Teaching the ideology of assessment.

   It is not coincidental that the
   concerted effort by government
   authorities to gain monopoly
   control over the curriculum
   (through testing) arrives at the
   time that social movements have
   appeared and are challenging
   male, White Anglo-European
   political and cultural supremacy.
   The formerly enslaved, colonized,
   and oppressed do not accept their
   ascribed cultural, racial, and gender
   inferiority. Many are asserting
   their rights to reclaim cultural
   power, and to create and forge
   their own cultural and social
   identities.

Harold Berlak

   The building blocks of knowledge
   were the same yesterday and
   will be the same tomorrow. We
   do not need trendy new theories
   or fancy experiments or feel-good
   curriculums. The basics work. If
   drill gets the job done, then rote
   is right.

George W. Bush (qtd. in Coles)

Over the past twenty-five years, standardized tests have increasingly defined the terms of public education in America. The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) codified into Federal law a national trend that was already fully underway well before George W. Bush took office. As of the year 2000, over two thirds of states had already implemented tests at multiple grade levels, and most had accountability measures attached to test scores (Hillocks 5). With or without NCLB, large-scale testing has become the unparalleled weapon of choice for those seeking to enact school reform in the United States.

The potential downsides of large-scale testing are well-documented among those who follow the issue. A host of publications, including this one, have published a growing mound of research that indicates that testing often: leads to canned curriculums and "teaching to the test"; erodes the agency of teachers and diminishes their professional status; relies on instruments that are poorly conceived, administered and/or scored; produces scores that are misunderstood and misused; compels systems to use instruments that don't meet acceptable validity thresholds, or are not systematically evaluated for validity at all; unfairly penalizes schools and teachers that serve the less privileged; is unfair to traditionally marginalized groups; is part of a broader, concerted effort to privatize public education.

Nevertheless, the basic logic of testing goes largely unchallenged in popular media. This logic packages the assumption that there is a crisis in American education with the conclusion that testing and accountability measures are an effective means of addressing that crisis. Given the richness of the research and discussion and the contentiousness of the testing debate inside of education circles, one would hope that at least educators would have a firm grasp of the serious problems with this line of reasoning. Unfortunately, I don't think this is the case. Rather, among many university teachers outside of education, including some who would politically self-identify as liberal or even radical, I often encounter a tendency to associate the declining status of the humanities with "failing" public education. Radical sociologist Stanley Aronowitz, for instance, opens The Knowledge Factory, an argument for comprehensive academic reform, with a narrative detailing the many soft spots in his own public education, concluding that we are in a "crisis" and "there is little that qualifies as higher learning in the United States" (xviii). Ironically, in this instance, the perspectives of political radicals who worry over the decline of humanities education can be oddly convergent with those of political conservatives who locate the roots of "educational decay" (in addition to other perceived decays) in 60's-era cultural transformation. Both tend to rely on a meta-narrative of decline from some prior golden age of rigor and high standards, and both tend to disparage education departments, "feel good" curriculums, and the intellectual capabilities of teachers themselves.

More importantly, among K-12 teachers, I often encounter what is best described as grim resignation--an acceptance of the inevitability of centralized curricular control and testing. In a recent discussion in a Masters-level course, one of my students who teaches at a local high school described the discouragement he felt on his first day on the job when he and his colleagues walked up to a table to pick up their laminated "pacing guides." Pacing guides are manuals with day-to-day curriculums aimed at boosting students' scores on end of year tests. "They have encouraged me to go on and get my Masters," he said, "But what's the point if I am just going to go back and do what the [pacing] guide says I have to do? Why do you need a Masters to follow directions?" Among the paradoxes of the testing/accountability movement is that it often puts teachers into a position in which their professional status is contingent upon their willingness to be enthusiastic technicians--low-level employees who implement curriculums created by professionals. At recent NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) conferences, there has certainly been much talk--and much of it disparaging--about the effects of states' efforts to comply with NCLB on writing curriculums in school districts across the country. I wonder. however, how much of this critique and complaint has actually filtered into teacher education classes and other classes that include substantial numbers of future teachers. Are students being invited to critically examine testing? Are they encouraged to explore strategies of resistance? How do we combat pervasive cynicism in the profession?

