An Illusion of Equity: The Legacy of Eugenics in Today's Education

Public education plays a crucial role in crafting a nation's future.In the United States, education reform policy, particularly the reliance on large-scale, standardized testing, is a growing topic of national conversation and concern.An Illusion of Equity: The Legacy of Eugenics in Today's Education demonstrates how centuries of propaganda have led us to accept the idea that test scores indicate something so valuable about human beings that they should be used to organize society. Drawing on decades of experience as an educator, author Wendy Zagray Warren unpacks the origins of this practice, inviting us to probe the ideologies underlying testing procedures and score interpretation and to evaluate the rationale for using test scores as the sole markers for academic achievement.From the beginning, large-scale tests have produced scores divided by race and class.Initially, these results aligned with the eugenic ideology of its creators.Warren shows that while the rhetoric used to justif