Word: trappings
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...place as, say, Fall River. The old South exists solely in the mind and its juxtaposition with present-day Birmingham jars as awkwardly as the idea of putting a city with the Hellenic name of Athens in the middle of Georgia. The Asheville of Thomas Wolfe is a tourist trap of unremitting neon. Faulkner cruised the strip of Hollywood. The capital of the New South is Atlanta--a crypto-futuristic city where you can rise 72 stories in an outdoor glass elevator and drink martinis in a revolving bar and look down on people as they smash their automobiles headlong...
...COLOR OF THE INK on the book jacket says it all. It shrieks; The Testing Trap: How it can make or break your career and your children's futures, and, in case the message isn't clear enough, the word "break" is printed...
Such-tactics unfortunately typify The Testing Trap--unfortunately, because Andrew J. Strenio, Jr., has something important to say, and is probably on the right side, if there is a right side, of the complex standardized-testing controversy...
...Testing Trap, however, does not discuss. It asserts. Everything about it is combative, from its chapter headings ("Branding Children--Closing College Doors--Narrowing Graduate Opportunites--Blocking Access to Licensed Professions") to its singsong polemical style. Strenio writes in a conversational second-person manner laced heavily with rhetorical devices. ("You've heard of setting the fox to guard the hens?") and breaks frequently into first-person to stress-a point or tell a sad little story about a friend ruined by low scores--sprinkling his pages with "I think" and "It seems to me" in the fashion that English teachers work...
...Testing Trap cannot be said to fail through lack of balance; it is what it is, a lively position paper offering a few substantive points and plenty of guidance for standardized testing's victims. Its weakness even as campaign literature is mostly the fault of length; repeating his thesis endlessly over 300 pages, Strenio unwittingly widens its gaps and saps much of its persuasive power. He could have written a great editorial