Measuring Up

Your child is more than a score. But in the era of No Child Left Behind and the Common Core, many are accusing America's public education system of sacrificing substantial learning and taxpayer dollars in favor of high-stakes testing that doesn't measure what really matters.

In The Test: Why Our Schools are Obsessed with Standardized Testing -- But You Don't Have to Be, Anya Kamenetz dives into the surprising history and tempestuous politics that have led to the ubiquitous tests we see in public K-12 classrooms across the country. Beyond dilemmas about measuring the performance of students, Kamenetz also explores alternatives to the over-testing crisis in an effort to ask: what and how should we be teaching in a competitive and increasingly globalized world? And how can we best measure the progress of education in a way that allows us to hold teachers, education administrators, and policymakers equally accountable?