Despite a decades-long battle to reform American education, we are still failing to prepare all American students for success in a complex, global marketplace. Increasingly, we have turned to assessment as the tool that will help us fix American education, and yet the ever more elaborate systems of standardized testing we have designed have not done the job. In an age when testing is used to create scores and rankings, enforce standards, and secure accountability, Edmund W. Gordon shows how we can use it instead to support teaching and develop students' competencies. Between 2011 and 2013,...

Despite a decades-long battle to reform American education, we are still failing to prepare all American students for success in a complex, global marketplace. Increasingly, we have turned to assessment as the tool that will help us fix American education, and yet the ever more elaborate systems of standardized testing we have designed have not done the job. In an age when testing is used to create scores and rankings, enforce standards, and secure accountability, Edmund W. Gordon shows how we can use it instead to support teaching and develop students' competencies. Between 2011 and 2013,...