a brief history of standardized tests

A brief overview of Standardized Testing (NOTE: broken link at Mothering magazine. The quote below is from the article and I have added two current links to this text as well. ) and its roots in the eugenics movement is up at Mothering magazine.  Many do not know of testing's link with the eugenics movement.  An excerpt (emphases mine):

At this point, 49 states have core standards around which standardized tests are implemented. Twenty-seven of those states back up the standards in a high-stakes environment, meaning students can be held back or denied graduation based on their test scores alone. Most recently, George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind Act has mandated high-stakes testing in grades 3 through 8 across the country and guaranteed that more testing under more pressure is well on its way. One might hope that the education bureaucrats of our day would listen to the words of Carl Brigham, the creator of the SAT. Near his death, Brigham wrote a five-page letter to the president of Harvard, stating, "If the unhappy day ever comes when teachers point their students towards these newer examinations, then we may look for the inevitable distortion of education in terms of tests." Yet neither his words nor the progressive education movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s could stop the political steamroller of testing. In 1983, the Reagan administration published the report, A Nation at Risk, which went on to push for more exams as the answer to education's shortcomings and the global economic trends of the time. From then on, there was nearly uninterrupted support for widespread testing. In the last few years, however, voices challenging standardized exams have become louder.

I have linked on this blog to the work of Yong Zhao.