Published: September 4, 1996

Whodunit?

Standardized tests have long been a bogeyman in education. For years, critics have questioned the tests' fairness, their biases, and the accuracy of summing up a child's entire achievement in a single number. In the early 1990s, Bernard Gifford, chairman of a national commission on testing, concluded, "The human animal is far more complex and far more rich than can be measured...