The Case Against Standardized Testing. - Review - book review

School Administrator, Jan, 2001 by William J. Leary

Dynamic intellectual life is being pushed out of schools as testing takes over the curriculum. This constitutes an educational emergency, in the view of Alfie Kohn, author of The Case Against Standardized Testing.

Kohn's format is to ask a series of general questions about standardized tests and respond in detail with his (and others') reasons for opposing this form of testing.

On the question of high-stakes testing, Kohn points out that teaching to the test has radically changed the kind of instruction offered in American schools. He believes teachers feel obliged to set aside regular curriculum for days or weeks to assist students in learning test-taking skills and to drill them on what it is believed will be asked on the test.

Kohn criticizes all standardized tests for ignoring the most important characteristics of a good learner: initiative, creativity, conceptual thinking and judgment, among others.

The author also decries the inevitability of the standardized test movement, contending such tests have not always existed and do not exist in other countries. What he is fighting, he says, is "not a force of nature, but a force of politics."

Kohn describes situations familiar to school leaders but less known to parents and politicians. This brief but provocative book is a useful refresher course against standardized testing. Right now, it's politically incorrect, but certainly worth reading.

(The Case Against Standardized Testing, by Alfie Kohn, Heinemann, 361 Hanover St., Portsmouth, N.H. 03801, 2000, 94 pp., $10 softcover)