Highlights

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Campbell’s Law: the more we base social decision-making on a specific quantitative measure, the more likely it is that that measure will become distorted, ultimately corrupting the processes it’s intended to monitor.

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in the long run, attaching high-stakes, or punishments, to student standardized test scores does not improve educational outcomes. Instead, it results in a host of perverse consequences, with poor, minority, and disabled kids like Dante experiencing the greatest harms. This last point makes a lot of sense when you consider that standardized testing was first developed by eugenicists looking to organize people into racist taxonomies based on perceived ability.

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disabilities are not, contrary to normative discourse, the unfortunate possessions of individual people. Rather, they’re cultural experiences, produced by structures that enable some of us while disabling others. There’s nothing per se disabling about needing a wheelchair, for example. Disability shows up in the interaction between that wheelchair and the sidewalks, curbs, buses, and buildings designed exclusively for people who walk.

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The most reliable predictors of kids’ standardized test scores are factors like socioeconomic status, over which schools have no control.

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