Test, Measure, Punish

How the Threat of Closure Harms Students, Destroys Teachers, and Fails Schools

Erin Michaels

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9781479823390
• eBook ISBN: 9781479823406
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

The risk of closure and repression in schools In the last two decades, education officials have closed a rising number of public schools nationwide related to low performance. These schools are mainly located in neglected neighborhoods with high concentrations of poverty. Despite this credible threat of closure, relatively few individual schools threatened with closure for low performance in the United States are actually shut down. Yet, as Erin Michaels argues, the looming threat is ever present. Test, Measure, Punish critically shifts the focus from school shutdowns to the more typical situation within these strained public schools: operating under persistent risk of closure.Many K-12 schools today face escalating sanctions if they do not improve according to repressive state mandates, which, in turn, incentivize schools to put into place nonstop test drills and strict student conduct rules. Test, Measure, Punish traces how threats of school closure have distorted education to become more punitive which disproportionately impacts—even targets—Black and Latinx communities and substantially hurts student social development. This book addresses how these new punitive schooling conditions for troubled schools reproduce racial inequalities.Michaels centers her research in a suburban upstate New York high school serving mainly working-class Black and Latinx students. She reveals a new model of schooling based on testing and security regimes that expands the carceral state, making the students feel dejected, criminalized, and suspicious of the system, their peers, and themselves. Test, Measure, Punish offers a new theory of schooling inequality and shows in vivid detail why state-led school reforms represent a new level of racialized citizenship in an already fragmented public education system.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface: Finding Sandview High
• Introduction: A School under Threat of Closure
• 1. The Creation of a “Bad” School: Divestment in an Inner-ring Suburb
• 2. Schooling under Threat of Closure: State Surveillance and Punishment in Twenty-first Century Education
• 3. “What Are We, Test Monkeys?” The Testing Regime Comple
• 4. “Bad” Kids: The Stigma of a School under Threat
• 5. On (Not) Fixing Racialized Policing through Neoliberal Accountability: Intensifying Pervasive Social Control beyond a Formal Suspension
• 6. Go Get Them (and Not Me): Fostering Peer Antagonisms through School Policing Practices
• Conclusion: We Can’t “Measure and Punish” Our Way Out of This
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix: Research Methods
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author