Standardized Minds: The High Price Of America's Testing Culture - Hardcover

Sacks, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0738202436 ISBN 13: 9780738202433

Publisher: Da Capo Press, 2000

Synopsis

We’ve been told time and again that standardized tests aren’t perfect but that they’re the best tool we have to make important decisions. Is this really true? What are the flaws of such testing? Why is your father’s occupation a better predictor of SAT scores than virtually any other factor? Whose interests do these tests serve? And, most important, what can we do to hold one another accountable to standards at all levels of schools and in the workplace? Standardized Minds dramatically shows how our unhealthy and enduring obsession with intelligence testing affects us all, from the day we enter kindergarten to the day we apply for that corporate job. Drawing creative solutions from the headlines and the frontlines, Sacks demonstrates proven alternatives to such testing and details a plan to make the American meritocracy legitimate and fair.

About this title

About the Author

Peter Sacks is a journalist and essayist. His essays on education and American culture have appeared in Change, Thought & Action, The American Enterprise, and The New York Times. He lives in Boise, Idaho.

Reviews

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.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Da Capo Press
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0738202436
• ISBN 13: 9780738202433
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368