Chapter 1: Introduction: Measuring History

National and state-level policymakers have invested considerable faith in testing as a lever for positive educational change. As former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education Chester Finn (1995) notes, national educational reforms will fail without “a meaningful examination or assessment system” (p. 121). State-level reformers apparently concur: New York State Education Commissioner Richard Mills asserts, “instruction won’t change until the tests change” (Grant, 1997, p. 271).

Policymakers’ faith in testing finds little support in academic research, however. As the first decade of the recent wave of educational reform crested, Stake and Rugg (1991) reported, “in sixty years of vast international research on school testing, the policy of emphasizing test performance in order to improve education has never been validated” (p. xx).