Standardized Minds: The High Price of America's Testing Culture and What We Can Do to Change it (Perseus Publishing, 2000)
Standardized Testing: It's an innocuous sounding term, isn't it? Straighforward, inexpensive, tidy, fair. Americans have grown so accustomed to filling in the "bubbles" on standardized tests that people often don't bother to question the tests' legitimacy.
But these seemingly innocuous rites of passage are neither straightforward, tidy, nor fair.
STANDARDIZED MINDS explores the nation's unhealthy and enduring obsession with standardized testing in schools, colleges and workplaces and how this tool of the so-called meritocracy affects us all, from the day we enter kindergarten to when we might apply for a new job or seek a new profession.
But while providing a vigorous critique of America's testing culture, STANDARDIZED MINDS also explores proven alternatives too such testing and ways to make the American meritocracy more accurate and fair to all people.