Unraveling the Assessment Industrial Complex: Understanding How Testing Perpetuates Inequity and Injustice in America

This book offers a comprehensive critique of how the assessment industry and standardized testing adversely impact students, teachers, and society. The authors present the case that the interconnected developments of the testing industry and the Assessment Industrial Complex (AIC) have effectively anchored American schooling to testing. Using an antiracist lens, the authors deconstruct the AIC, exposing the neoliberal agenda of education reformers and how proponents utilize the rhetoric of testing, and the data extracted from them, to normalize the reliance on AIC systems. This critique further exposes education reformers’ ideological agenda, their hypocrisy, and how they grossly profit from the AIC at the expense of society’s marginalized and most vulnerable students. The COVID-19 pandemic, society’s racial unrest, and anti-testing movements have aligned to underscore the need to examine systemic oppression and the impact it has on society through our education system. This text exposes how standardized testing perpetuates these injustices and provides the opportunity to disrupt the systems they rely upon and bolster the societal resistance that is needed.

Michelle Tenam-Zemach is the Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at Nova Southeastern University.

Daniel R. Conn is the Associate Professor of Teacher Education, Master of Education Program Director at Minot State University.

Paul T. Parkison is Professor and Chair of Teaching, Learning & Curriculum in the College of Education & Human Services at University of North Florida.