I am an active participant in my university's chapter of the National Writing Project (NWP). The project brings together K-12 teachers to learn how they might become better teachers of writing. Early in a NWP course for new participants I taught this summer, I asked students to reflect on their own "theories" of teaching and writing, on the assumptions that drive their approaches to writing pedagogy. Unfortunately, the question just didn't register for most. Some indicated that they had never really thought extensively about the assumptions that drive their approaches to teaching writing, largely because their writing curriculums do come out of pacing guides and mandatory texts and are geared toward end-of-year tests. There was also a general resistance to the term "theory" itself. Some said that they found theory intimidating and considered it ultimately peripheral to their concerns. They described theory as an insider's realm for academics that isn't intimately connected to the embodied work they do everyday in the classroom. That work involves negotiating highly coercive, sometimes punitive, bureaucracies that can be hostile to local curricular innovation. It also involves working within the terms set by a bottom-line focused, arguably Calvinistic, discourse that assumes that teachers are largely incompetent and must prove their worth through improving their students' scores on standardized tests.

These discussions convinced me of the pressing need to bring testing and theory more fully and obviously under one conceptual umbrella, "the political," with our students. Because they typically result in numbers, and because they are frequently explained in the language of statistics ("validity," "reliability," "mean," etc.), large-scale assessments, even writing assessments, can easily be seen as "scientific" in the uncomplicated, positivistic sense of the term. Moreover, even "theory" itself can be perceived by students in the same way as "science": as a body of sophisticated critical knowledge to be consumed uncritically. In short, both "assessment" and "theory" can appear unassailable, non-participatory and therefore powerfully deterministic.

Assessments are innately and inescapably political: they are the product of particular political processes; they are formed by/within politically charged discourses; and they enact ideologies in classrooms every day through determining the shape and goals of curriculums. It is through theory that we are able to recognize ideological assumptions, critique them, and imagine and propose alternatives. To combat pervasive cynicism, frustration and feelings of powerlessness, both current and future teachers should be encouraged to critically examine the politics of assessment--a necessary step toward effective resistance and positive change. Toward that end, in the following I offer three starting points for examination of the political aspects of large-scale assessments.

I. ASSESSMENT AND THE POLITICAL PROCESS

Two national political events are often cited as catalysts for the widespread use of standardized tests in contemporary education. In 1965, Title 1 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was passed within a broader legislative initiative to address the root causes of poverty in the U.S. A part of the Johnson administration's "Great Society" program, this legislation linked federal support for the education of low-achieving children in underprivileged areas to ongoing program evaluation. Title 1 did much good. It funneled money into shamefully under-funded schools, and more generally, it recognized the federal government's long-shirked responsibility to ensure access to quality education for all of its citizens. Title 1 also had some unintended consequences. To ensure that the funding was being used appropriately, legislators insisted that schools show quantified results. These compliance requirements forced state school systems to develop and administer standardized tests. Though initially targeted at underprivileged students, over time these tests were gradually extended to most students in most states. Title 1, therefore, promoted "accountability," as we have come to know the term in education, through making federal funding contingent upon quantified measurements of achievement and progress. Title 1 has gradually been expanded beyond its original mandate and has become the primary source of Federal aid to schools.

At least as important as Title 1 was the publication, in 1983, of "A Nation at Risk," a report by the National Commission on Education. An immediate media and political event, "A Nation at Risk" argued that America's schools were failing in relation to those of other industrialized nations. The report linked this perceived failure to America's global economic competitiveness. Among its charges: that curricula had been "homogenized, diluted, and diffused to the point that they no longer have a central purpose"; that homework amounts were too low; that the number of hours spent on "academic instruction" were inadequate; that too many teachers were ill-qualified and "drawn from the bottom quarter of graduating high school and college students"; and that standards for promotion and graduation were too low. Importantly, nine of the thirteen indicators the commission used to compile the report were in some way related to standardized testing (Sacks 76). Moreover, both increasing students' scores on existing standardized tests (like the SAT), and implementing more standardized tests for gatekeeping and "remedial intervention" were among the reports' primary solutions to the crisis it identified ("National Commission ..." 12). The report's credibility was almost immediately challenged by critics who pointed to numerous, serious flaws in logic and methodology--among them, that the report fallaciously equated data that was collected using different testing instruments on different populations in very different educational systems; that it treated American schools as a monolith; and that it did nothing to empirically substantiate its most central claim: that higher test scores would lead to more competitive workers and a stronger economy.

