SOCIALISM AND DEMOCRACY ON STANDARDIZED TESTING

Check out the most recent issue of Socialism and Democracy, and especially Andrew Hartman's article on standardized testing. Hartman tries to show how standardized testing operates as part of a scholastic apparatus of capitalist discipline, molding knowledge in a form that recognizes richness, whiteness, and maleness as "natural." In sum, "the mission of attaining higher SAT scores, hypothetically undertaken by every American student, limits the space where movement outside the demands of social production can occur, particularly dissent and other types of subversive energy... In this regard, schools train students to coordinate individual action with the needs of the political economy, in both explicit and implicit ways."