Future lawyer Theodore Boone finds himself in the middle of a cheating scandal when an anonymous tip leads the Strattenberg school board to investigate suspicious standardized testing scores at another local middle school

"The book introduces educational students and practitioners to the use of statistics in education"--

Award-winning author, public intellectual, and former Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch critiques a lifetime's worth of school reforms and reveals the simple--yet difficult--truth about how we can create actual change in public schools.

This book offers far more than an introduction to the principles of assessment of student learning outcomes in the context of program review. Within a clearly structured framework, it systematically shares the good practices of some forty institutions recognized by independent scholars for their improvements in teaching/learning, research, and service, to offer examples and ideas for others to learn from and adapt. While the book focuses on assessment...

Discusses standardized testing in schools and the controversy about its value as a tool, the history of testing, standards, and scoring, the No Child Left Behind Act, the effects on teaching, cheating among students and teachers, and public opinion about the topic.

"In many public schools, students are spending up to 28 percent of instructional time on testing and test prep. Starting this year, the introduction of the Common Core State Standards Initiative in 45 states will bring an unprecedented level of new, more difficult, and longer mandatory tests to nearly every classroom in the nation up to five times a year--forcing our national testing obsession to a crisis point. Taxpayers are spending extravagant...

This collection of articles pro and con on school reform debates the policies that should guide reform; how students, teachers, and schools should be evaluated; the role of school choice in reform; and whether curriculum content should be reformed.

We are in an era of radical distrust of public education. Increasingly, we turn to standardized tests and standardized curricula-now adopted by all fifty states-as our national surrogates for trust. Legendary school founder and reformer Deborah Meier believes fiercely that schools have to win our faith by showing they can do their job. But she argues just as fiercely that standardized testing is precisely the wrong way to that end. The tests themselves,...

"Our students are tested to an extent that is unprecedented in American history and unparalleled anywhere in the world. Politicians and businesspeople, determined to get tough with students and teachers, have increased the pressure to raise standardized test scores. Unfortunately, the effort to do so typically comes at the expense of more meaningful forms of learning." "That disturbing conclusion emerges from Alfie Kohn's devastating new indictment...