Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

Psychometric Practice and the Problem of Assessment in Education 823
are in themselves attacks on public education and those who attend and work in public schools.
By marking so many of the nation’s schools as failures, the law is functioning to devalue public
education. This discrediting is necessary if new arrangements are to be put into place, such as
charter schools and voucher schemes. Efforts to alter the sense of the value of public education
might function to assimilate Americans to a lower standard of education, not to a higher one. For
if the society does not organize for universal public education—publicly financed and publicly
controlled—the overall level of education will decline. In this way, standards in educational
assessment not only are bound up with attempts to differentially value human beings and thereby
justify inequalities, but are presently serving to devalue the notion of public education itself by
marking the institution as a failure.
SUGGESTED READING
Berka, K. (1983). Measurement: Its Concepts, Theories, and Problems (A. Riska, Trans.). Boston: Kluwer.
Nash, R. (1990). Intelligence and Realism: A Materialist Critique of IQ. New York: St. Martin’s.
Ward, A. W., Stoker, H. W., and Murray-Ward, M. (Eds.). (1996). Educational Measurement: Origins,
Theories and Explication (vol. 1). Lanham, MD: University Press of America.