Review of Miracle Children: Race, Education, and a True Story of False Promises, by Katie Benner & Erica L. Green

Howard Wainer was on the faculty of The University of Chicago until 1977, was in Washington during the Carter administration, was Principal Research Scientist at the Educational Testing Service from 1980 until 2001, was Distinguished Research Scientist at the National Board of Medical Examiners and Professor of Statistics at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania from 2001 until 2016. He is now in his post-employment career as statistician and author. Dr. Wainer is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and American Educational Research Association and has been the recipient of many honors, most recently: American Statistical Association’s Harry V. Roberts Statistical Advocate of the Year Award in 2019 and its Statistical Computing and Graphics Award, in 2021; additionally The E. F. Lindquist Award for Outstanding Research in Testing & Measurement, The Psychometric Society Lifetime Achievement Award, The Samuel J. Messick Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions from the American Psychological Association, The Career Achievement Award from The National Council on Measurement and Evaluation., and ETS’s coveted Senior Scientist Award in 1990. He has written the Visual Revelations column in the statistics magazine Chance for the last 32 years and, in addition, has published omore than 450 articles and chapters, as well as 26 books. Among his recent books are Truth or Truthiness: Distinguishing Fact from Fiction by Learning to Think like a Data Scientist, which was published by Cambridge University Press and was named “top 6 books of 2016” by the Financial Times of London. In 2021, he published A History of Data Visualization and Graphic Communication in collaboration with Michael Friendly (Harvard University Press). His most recent book, Testing and the Paradoxes of Fairness with Daniel Robinson, awas published by Cambridge in 2026.