This book is meant to be a guide to standardized reading tests, to help teachers live with tests. Standardized, norm-referenced reading tests are a fact of life for most teachers. The suggestions in this book are drawn form the experience of teachers in the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project at Teachers College, Columbia University. Part I, "Confronting the Test," explores confronting the existence of tests and test use. Chapter 1, "The Challenge," explores the challenges of testing, and chapter 2, "Learning Enough To Talk Back to the Tests," discusses what teachers need to know about testing. Part II, "Teaching Reading in the Shadow of Standardized Tests," considers the situations in chapter 3, "When a Concern for Scores Drives the Curriculum" and chapter 4 The Overlap of Good Teaching and Good Test Scores." Part III, "A Curriculum for Test Preparation," presents a curriculum for test preparation in the following chapters: chapter 5, "Rethinking Test Preparation"; chapter 6, "Reading the Test Passages"; chapter 7, "Navigating the Formats of Tests"; chapter 8, "Mastering the Tricks and Avoiding the Traps"; and chapter 9, "The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day." Part IV, "The Politics of Testing: A Guide to Survival," contains chapters 10, "The Politics of Reading Scores and the Community" and 11, "Taking Our Place at the Policy Table," a discussion of what teachers can do to improve the testing situation. A glossary and a list of 47 suggested readings are included. (Contains 60 references.) (SLD)