Jim Horn, Denise Wilburn The Mismeasure of Education

With new student assessments and teacher evaluation schemes in the planning or early implementationphases, this book takes a step back to examine the ideological and historical grounding, potential benefits,scholarly evidence, and ethical basis for the new generation of test based accountability measures. Afterproviding the political and cultural contexts for the rise of the testing accountability movement in the 1960sthat culminated almost forty years later in No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, this book then moveson to provide a policy history and social policy analysis of value-added testing in Tennessee that is framedaround questions of power relations, winners, and losers.In examining the issues and exercise of power that are sustained in the long-standing policy of standardizedtesting in schools, this work provides a big picture perspective on assessment practices over time in the U.S.; by examining the rise of value-added assessment in Tennessee, a fine-grained and contemporary case isprovided within that larger context. The last half of the book provides a detailed survey of the researchbasedcritiques of value-added methodology, while detailing an aggressive marketing campaign to makevalue-added modeling (VAM) a central component of reform strategies following NCLB. The last chapterand epilogue place the continuation of test-based accountability practices within the context of an emergingpushback against privatization, high stakes testing, and other education r...