It would nevertheless be difficult to overstate the political significance of "A Nation at Risk." Aggressively promoted by the Reagan administration, the report was immediately embraced by politicians, editorialists and others who advocated widespread reforms and sought empirical evidence for failing schools. Since the publication of the report, the prevailing national assumption is that American schools are in crisis, and this perceived crisis has been consistently linked to the nation's economic competitiveness. The connection is vague. When "A Nation at Risk" was published, the American economy was stumbling. Unemployment and inflation were high, wages and consumer confidence were falling, and there was widespread anxiety about the increasing economic power of Asian countries, particularly Japan. The report provided empirical support for a broader Reagan-era social vision that scapegoated bureaucratic inefficiency and a general softness and decline in social and institutional standards. However, given the ensuing crash of the Asian market, and the technology-fueled economic boon that America experienced in the following decade, one would think that either a.) American education would be given some credit for producing a sophisticated workforce that is highly competitive in a high-tech economy or b.) more people would recognize that the relationship between quality public education and economic growth/health is complicated and tenuous. Not so. Despite America's continuing economic and techno-military dominance of the world, the "fact" that schools are failing and that this failure erodes our economic and technological competitiveness is a given in national debates. Rather than questioning, or at least complicating, this basic premise, the political disagreement has largely been over the likely causes and potential solutions. In this climate, large-scale testing and accountability measures have constituted compromises between liberals and conservatives.

A primary attraction is, of course, cost. Though expensive, administering tests and insisting on improving scores is far cheaper than, for instance, buying books, computers and other essential equipment; reducing class sizes; enhancing teachers' opportunities for professional development; raising teacher salaries; updating material infrastructure; experimenting with alternative curricula, etc. Moreover, insisting on higher standards, but then leaving the details to assessment specialists and curricula designers, enables legislators of any political stripe to sidestep politically sensitive and divisive processes (such as determining "essential knowledge" in given subjects, and articulating the reasons for "the achievement gap") while maintaining to constituents that they are doing something strong and decisive to improve education. By the mid 80's, 33 states already had minimum-competency testing, and by the late 90's, almost half of the states had instituted accountability measures based on students' performances on standardized tests (Bond et al.). Both George W. Bush and John Kerry supported NCLB, and when President Bush signed the Act into law, he was flanked by a beaming Senator Ted Kennedy.

We need to find creative ways to help students denaturalize the current testing trend, through historicizing it as fully as possible. The "Elementary and Secondary Education Act" and "A Nation at Risk" are useful starting points for class-based research and discussion. Other historical views make excellent sources for discussion of both the history of perceived "crises" in American education and the history of large-scale testing itself. Standardized testing has a long and checkered history in the United States. For instance, Horace Mann, an important early champion of universal education, instituted the first state-mandated test during his tenure as secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education. The test was designed to measure individual performance, but the results were quickly misused to compare and rank schools and as the basis for personnel and curricular decisions in counties across the state--the beginning of an unfortunate practice that continues to the present day.

French psychologist Alfred Binet developed the IQ test with explicit cautions against using it as a device to make generalizations about the intellect, to rank children according to scores, or to classify children as innately incapable. When, in 1908, the Binet-Simon intelligence test was brought to America and translated into English by Dr. Henry Goddard, however, it was for the explicit purpose of generalizing, ranking, sorting and excluding on a large-scale. An enthusiastic and devoted eugenicist, Goddard made no secret of his beliefs and political aims: he wanted to "recognize limits, [and] segregate and curtail breeding to prevent further deterioration of an endangered American stock" (Gould 159). He therefore strongly advocated the mandatory sterilization of "feebleminded" people. Widely credited as "the father of intelligence testing in the U.S.," Dr. Goddard enthusiastically advocated IQ testing as a means to determine the fitness for citizenship of incoming immigrants at Ellis Island. When tests he developed were implemented as a screening measure at Ellis, there was a dramatic increase in the number of immigrants who were deemed "mentally defective" and deported (Zenderland 273). Goddard's intelligence-based research on immigrants has been cited as an important contributing factor to the increased restrictions of immigration in the 1920's (Corbett and Wilson 15-16). To promote the use of psychometric testing in public schools, Goddard distributed over 22,000 copies of the Binet-Simon test to schools in the U.S. during the years 1908-1915.

