Daniel Koretz Book Reception

4:00 to 6:30 pm
555 New Jersey Ave, NW, Washington, D.C.

You are invited to a discussion & reception for

DANIEL KORETZ

THE TESTING CHARADE:
Pretending to Make Schools Better

American education today has one goal. And it’s not teaching students.

It’s raising test scores. High-stakes testing, launched as a way to evaluate Teaching and determine whether students were learning, has become an end in itself. And it’s ruining education.

With The Testing Charade, Daniel Koretz, the nation’s foremost expert on educational testing, presents damning evidence for that charge, and builds a powerful case for why—and how—we have to fix it. Koretz brings to this book decades of close study of how we assess student learning, the reasons we do so, and all the many institutional and political incentives that have led to the endless proliferation of tests. Building his case with unimpeachable evidence, he calls out high-stakes testing as a sham, a false idol—popular with reformers across the political spectrum—that shows little evidence of leading to educational improvement.

Our students deserve the best possible education. We need to know whether it’s working. But we can’t let a desire to measure it warp the whole process. Right now, we’re getting the worst of both worlds: we’re teaching solely for tests, and we’re lying to ourselves about what the results mean. This book is the first shot in a battle to end that.

Daniel Koretz is the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the author of Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us.