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This book has received the AESA (American Educational Studies Association) Critics Choice Award 2012.
This book overturns the typical conception of standards, empowering educators by providing concrete examples of how top-down models of assessment can be embraced and used in ways that are consistent with critical pedagogies. Although standards, as broad frameworks for setting learning targets, are not necessarily problematic, when they are operationalized as high-stakes assessments, test-based pedagogies emerge and frequently dominate the curriculum, leaving little room for critical pedagogies. In addition, critics maintain that high-stakes assessments perpetuate current class structures by maintaining skill gaps and controlling ideology, particularly beliefs in individualism, meritocracy, and what counts as knowledge. This book offers readers a deepened awareness of how educators can alleviate the effects of standardization, especially for students in poor and working-class communities. As teachers negotiate their roles in this time of increasing regulation and standardization, it is essential to maintain and model a critical stance toward curriculum and instruction. Educators know why this approach is vital: This book illustrates how to make it happen.

Using Standards and High-Stakes Testing for Students: Exploiting Power with Critical Pedagogy

Contents: Wayne Au: Foreword - Julie A. Gorlewski/Brad J. Porfilio/David A. Gorlewski: Introduction - Joshua Garrison: Academic Labor as Alienated Labor: Resisting Standardized Testing - Ted Purinton: Teachers as Professionals: Owning Instructional Means and Negotiating Curricular Ends - P. L. Thomas: Speaking Empowerment to Crisis: Unmasking Accountability through Critical Discourse - Victor H. Diaz: Teaching through the Test: Building Life Changing Academic Achievement and Critical Capacity - Nicholas Daniel Hartlep/Antonio L. Ellis: Just What Is Response to Intervention and What's It Doing in a Nice Field Like Education? A Critical Race Theory Examination of Response to Intervention - Andrea Hyde: The Yoga in Schools Movement: Using Standards for Educating the Whole Child and Making Space for Teacher Self-Care - Patricia Jacobs/Danling Fu: Students with Learning Disabilities Writing in an Inclusion Classroom - Lindsey Russo: «Standardized» Play and Creativity for Young Children? The Climate of Increased Standardization and Accountability in Early Childhood Classrooms - Shawgi Tell: Occupying the Space for Change: The Effects of Neo-liberalism in a Public School in Metro Buffalo - Rosemary A. Millham: The Race to Somewhere: Experiential Education as an Argument for Not Teaching to the Test - Katie Greene/Peggy Albers: Making Writing Matter: Creating Spaces for Students in the Research Process - Kathy Garland/Marion Mayer: Traditional Language Arts Viewed through a Media Lens: Helping Secondary Students Develop Critical Literacy with Media Literacy Education - Julie A. Gorlewski: Teaching from the Test: Using High-Stakes Assessments to Enhance Student Learning - David A. Gorlewski: Standardizing Effective Pedagogical Practices - Lauren P. Hoffman/Brad J. Porfilio: A Counternarrative of Subversion and Resistance: Hijacking NCATE to Promote Equity and Social Justice in a College of Education.