Book Focus

You and Testing: A Casual Relationship?

Since the advent of high-stakes standardized testing, education data has been used to grade schools, reward “high-performing” campuses with more money, and increasingly, to determine teacher pay. With that in mind, especially during the spring testing season, it’s important for you to understand data. For that, there’s no better teacher than independent education researcher Gerald Bracey. In his new book, Reading Educational Research: How to Avoid Getting Statistically Snookered (Heinemann), Bracey provides easy-to-understand lessons on such concepts as correlation, and also asks readers to consider the many ways that data can be abused. These days, reading the numbers means calling the shots—so make sure it’s you doing it.