The Testing Bubble
The seventh-century Chinese emperor Yangdi is usually remembered as a megalomaniac who led his newly united nation into a series of debilitating wars. But Yangdi’s real legacy is his development of the world’s first standardized testing system. The idea was to locate China’s most talented rural scholars and bring them into the nascent empire’s civil service.
The history of education is filled with such earnest, progressive hopes for stan- dardized testing; Napoleon built the French bureaucracy in much the same way, and the SAT, for all its flaws, played an important role in opening up the Ivy League to Jews, Catholics, and public-school students.
The University of California and other elite colleges now acknowledge that the SAT is an incomplete measure of what students know and discriminatory against low-income students of color. But standardized testing is booming in primary and secondary schools. For the past decade, No Child Left Behind has required states to assess children in math and reading every year from third through eighth grades. The Obama administration has
Intel Winners Show What it Takes for Schools to Excel in Math and Science
There is plenty of bad news about how American schools are in crisis and students aren't keeping up with their peers around the globe. But despite the grim data on falling SAT scores and students saying our education system needs to better prepare them for college or the workforce, there are schools that are trailblazing creative, effective approaches to math and science education. Eighteen such models of K-12 innovation and excellence are among the recently announced winners of Intel's Schools of Distinction awards competition.
The schools, which were chosen from a group of 156 applications from 38 states, are a diverse cross-section of public, charter, vocational and independent campuses of different sizes—the smallest school has 58 students and the largest has 4,300. According to Carlos Contreras, Intel's United States education director, each campus
