On the Growing Use of Corporate Test Scoring Sweatshops
In April 2006 I posted on the use of Kelly Girls in Florida to score FCAT. Since then the scoring industry has worked to perfect the cheap, production-line model for scoring the hundreds of millions of tests that are making Pearson, McGraw-Hill, Kaplan, and other bottom feeders deliriously wealthy corporate bodies. Here is a recent piece that appeared in the Monthly Review, a must read called "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Test Scorer," with apologies to Alan Sillitoe:
by Dan Dimaggio
by Dan Dimaggio
Standardized testing has become central to education policy in the United States. After dramatically expanding in the wake of the No Child Left Behind Act, testing has been further enshrined by the Obama administration’s $3.4 billion “Race to the Top” grants. Given the ongoing debate over these policies, it might be useful to hear about the experiences of a hidden sector of the education workforce: those of us who make our living scoring these tests. Our viewpoint is