The Case Against Standardized Testing: Raising the Scores, Ruining the Schools. - Review - book review

Progressive, The, August, 2001 by Tom Gallagher

The Case Against Standardized Testing: Raising the Scores, Ruining the Schools by Alfie Kohn Heinemann. 94 pages. $10.00 (paper).

Alfie Kohn has warned about standardized testing since well before George W. Bush's initiatives. And he foresaw such embarrasments as when almost 6,000 New York City students were mistakenly sent to summer school due to a grading error on the part of a company that produced a test 300,000 of them took.

His primary objection is not the tests' fallibility but the inevitable tendency to "teach to the test," a phenomenon now so widespread that few even blink an eye at educational materials with titles like Six Steps to SAT Success, or Test-Taking Strategies.

What Kohn says standardized tests actually measure best is the economic backgrounds of the groups that take them: "Break down the test takers by income, measured in $10,000 increments, and without exception the scores rise with each jump in parents' earnings."

The Case Against Standardized Testing is a handbook for everyone who doesn't like the testing trend but hasn't known what to do about it.