ABSTRACT
The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (Public Law 107-110) resulted in a greater emphasis on standardized testing in U.S. schools. This chapter provides a sociolinguistic perspective on critical issues concerning standardized assessments used to measure the aptitude and achievement of African American children. I emphasize the linguistic issues that arise from lexical choices in the testing stimuli and the cultural assumptions that test writers make about test takers. I suggest ways that current assessment practices may be ameliorated to minimize bias, and I also present several assessment practices that are more equitable for children of different linguistic and cultural backgrounds.
