This paper is addressed primarily to those educators skeptical of or outright hostile to the regime of standardized testing facing schools, children, and teachers
The central theme of the paper is that standardized testing today is often used to attack or punish educators and/or schools, but that educators should not on that ground oppose testing; it is the use, not the test, that we should oppose. The tests, I will argue, are potentially liberating tools that can enhance both equity for the poor and democratic governance in general.
I also argue that the harmful effects attributed to testing are (1) not the consequence of testing at all, but evidence of educational difficulties that long pre-dates the tests, and (2) if tests do follow from the tests in some sense, they do not do so inevitably.
