How Testing Came to Dominate American Schools

How Testing Came to Dominate American Schools PDF Author: Gerard Giordano
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9780820472553
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
Although originally designed as instruments to gauge students' progress, tests eventually were used to modify curricula, learning materials, pedagogy, and many practical features of schooling. Tests were employed to shape attitudes toward national issues such as employment, immigration, and defense. Worried about the enormous consequences that were at stake, advocates and opponents pitched their cases to educators, parents, journalists, and policymakers and also targeted special audiences. Testing proponents pleaded with military leaders, businesspeople, and scholastic publishers while their adversaries appealed to job seekers, college applicants, racial minorities, and anti-establishmentarians. This book illustrates how all of these parties showed interest; many became passionate; and some decisively influenced the course of American educational testing.

How Testing Came to Dominate American Schools

How Testing Came to Dominate American Schools PDF Author: Gerard Giordano
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9780820472553
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 314

Get Book

Book Description
Although originally designed as instruments to gauge students' progress, tests eventually were used to modify curricula, learning materials, pedagogy, and many practical features of schooling. Tests were employed to shape attitudes toward national issues such as employment, immigration, and defense. Worried about the enormous consequences that were at stake, advocates and opponents pitched their cases to educators, parents, journalists, and policymakers and also targeted special audiences. Testing proponents pleaded with military leaders, businesspeople, and scholastic publishers while their adversaries appealed to job seekers, college applicants, racial minorities, and anti-establishmentarians. This book illustrates how all of these parties showed interest; many became passionate; and some decisively influenced the course of American educational testing.

An Age of Accountability

An Age of Accountability PDF Author: John L. Rury
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 197883229X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 140

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Book Description
An Age of Accountability highlights the role of test-based accountability as a policy framework in American education from 1970 to 2020. For more than half a century, the quest to hold schools and educators accountable for academic achievement has relied almost exclusively on standardized assessment. The theory of change embedded in almost all test-based accountability programs held that assessment with stipulated consequences could lead to major improvements in schools. This was accomplished politically by proclaiming lofty goals of attaining universal proficiency and closing achievement gaps, which repeatedly failed to materialize. But even after very clear disappointments, no other policy framework has emerged to challenge its hegemony. The American public today has little confidence in institutions to improve the quality of goods and services they provide, especially in the public sector. As a consequence, many Americans continue to believe that accountability remains a vital necessity, even if educators and policy scholars disagree.

Testing in American Schools

Testing in American Schools PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Educational tests and measurements
Languages : en
Pages : 56

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Book Description


Encyclopedia of the Social and Cultural Foundations of Education: A-H ; 2, I-Z ; 3, Biographies, visual history, index

Encyclopedia of the Social and Cultural Foundations of Education: A-H ; 2, I-Z ; 3, Biographies, visual history, index PDF Author: Eugene F. Provenzo
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 1412906784
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 1393

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Book Description
The 'Encyclopedia' provides an introduction to the social and cultural foundations of education. The first two volumes consist of A-Z entries, featuring essays representing the major disciplines including philosophy, history, and sociology, and a third volume is made up of documentary, photographic, and visual resources.

Common Sense Questions about School Administration

Common Sense Questions about School Administration PDF Author: Gerard Giordano
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1475812620
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 173

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Book Description
Parents have questions for school administrators. They want to know how they hire teachers, erect facilities, select learning materials, protect students, allocate budgets, use data, make forecasts, measure progress, and compete with for-profit schools. This book examines the questions they pose, the answers they elicit, the allies they attract, the adversaries they arouse, and the improvements they prod.

Unraveling the Assessment Industrial Complex

Unraveling the Assessment Industrial Complex PDF Author: Michelle Tenam-Zemach
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000360555
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book 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.

Handbook of Social Influences in School Contexts

Handbook of Social Influences in School Contexts PDF Author: Kathryn R. Wentzel
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317670868
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 626

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Book Description
The Handbook of Social Influences in School Contexts draws from a growing body of research on how and why various aspects of social relationships and contexts contribute to children’s social and academic functioning within school settings. Comprised of the latest studies in developmental and educational psychology, this comprehensive volume is perfect for researchers and students of Educational Psychology. Beginning with the theoretical perspectives that guide research on social influences, this book presents foundational research before moving on to chapters on peer influence and teacher influence. Next, the book addresses ways in which the school context can influence school-related outcomes (including peer and teacher-student relationships) with specific attention to research in motivation and cognition. Within the chapters authors not only present current research but also explore best-practices, drawing in examples from the classroom. With chapters from leading experts in the field, The Handbook of Social Influences in School Contexts provides the first complete resource on this topic.

American Special Education

American Special Education PDF Author: Gerard Giordano
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9780820486956
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
This book is an account of the epic struggle for special education in America's schools. It chronicles the actions of community leaders, families, caregivers, instructors, physicians, scientists, lawyers, judges, lawmakers, businesspersons, journalists, social activists, and persons with disabilities. It details the creation of facilities in which special learners would be safe, productive, independent, respected, and self-fulfilled. The book discusses techniques for assessing the presence, scope, and etiology of disabilities. Finally, American Special Education describes novel, sometimes expensive, and frequently controversial interventions, and places each development within the remarkable confluence of social and political circumstances that propelled the transformation of special education.

Collateral Damage

Collateral Damage PDF Author: Sharon L. Nichols
Publisher: Harvard Education Press
ISBN: 1612500803
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
Drawing on their extensive research, Nichols and Berliner document and categorize the ways that high-stakes testing threatens the purposes and ideals of the American education system. For more than a decade, the debate over high-stakes testing has dominated the field of education. This passionate and provocative book provides a fresh perspective on the issue and powerful ammunition for opponents of high-stakes tests. Their analysis is grounded in the application of Campbell’s Law, which posits that the greater the social consequences associated with a quantitative indicator (such as test scores), the more likely it is that the indicator itself will become corrupted—and the more likely it is that the use of the indicator will corrupt the social processes it was intended to monitor. Nichols and Berliner illustrate both aspects of this “corruption,” showing how the pressures of high-stakes testing erode the validity of test scores and distort the integrity of the education system. Their analysis provides a coherent and comprehensive intellectual framework for the wide-ranging arguments against high-stakes testing, while putting a compelling human face on the data marshalled in support of those arguments.

Handbook of Research on Educational Leadership for Equity and Diversity

Handbook of Research on Educational Leadership for Equity and Diversity PDF Author: Linda C. Tillman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113512843X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 758

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Book Description
The rapid growth of diversity within U.S. schooling and the heightened attention to the lack of equity in student achievement, school completion, and postsecondary attendance has made equity and diversity two of the principle issues in education, educational leadership, and educational leadership research. The Handbook of Research on Educational Leadership for Equity and Diversity is the first research-based handbook that comprehensively addresses the broad diversity in U.S. schools by race, ethnicity, culture, language, gender, disability, sexual identity, and class. The Handbook both highly values the critically important strengths and assets that diversity brings to the United States and its schools, yet at the same time candidly critiques the destructive deficit thinking, biases, and prejudices that undermine school success for many groups of students. Well-known chapter authors explore diversity and related inequities in schools and the achievement problems these issues present to school leaders. Each chapter reviews theoretical and empirical evidence of these inequities and provides research-based recommendations for practice and for future research. Celebrating the broad diversity in U.S. schools, the Handbook of Research on Educational Leadership for Equity and Diversity critiques the inequities connected to that diversity, and provides evidence-based practices to promote student success for all children.