Full Description
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.
Contents
Foreword: Because We Know There is No Excuse for Doing Nothing; Introduction: The Upside Down; 1. Introducing the Assessment Industrial Complex: How This Book Came to Be; 2.Testing and Society: How We Got to Where We Are; 3. Strange Bedfellows: How Test-Driven Accountability Became Common Sense; 4. Testing for Profit: Billionaire Boys' Club, EdReformers and All Matter of Money; 5. Students, Teachers, and Testing: An Existential Crisis in the Making; 6.A Path to Hope and Change: The Time is Now
