All Kinds of Testing: To What End?

Here are a few good resources to bring you up to speed on testing in our schools, especially the first one.

1)  NPR's “The Past, Present And Future of High-Stakes Testing” is an excellent, short update on testing. Listen to Steve Inskeep interview Anya Kamanetz, author of The Test: Why Our Schools Are Obsessed With Standardized Testing — ButYou Don’t Have to Be.
2)  Check out The Smartest Kids in the World by Amanda Ripley to learn about a test that has been given to 15-year old students all over the world, using the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA).
3)  “Ivy League’s meritocracy lie: How Harvard and Yale cook the books for the 1 percent” by Lani Guinier

“. . . the name was changed first to the Scholastic Assessment Test (keeping the handy, well-known acronym) and later to the SAT Reasoning Test. Call it what you will, the SAT still promises something it can’t deliver: a way to measure merit. Yet the increasing reliance on standardized test scores as a status placement in society has created something alien to the very values of our democratic society yet seemingly with a life of its own: a testocracy.”