Other examples of the use of testing as a socio-political tool abound. In 1917, Columbia University attempted to use a test of "mental alertness" for the explicit purpose of excluding as many Jewish students as possible (Crouse and Trusheim 19). Even since 1980, large-scale tests have been found to have been racially discriminatory in California, Florida and Illinois. The point is that when the testing movement is put into a broader historical perspective and examined from a critical/theoretical perspective, tests seem less inevitable, less objective, more firmly rooted in specific historical and political movements and concerns. (The appendix provides a short list of resources that teachers and students might use for examination of the history and politics of assessment.)

II. ASSESSMENT AND IDEOLOGY

In addition to historicizing the testing movement, we need to encourage our students to identify the ideological assumptions that drive them. Students don't need to oppose testing to have an informed understanding of the political dimensions of the debate. In varied contexts, remarkably consistent rhetoric is used to justify testing. Though this rhetoric is clearly driven by ideology--for instance, by contentious assumptions about history, people, language and learning--the ideologies are rarely explicitly acknowledged. The following quote is from Herbert J. Walberg's foreword to Richard Phelps' Kill the Messenger, an argument for testing and accountability measures. Note the distinction that is made between educators and "the public"; also note the predilection for standardization and the faith in "objective" measures:

   Though a self-serving
   resistance
   and view has prevailed
   for many
   years in education
   circles, federal and state
   legislators and the public are
   increasingly demanding objective
   accountability and better performance
   for our schools. To varying
   degrees, state legislatures have
   begun requiring the development
   of achievement tests and standards
   for K-12 schools. The new federal
   act "No Child Left Behind"
   requires an even more ambitious
   and uniform testing system for
   the nation ... For reasons Richard
   Phelps makes clear in this book,
   this movement is all to the good.
   Taxpayers who pay the school bills
   have a right to know the quality
   of results their hard-earned money
   buys. Legislators and school
   boards cannot be stewards of children's
   academic progress without
   objective information on what
   students learn. xiii

The next quote is from the introduction to a recent issue of Education Next that discusses what has happened in the wake of "A Nation at Risk." Here, the report's description of an educational crisis is contextualized within a general narrative of post 1960's cultural decline. In addition to echoing the usual inventory of perceived failings--liberal social engineering, bureaucratic red tape, litigation and "teacher organizations" (unions)--the passage seems almost wistful about the anxieties created by the Cold War:

   By the 1960s ... the focus of
   reform had turned away from academic
   performance. Well-intended
   efforts to address racial segregation,
   meet the needs of handicapped
   youngsters, compensate
   for disadvantage, and provide
   bilingual schooling for immigrants
   eclipsed concern about student
   achievement. They also produced
   much red tape, litigiousness,
   and contentious battles over
   means and ends. Teacher organizations,
   at the same time, asserted
   their right to bargain collectively
   and to strike, which brought them
   unprecedented power over schools
   and school systems. The Sputnik-inspired
   commitment to education
   quality, in other words, had
   clearly lost priority. SAT scores
   peaked in 1964 and declined
   thereafter, reaching their nadir
   about the time Risk was
   unleashed. (Chubb et al. 10)

