High Stakes: Poverty, Testing, and Failure in American Schools, 2nd Edition - Tapa dura

I know of no other book that so clearly shows how our fascination with testing, standards, and accountability fails miserably to deal with the daily realities of education and poverty in this country. High States provides a richly detailed picture of these realities and deserves to be read by anyone concerned with the educational lives of poor children. -- Michael W. Apple, John Bascom Professor of Curriculum and Instruction and Educational Policy Studies, University of Wisconsin, Madison; author,

High Stakes is a critical ethnography of an underfunded public elementary school in this era of accountability and high stakes testing. The book was written during the year the authors served as third and fourth grade teachers, and it juxtaposes the experiences of mostly minority children of poverty and their teachers with an examination of high stakes testing policies and the loss of a comprehensive education to political dictates.