Avoidance of Equivalence by Leveling: Challenging the Consensus-Driven Curriculum that Defines Students as "Average"

Historically, the high-stakes component in educational testing maintained a rather low and even negligible profile in standardized assessment. Since the inception of the so-called standards movement in the early 1990s, and surely by the enactment of the No Child Left Behind mandate in 2003, teachers and school administrators have been under increasing pressure to allocate more time during the school day for annual high-stakes test preparation. [...]since public officials have become increasingly obdurate in their willingness to finance assessments that provide better long-term returns (for example, those that measure higher-order skills, such as analytical thinking, synthesis, and research skills), testing companies are lowering the academic bar by limiting content and testing basic skills so that students are more inclined to pass high-stakes examinations.