Recommended reading, watching, and listening.

Does a deep dive into the testing industry and exposes how its corporate priorities guide every decision.

The definitive account of the growth of standardized testing in America.

Demonstrates how much testing is the soft science of psychology and how the biases of the scientists behind it frame our beliefs today.

A detailed and thoughtful analysis of the problems with testing from the item level to the delivery mechanism to the systems and assumptions behind them.

Exposes how one school exploited our obsession with highly rejective colleges and reveals the broken systems, persistent myths, and deep American failures fueling the admissions hunger games. Read the full review →

Full of rich academic research but written with a clarity and voice that makes it a great read — full of personality and wit.

Reading OiYan Poon is like talking to her — it teaches you things your history classes skipped. I learned about regressive legalism and the education cases involving Asian Americans that shaped college admissions in ways most people have never heard of.

An engaging and easy read that is also an enraging exposure of the systematic underfunding and exclusion of Black people from American higher education.

On my reading list.