Objectifying Measures: The Dominance of High-Stakes Testing and the Politics of Schooling - Hardcover

Johnson, Amanda Walker

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1592139051 ISBN 13: 9781592139057

Publisher: Temple University Press, 2009

Synopsis

In the past twenty years, the number of educational tests with high-stakes consequences—such as promotion to the next grade level or graduating from high school—has increased. At the same time, the difficulty of the tests has also increased. In Texas, a Latina state legislator introduced and lobbied for a bill that would take such factors as teacher recommendations, portfolios of student work, and grades into account for the students— usually students of color—who failed such tests. The bill was defeated.

Using several types of ethnographic study (personal interviews, observations of the Legislature in action, news broadcasts, public documents from the Legislature and Texas Education Agency), Amanda Walker Johnson observed the struggle for the bill’s passage. Through recounting this experience, Objectifying Measures explores the relationship between the cultural production of scientific knowledge (of statistics in particular) and the often intuitive resistance to objectification of those adversely affected by the power of policies underwritten as “scientific.”

About this title

About the Author

Amanda Walker Johnson is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Review

“The novelty of Objectifying Measures is the clarity with which an analysis of statistical discourse is mapped out to show its complex relationship to inequality. Johnson offers a reader-friendly ethnography that demands attention simultaneously to racial and class implications inscribed into the conceptual premise of ‘minority failure.’ Her analysis of assumptions and biases which frame and inform standardized testing as a method of defining and measuring failure/progress is timely and important. Highly recommend!”—Katya Gibel Mevorach, Associate Professor, Anthropology Department & American Studies Concentration at Grinnell College

Edition details

• Publisher: Temple University Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1592139051
• ISBN 13: 9781592139057
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 224