This book is a genius thing. Though Warren would balk at the term "genius," having uncovered the violent and exclusionary use of the term, but still. This is the work of a brave practitioner, a teacher who investigates the system that misled her. As a parent, I'm changed by this book. I'm rethinking the kind of education I want for my kids. The book is a bracing, shattering, and crucial read. Anyone who cares about education, education policy, equity, or kids should read this. I hope it becomes required reading for anyone designing curriculum, education policy, school administrators. Warren lays out a history of violence and intentional exclusion; she also lays out a path—if we are brave enough to take it—to get our schools back on track to teaching kids in a way that honors their humanity and results in, get this, better education.
~Lulu Miller, co-host of Radiolab and author of Why Fish Don't Exist
Written in an accessible and engaging style, this book asks us to face, as its author did, the atrocities humans have committed under the auspices of objectivity and righteousness. Refusing systematic racism disguised as scientific process and progress, Warren challenges us to recognize the ostensibly objective practice of standardized testing as violent and deadly, to reject the testing premises and practices that destroy human lives, and to work instead toward justice in education.
~Alison Cook-Sather, author of Co-Creating Equitable Teaching and Learning: Structuring Student Voice into Higher Education
Wendy Warren has written a compelling account highlighting the harm cause by our test-based educational policies, which, whether intended or unintended, support a false linear hierarchy of intelligence, merit, ability and/or worth. Starting from testing's modern roots in eugenics, Warren illuminates the through line to the present, from little-known historical facts to testing's impacts upon real people. Readers will better understand why the multi-billion-dollar testing industry's house of cards is slowly beginning to, and should, collapse.
~Jay Rosner, Executive Director of The Princeton Review Foundation
Warren's book provides a weapon to confront the meritocracy myths, such as standardized tests, which continue to hinder improvement. While Eugenics' mismeasurements of human intelligence were deemed invalid in the last century, their resurgence is alarming. With meticulously researched facts, she describes the origins of educators' over-reliance on standardized testing. Relevant research shows that the learning styles, emotional intelligence, and mental development of all students are not assessed justly. Warren calls to action anyone who believes public schools are community institutions worth investment.
~Jacqueline G. Burnside, Professor of Sociology at Berea College
As educators struggle with the disconnect between standardized test results and student learning and potential, An Illusion of Equity is the book we have been waiting for. Warren explores the historical roots of conditions that encourage us to expect and accept unequal results by exposing the ideas upon which the testing model was constructed. By revealing threads we can pull to unbind our education system from the smoke and mirrors of testing, Warren envisions a future where schools are relationship-centered ecosystems of mutual thriving. There is hope.
~Jacqueline Battalora, author of Birth of A White Nation: The invention of white people and its relevance today
Wendy Zagray Warren's carefully researched, enlightening book is an important contribution to this country's debate over systemic inequities. No doubt her thesis that the American system of educational testing has historical roots in eugenics, Nazi ideology, and white supremacy, will unnerve and disturb. But it is precisely the kind of challenging, heartfelt analysis that demands our attention and, hopefully, action. From decades of experience as a classroom teacher, Warren's love of students shines through and should motivate all of us to reimagine and strive for a system that values, respects and nourishes each child.
~Deborah Lauter, executive director of The Olga Lengyel Institute for Holocaust Studies and Human Rights
Our nation's system of required standardized academic tests was built on a mountain of good intentions designed to cure inequities, raise academic performance, and improve our nation's economic competitiveness. In An Illusion of Equity: The Legacy of Eugenics in Today's Education, Zagray Warren takes both the origins of these intentions and their real impact to task, exposing deeply systemic flaws in their logic and consequences—which are serving to reinforce (rather than cure) the problems they set out to solve. This work is deeply provocative and the arguments and concepts it raises need to be brought to the table as we consider the future of standardized testing, and of public education itself.
~Jason E. Glass, commissioner and chief learner of the Kentucky Department of Education
Every teacher, parent, administrator, and policymaker concerned about the proliferation of high-stakes testing in American schools needs to read this book. Through the eyes of a teacher, Warren tackles the veneer of 'norm referencing' and 'cut scores,' and shows how a historically rooted, racist, classist ideology has infused education with profoundly harmful, multi-generational consequences. This work makes visible an infrastructure of human worth and ability that has long been obscured, to our mutual detriment.
~Ann Gibson Winfield, professor at Roger Williams University and author of Eugenics and Education and Education in America