These arguments appeal to a binary in contemporary politics that frames popular discourse concerning education: I call it "soft/hard." In the soft/hard binary, "soft" educational bureaucracy, with roots in 60's left-oriented politics, is compared unfavorably with the "hard" culture of business and finance--a culture that is imagined to have had ascendancy in the halcyon 1950's, but lost its rightful place afterward. Striking a theme that is at least as old as Cato, the arguments associate recent trends in education with a more general cultural effeminacy and propose a restoration of an objective (male) order, an order that can be found in laissez faire capitalism. In an interview on Fox news, conservative author/commentator Michael Barone said that the title of his recent book, Hard America, Soft America,

   refers to the parts of American life
   where we have competition and
   accountability. And "Soft
   America" is where you don't. So
   hard America includes the high-tech
   private sector. Soft America
   includes high school, at least for
   most students. And I was
   prompted to write this book by
   my observation that American 18-year-olds
   are in many ways more
   incompetent than other 18-year-olds
   from many other countries. I
   mean, you look at the test scores. I
   mean, watch them on their starting
   day in McDonald's ...
   because they have been spending
   most of the dozen years between
   ages 6 and 18 in soft America, in
   schools and other settings where
   not much is demanded of them.
   We have seen them move now
   towards more tests and accountability
   but for the most part, the
   schools since the late 1960s have
   been pretty soft. They've introduced,
   you know, whole language
   that doesn't teach you very much
   language and new math which
   you don't have to get the answers
   right. They have been abolishing
   dodge ball and tag because, hey,
   somebody loses, and kids are
   going to lose--their self-esteem is
   in danger.

The "soft" world of education lacks purpose and accountability; the hard world of business is disciplined and accountable. Lazy and incompetent teachers collectively hide behind unions that shelter mediocrity in the soft world; the hard world rewards individuals for excellence and penalizes weakness through relentless competition. The soft world lacks clear direction and goals, and excessive experimentation is why schools have gotten off track--"back to the basics." The hard world proceeds according to transcendent, self-apparent, objective principles. Paradoxically, the soft world of education is also deeply entrenched in standard, old modes of thinking and needs to be compelled through competition to be agile and creative, to "think outside the box" as is required in the dynamic, creative, hard world of business. In this discourse, being a business leader makes one's opinion on education valuable, while being an experienced educator or an educational researcher renders one's opinion all but useless.

This soft/had thinking tends to omit nuanced discussion of the many divergences between civic and private goals, the need for a public, truly plural, civic sector in a healthy democracy, or the many shortcomings of private industry--including waste, corruption, social irresponsibility and the high failure rates of new businesses. Nor does it typically admit the many problems with so-called "objective" testing measures. These details are among those glossed over in a discourse that casts "the people" or "taxpayers" (a grouping that conspicuously erases distinctions in class, race and gender) against K-12 teachers, education administrators, and academic researchers, who--though taxpayers and often themselves parents of school-age children--are oddly not of "the people."

We should encourage current and future teachers to analyze the ideologies that drive the public discourse concerning education with our students. Presidential addresses, election season ads and debates, editorials and public policy statements are rich starting points for examination of the contentious ideological assumptions that are embedded in the current public conversation about public education and testing. Students should examine who has authority in this discourse and who is dismissed. What is valued and what is ignored or disparaged? What considerations are altogether omitted from the conversation?

III. ASSESSMENTS AS ORDERING SYSTEMS

Allan Hanson persuasively argues that tests don't just measure particular qualities in people, they produce those qualities, and this is the primary reason that we use them. Tests administered throughout history--witch trials, medieval tests of guilt, drug tests, standardized tests of intelligence and learning, personality predictors and lie detector tests--serve a common cultural goal: they are powerful disciplining mechanisms that function to maintain a prescribed societal order. Tests define excellence, proficiency, normalcy, deficiency and deviance according to the dominant standards of place and time. In contemporary western society, where we are literally tested from the womb to the grave, tests are among the primary mechanisms that we use to "norm" ourselves and locate ourselves within societal hierarchies. Moreover, they habituate a willingness to submit to institutional authority. As early as kindergarten, we learn to seek the favorable score, fear the unfavorable score and internalize the perceived meaning of the score, whatever it may be. Meanwhile the more general ideological and social terrain on which we are tested remains largely invisible: we are not compelled to question the institution's authority, to ponder the assumptions that drive its standards or methods of measurement, or to imagine and propose alternatives. As tests measure they also control. Theorists of cultural systems and social power--from Frankfort school Marxists to Giddens, Bourdieu and Foucault--can and should be productively applied to the testing movement.

