Objectifying Measures: The Dominance of High-Stakes Testing and the Politics of Schooling Book

In the past twenty years, the number of educational tests with high-stakes consequencesâ??such as promotion to the next grade level or graduating from high schoolâ??has increased. At the same time, the difficulty of the tests has also increased. In Texas, a Latina state legislator introduced and lobbied for a bill that would take such factors as teacher recommendations, portfolios of student work, and grades into account for the studentsâ?? usually students of colorâ??who failed such tests. The bill was defeated. Using several types of ethnographic study (personal interviews, observations of the Legislature in action, news broadcasts, public documents from the Legislature and Texas Education Agency), Amanda Walker Johnson observed the struggle for the bill’s passage. Through recounting this experience, Objectifying Measures explores the relationship between the cultural production of scientific knowledge (of statistics in particular) and the often intuitive resistance to objectification of those adversely affected by the power of policies underwritten as “scientific.”Read More