in making teaching a less desirable profession at a time when the U.S. needs teachers the most. According to the Nebraska State Education Association about 6 percent of teachers leave the profession annually and 20 percent leave teaching in their first three years. This is especially true in math and science, where new teachers make an average of $25,000 per year while individuals starting at engineering or computing firms make $40,000 and up. According to national averages, a math graduate may never make as much from a year of teaching as she would in her first year with an engineering firm. This has resulted in nationwide shortages of teachers. Because students in poor rural and urban areas are less likely to do well on standardized tests because of other stresses in their lives, new teachers are more reluctant to accept jobs in these schools because the standardized test scores reflect on their ability as teachers and their future career prospects.