We should also explore in our classes and through our research how testing serves as a mechanism of control. The exertion of centralized control over curriculum and instruction may be at the very heart of the contemporary testing movement. Perceptions of success in education have come to be founded on the very shaky premise that higher test scores are tantamount to higher quality education. Significantly, this focus on numerical outcomes has largely been driven by legislators and state-level administrators, not lower-level administrators and teachers. Controlling instruction in everyday classrooms is difficult without maintaining some material presence--unless you impose mandatory outcomes. It is important to emphasize that large-scale tests aren't intended to be unobtrusive mechanisms that are only relevant at the end of a particular term--they are the backbone of contemporary education reform. Tests are developed and imposed with the assumption that mandated curriculums geared toward helping students get successful test scores will follow. Nationwide, districts and states, under pressure to produce higher scores, instrumentalize day to day teaching through emphasizing testing outcomes and implementing systemic processes that are designed to reach those outcomes. The logic of large-scale testing is therefore the logic of industrial-era scientific management: efficiency and consistency are achieved through eliminating as much variance in the work of rank and file workers--in this case teachers and students--as possible.

Working in the National Writing Project, I find that this aspect of testing and curricular control is a significant challenge to the organization's central mission. The Writing Project creates fertile ground for pedagogical innovation: teachers familiarize them selves with the best available research concerning literacy and learning, and develop and share innovative ideas about their practice at meetings and conferences. However, testing and curricular mandates constantly loom as ubiquitous obstacles to the project. Stories about confrontations with administrators and peers who insist on strict conformity to pacing guides are a regular feature of NWP gatherings. Pedagogical "innovations" (like inquiry-based and/or critical approaches to writing instruction) are often simply not welcome in many systems, and when they are tolerated teachers are often warned that their deviation from standard curriculums had better lead to success on end-of-year tests.

Educators of writing teachers should make it clear to new teachers that they should add negotiation of efforts to instrumentalize their work to the long list of challenges they will face in their jobs. This will not be enough though. Teachers should not be expected to stand alone. Organizations like the NWP can be important providers of ongoing support for teachers who want to teach in ways that are not prescribed by testing outcomes and curricular mandates. The Writing Project provides a framework through which new participants can get advice and resources for dealing with obstruction from administrators and peers. NWP participants often share lines of argument and even lists of articles that support/advocate specific pedagogical approaches. More generally, teacher organizations like NWP chapters should seek ways to foster relationships with local school systems in order to have some influence on decision-making processes. These organizations can be important mechanisms through which systemic values and assumptions are critiqued and, over time, changed.

ARE YOU SOFT OR ARE YOU HARD?

It is no accident that the testing movement has emerged in America during an era of triumphant capitalism in which the national political discourse has shifted rightward. Bush's assertion that "rote is right" has more meaning than he likely intended. With test-driven education, content and method merge, as future workers learn the skills and information that will make them job-ready upon graduation--within a sovereign framework that is driven by a numerical logic and conditions submission to institutional evaluation. Teachers are compelled to become low-level technicians who pursue goals and enact methods determined elsewhere: creativity, open inquiry, agency and variance are circumscribed within a perpetually self-validating matrix that measures what it teaches and teaches what it measures. Meanwhile, public education is clearly being opened as a new frontier for private industry. Over the past two decades, testing and curriculum development have become a multi-billion dollar industry. The testing industry has seen its bottom-line grow exponentially as districts and states scramble to implement tests that meet accountability mandates. Moreover, a lucrative secondary industry has arisen that conducts research, creates test-focused curriculums, and scores tests (see Gallagher, Haney et al.). Lobbying efforts by groups that represent this industry have played an increasingly prevalent role in legislative decision-making concerning education.

I close with the question "Are you Soft or are you Hard?" because I think it is the only real question that public debate concerning education and testing allows right now. Should teachers be accountable or not? Should we have standards or not? Does education need improvement or not? Most would answer in the affirmative, but this seems to automatically justify the logic of testing. We need to ask new questions. Sophisticated, informed, critical examination of the politics of assessment can enable students to step outside of these binaries, critique the present use of testing, and imagine and pursue alternatives. Examining the political aspects of large-scale assessment highlights its historical contingency and its ideological functions. Perhaps more importantly, it reminds teachers that education is rightly a democratic entity within which we need to assert ourselves as active participants.

