The testing charade

Daniel M. Koretz

For decades we've been studying, experimenting with, and wrangling over different approaches to improving public education, and there's still little consensus on what works and what to do. The one thing people seem to agree on is that schools need to be held accountable - we need to know whether what they're doing is actually working. But what does it mean in practice? High-stakes tests. Lots of them. And that has created a crisis in American schools. Daniel Koretz, one of the nation's foremost experts on educational testing, argues in The Testing Charade that the whole idea of test-based accountability has failed - it has increasingly become an end in itself, harming students and corrupting the very ideals of teaching. In this powerful polemic, built on unimpeachable evidence and rooted in decades of experience with educational testing, Koretz calls out high-stakes testing as a sham...