Biography

"Garrison's analysis of the political origins and impact of standardized tests provides an important look at their current use and misuse.... Here is an important book worthy of careful consideration. Highly recommended."— R. Roth, emerita, Rockhurst University (Choice, June 2010). “Both original and provocative, A Measure of Failure is a compelling account of the historical and contemporary relationship between standardized testing in education and processes of state formation.”— Thomas C. Pedroni, author of Market Movements: African American Involvement in School Voucher Reform. "While most school-based administrators are daily affected by state driven accountability-testing regimes, Garrison takes the time to go back and explore the origins of the rise of measurement in education. The Latin term, deus ex machina, often represents a technological sleight of hand used by playwrights to extricate actors and scripts out of sticky positions...The point being made by Garrison, although not in these words, is that the community has been conned by the deus ex machina, an implied precision and purpose, which is not what it seems. I enjoyed reading this book, twice."— Neil MacNeill, Educational Leadership, Curtin University of Technology, Australia. "By most accounts, a majority of the current generation of administrators and legislators has unwittingly bought into the mythology of standardized testing — which is why "A Measure of Failure" will be required reading in my graduate testing and assessment class next semester. Maybe, just maybe, we can prevent the next generation from succumbing to the same delusions.— Aaron W. Hughey, Department of Counseling and Student Affairs, Western Kentucky University

For most of my adult life, in and out of school, I have focused my intellectual efforts on matters of politics and ideology. Interest in education as an institution emerged out of my preoccupation with the study of social continuity and change. As schooling became an important agent of reproducing our social order, and at the same time, the proscribed method for addressing all manner of social problems (such as social inequality), it became an important instance in the dynamic of continuity and change. With national states increasingly focusing their attention on educational institutions over time, making them both the object of ridicule and preferred tool for addressing social problems, their political function is unmistakable. Yet this function is contradictory and difficult to grasp, and most importantly, frequently obscured in both education policy debates and research. It is the political functions of education reforms that are of particular interest to me.

I have published articles in the areas of educational technology, assessment and measurement, with numerous presentations at professional conferences offering political critiques of “school safety” and “character education initiatives,” theorizing political and human rights and the significance and transformation of the public/private division in society. Current research projects include the study of the rise of for-profit colleges and universities and the political significance of educational restructuring in post-Katrina New Orleans. My book, A Measure of Failure: The Political Origins of Standardized Testing, is due to be released in September 2009.

A Measure of Failure asks the timely question of how and why standardized tests became the ubiquitous standard by which educational achievement and intelligence are measured. Drawing on the insights of historical sociology, it articulates a heuristic where the setting of standards is explored as a function of political authority, bound up with the political theory and social values of that authority. Standardized tests are thus classified as political tools for ranking human worth and legitimizing social distinction. Their origin rests in the need to contend with the contradiction between our society’s declarations of formal equality and the reality of vast inequality. Public schools and our present assessment methods originate as methods for mediating this tension.

Tracing the work of two leaders in the development and use of standardized tests, case studies of Horace Mann and Alfred Binet are presented. These cases from the mid 19th and early 20th century challenge beliefs still held today, namely that standardized testing originated to efficiently measure the inputs and outputs of schooling. By marking then existing arrangements as failures, each case reveals how standardized tests were tools used to institute and justify substantive changes in how and who governed schools. Born in this crucible of failure, the book argues, testing plays a similar role today. By marking public institutions as failures under the guise of leaving “no child behind” reformers are privatizing a quintessential public good.

The book concludes with an invitation to develop standards that assist students, teachers, and parents in assessing their work with the understanding that such standard-setting is inescapably political, and that in order for it to serve the common interest, it must be premised on the inherent rights, dignity and worth of all human persons.

I hold both a BA and MA in sociology and a Ph.D. in the sociology of education. Since 1999, I have worked as a teacher educator, and now direct a new doctoral program in educational leadership. I welcome contacts and can be reached here.