Standardized Minds: The High Price of America's Testing Culture

This jeremiad against the ""emotional and intellectual abuse we call standardized testing"" makes a provocative contribution to current discussions about standards and accountability in the U.S. school system. Pointing out that, by some estimates, Americans in schools, workplaces and the military take 600 million standardized tests annually, journalist Sacks argues that the standardized tests used to sort and classify Americans are ""divorced from real-world subtleties and complexities"" and measure little more than the ability to ""solve puzzles and play games."" In his effort to illuminate the profound and, he argues, often damaging consequences of these tests, particularly educational tests on children, he effectively presents research findings that are largely invisible to the public because they are published in scholarly journals. The ""accountability movement,"" spawned by the 1983 report on education ""A Nation at Risk,"" has led to more and more testing as politicians and the public continue to believe that test scores have some relation to merit. Questioning what ""merit"" means, Sacks drives home the point that test scores correlate most closely with the test taker's socioeconomic status. ""Educational policy makers,"" he contends, ""have essentially created what amounts to educational reservations for certain races and classes of American children."" Surprisingly, Sacks sees the end of affirmative action as likely to result in an increase of ""performance assessments"" as higher education struggles to avoid the ""whiteout"" resulting from sole reliance on test scores. (Feb.)