A masterly fly-on-the-wall account of one school’s year of standardized-test stress.

The pressure is on at schools across America. In recent years, reforms such as No Child Left Behind have created a new vision of education that emphasizes provable results, uniformity, and greater attention for floundering students. Schools are expected to behave more like businesses and are judged almost solely on the bottom line: test scores.

To see if this world is producing better students, Linda Perlstein immersed herself in a suburban Maryland elementary school, once deemed a failure, that is now held up as an example of reform done right. Perlstein explores the rewards and costs of that transformation, and the resulting portrait—detailed, human, and truly thought-provoking—provides the first detailed view of how new education policies are reshaped by human realities.

Praise for Tested

“What Perlstein has managed to do in this excellent book is the same magical trick Barbara Ehrenreich pulled off so well in Nickled and Dimed: taking public policy and its consequences down to the micro-personal level and making it real to readers.”
                                                                                                 —Daily Kos

Excerpt: Tested, by Linda Perlstein Prologue Ain’t No Stopping Us Now You could not tell by looking that Tina McKnight was in pain. Her hair was perfectly curled and she sat up straight in her desk chair, underneath a series of watercolors of Taxco, the Mexican town she loved to visit. That morning Tina had chosen a pantsuit of salmon pink and pinned a matching silk flower to her lapel, as if she could will good news through cheerful attire. Her back throbbed, sore from hours of bending over the toilet, possibly from food poisoning but more likely from stress. It was a week and a half before the end of the school year, and McKnight, the principal of Tyler Heights Elementary School in Annapolis, Maryland, had a lot on her mind. She was worried about her sick mother, whom she could not care for the day before because she’d been stuck babysitting strangers who had appropriated the playground for an illicit soccer tournament. (Corona bottles and Pampers had been scattered all over the grass until Tina appeared with trash bags; god knows what was still left.) Today drops of water plopped rhythmically into strategically placed trash cans on the fifth-grade hall—trouble with the air conditioning, one more thing that needed to be fixed. Other problems obsessing McKnight: It didn’t look like she’d get the school uniform plan in place by fall, as she’d wanted to. The discipline data had stopped improving, even with all the prizes given to students as behavior incentives, so McKnight hoped another principal in the district would call to chip in for the five-thousand-dollar consultant whose book promised “discipline without stress, punishment and rewards.” Then there was the secretary whose father had suffered a stroke, the assistant whose dad was headed to the hospital for his heart, and the kindergarten class that at the moment had neither teacher nor assistant nor substitute. On top of all that, something far bigger was looming. It wa ... continue reading >

Review: Tested (Washington Post) Perlstein's narrative is much bleaker, however. Deploying the fine fly-on-the-wall reporting skills that made her previous book, Not Much Just Chillin', so uncannily evocative of the lives of middle school kids, she opens a window into a school that has become over-the-top test obsessed. Along the way, she weaves in extensive discussions of federal education policy, pushing readers to the conclusion that the standards and accountability movement in general -- and No Child Left Behind in particular -- have gone badly awry. Perlstein paints a sobering portrait of Tyler Heights. Students slog through a rigidly scripted curriculum and spend an inordinate amount of time practicing the paragraph-length "BCRs" (for "brief constructed response") that are used to answer questions on the Maryland state test. Science and social studies are given short shrift: Cool experiments, field trips and just about all activities "seen as irrelevant" to the state exam are backloaded to the end of the school year. ... (Read the full review.)

Review: Tested (Newsweek) Although No Child Left Behind rules are changing education, the changes we’re getting may not be the ones we want. So writes veteran journalist Linda Perlstein, who got total access for a year at Tyler Heights Elementary, a back-from-the-brink school in Annapolis, Md. She charts in chilling detail how the grinding test-prep culture has infiltrated elementary schools. Day after day, administrators, teachers and students engage in what seems like a Sisyphean struggle to meet and maintain No Child Left Behind standards. The title of her book—“Tested”—says it all: students at Tyler are subjected to an almost constant battery of federal, state, regional and schoolwide assessment. Teachers spend most of the year drilling kids in order to help them perform well on exams. The administration encourages it: “What gets taught is what gets tested,” admits the principal. Depth of understanding, context, creativity and intellectual curiosity are forgotten in the effort to raise scores. Social studies and science are put on the back burner, too. Perlstein asks the right question: is this fill-in-the-blank culture making our kids smarter or are we merely teaching to the bottom? ... (Read the full review.)

Review: Tested (SusanG, Daily Kos) What Perlstein has managed to do in this excellent book is the same magical trick Barbara Ehrenreich pulled off so well in Nickled and Dimed: taking public policy and its consequences down to the micro-personal level and making it real to readers. Through the author’s eyes and ears, we hear of the hopes and dreams of the teacher agonizing over her boyfriend’s deployment to Iraq, the principal’s worries about her mother, a student’s worries about his brother, all unfolding against the backdrop of school success defined in very depersonalized statistics. The numbers give way to human stories as Perlstein shuttles between telling the history of NCLB adoption, the layers of bureaucracy, the Bush crony testing industry, the specifics of the law and profiles of those struggling with the standards. The result is a smooth, captivating, heartbreaking read that’s informative on policy and devastating in depicting the crushing test environment, as it moves like a novel toward the dramatic climax: Will Tyler Heights Elementary achieve a repeat of its astounding scoring success the previous year? Or was it all a fluke? As the chapters wind down, the dramatic interest ramps up, proving that you can write about public policy in way that makes it as engaging in a summer blockbuster. ... (Read the full review.)

Linda Perlstein, who spent five years covering education for the Washington Post, is the author of Tested and Not Much Just Chillin’. She speaks nationwide to educators and parents. She grew up in Milwaukee and now lives with her husband in Baltimore and western Virginia.

Interview: Linda Perlstein on Obama's Education Agenda Former Washington Post reporter Linda Perlstein spent a full year immersed in the day-to-day life of Tyler Heights, a Maryland elementary school striving to meet the student test standards set down under the No Child Left Behind law. The book she wrote about that experience, Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade, is a masterly examination of the ambiguities, contradictions, and unintended consequences that flow from even well-intentioned educational reform. Perlstein combines dispassion and sympathy as she introduces readers to the principal, staff, and students of Tyler Heights, and her perspective is refreshingly--and, for readers who don't work in education--helpfully objecitive: she broadly supports test-based accountability for schools and teachers, but is convinced that one type of test will never tell you what you need to know to evaluate either teacher or student performance; she's in favor of some form of merit pay for teachers, but is quick to point out that some teachers, in especially challenging schools or classes, start out at a disadvantage; she thinks the federal government needs to put more money into the public school system but is under no illusions that money alone will fix our schools. Combined with her storytelling gifts, the clarity of her thinking and her conviction that there are no easy answers to the problems of public education make Perlstein one of the most interesting journalists writing about the subject today. Linda Perlstein is currently Public Editor at Education Week. She recently spoke to Progressive Book Club about the Obama administration's education agenda, the challenges facing public schooling in America, and the prospects for meaningful reform. Q: We have a pretty good sense of continue reading >