APPENDIX

A complete copy of A Nation at Risk: the Imperative for Educational Reform can be found at: http://www.ed.gov/pubs/NatAtRi sk/index.html

EXCELLENT SOURCES FOR BEGINNING EXAMINATIONS OF THE HISTORY OF TESTING AND MEASUREMENT IN SCHOOLS:

Crouse, James, and Dale Trushheim. The Case Against the SAT (see Works Cited below).

Giroux, Henry A. Border Crossings: Cultural Workers and the Politics of Education. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Gould, Stephen J. The Mismeasure of Man (see Works Cited below).

Fancher, Raymond E. The Intelligence Men: Makers of the IQ controversy. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1985.

Fass, P.S. "The IQ: A Cultural and Historical Framework. American Journal of Education 88.4 (1980): 431-458.

Haney, Walter. "Testing and Reasoning About Testing." Review of Educational Research 54.4 (1984): 597-684.

Haney, Walter, Madaus, George, and Robert Lyons. The Fractured Marketplace for Standardized Testing. (see Works Cited below).

Hanson, Allan F. Testing Testing: Social Consequences of the Examined Life (see Works Cited below).

Jones, Gail M., Jones, Brett D. and Tracy Hargrove. The Unintended Consequences of High-Stakes Testing. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003.

Nairn and Associates. The Reign of ETS: the Corporation that Makes up Minds. The Ralph Nader Report on the Educational Testing Service, 1980.

Sacks, Peter. Standardized Minds (see Works Cited below).

Tyack, David and Larry Cuban. Tinkering Toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995.

Zenderland, L. Measuring minds: Henry Herbert Goddard and the origins of American intelligence testing (see Works Cited below).

WORKS CITED

Aronowitz, Stanley. The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating True Higher Learning. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000.

Barone, Michael. Author, Hard America, Soft America. Interview. On The Record with Greta Van Sustern (Fox News) 17 May, 2004. Ebsco, The University of North Carolina at Charlotte Libraries, Charlotte NC. (7 July 2004)

Berlak, Harold. "Standards and the Control of Knowledge." In Failing Our Kids: Why the Testing Craze Won't Fix Our Schools, ed. Kathy Swope and Barb Miner. Milwaukee: Rethinking Schools, Ltd, 2000.93-94.

Bond, Linda Ann, Braskamp, David, and Edward D. Roeber. The Status of State Assessment Programs in the United States. Oak Brook, IL: North Central Regional Educational Laboratory and Council of Chief of State School Officers, 1996.

Chubb, John E. et al. "Our Schools and Our Future: Are We Still at Risk?" Education Next 3.2 (2003): 9-15.

Coles, Gerald. "Learning to Read--'Scientifically.'" Rethinking Schools 15.4 (2001) 31 pars. 27 July 2004. (20 Nov. 2004)

Corbett, H. Dickson, and Bruce L. Wilson. Testing, Reform, and Rebellion. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing, 1991.

Crouse, James, and Dale Trushheim. The Case against the SAT. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago Press, 1988.

Gallagher, Chris. "A Seat at the Table: Teachers Reclaiming Assessment Through Rethinking Accountability." Phi Delta Kappan, 81.7 (2000), 502-07.

Gould, Stephen J. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: W.W. Norton, 1981.

Haney, Walter, Madaus, George, and Robert Lyons. The Fractured Marketplace for Standardized Testing. Boston, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993.

Hanson, Allan F. Testing Testing: Social Consequences of the Examined Life. Berkeley: U of California Press, 1993.

Hillocks, George, Jr. The Testing Trap: How State Writing Assessments Control Learning. New York: Teachers College Press, 2002.

National Commission on Excellence in Education. A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Education Reform. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1983.

Sacks, Peter. Standardized Minds: The High Price of America's Testing Culture and What We Can Do to Change It. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing, 1999.

Walberg, Herbert J. Foreword. Kill The Messenger. By Richard P. Phelps. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2003.

Zenderland, L. Measuring Minds: Henry Herbert Goddard and the Origins of American Intelligence Testing. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.