Abstract
The use of standardized testing systems in the United States during the last two decades as mechanisms to enhance accountability and improve the quality of education has opened an intense debate among social scientists. Objectifying Measures adds a new chapter to this discussion by analyzing the implementation and effects of high-stakes testing in Texas, a sort of national laboratory for testing policies in the United States. Since 1984, Texas has been constructing an accountability system that in its present form mandates high-stakes examinations that determine high school graduation and grade promotion at the fourth, sixth, and ninth grades. As a critical response to this process, Amanda Johnson participated actively in the support of a bill introduced by a state legislator to establish a multiple-criteria system that would diversify the measures of performance beyond testing by including teacher recommendations, portfolios of student work, grades and also parents’ opinion. Taking that experience as an ethnographic starting point, Johnson develops an historical and conceptual analysis of the mechanisms through which the high-stakes testing system and the statistical knowledge it produces reinforce unequal educational outcomes such as segregation, retention and tracking of racial minorities. Statistics, she argues, are used to support a system of authoritative knowledge that objectifies educational reality and student’s experience, creating the notion that underperformance by racial minorities is natural and inevitable. The policy is described as the result of the political confluence of different groups from the political right fostering privatization and increasing corporate intervention in public education. This way, “the hegemony of testing as part of the marketization of education is maintained through statistical discourse” (p. 7). Overall, the book is an interesting critical approach to the politics of American education that consciously takes the risky choice of using social science as a tool for political activism.