The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better, Koretz Daniel

High-stakes tests. Lots of them. And that has become a major problem. Daniel Koretz, one of the nations 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, a false idol that is ripe for manipulation and shows little evidence of leading to educational improvement. Rather than setting up incentives to divert instructional time to pointless test prep, he argues, we need to measure what matters, and measure it in multiple ways--not just via standardized tests.