Is Testing a Conspiracy?

Reading Alfie Kohn's 2000 book, The Case Against Standardized Testing: Raising Scores ad Ruining the Schools. Pretty easy to see where Kohn comes down on the issue. Why do we test as much as we test? Kohn identifies the following groups - those determined to cast the schools in thw worst possible light as a way of paving the way for privatization", "corporations that manufacture and score the exams", "politicians to show they're concerned about school achievement", and those members of the public who want accountability, measurements, or "tradtional 'back to basics' instruction." The privitizers and corporations are tricking us, and the rest of us are misguided.

His view of the move towards privatization is hostile: "After all if your goal was to serve up schools to the marketplace, where the point of reference is to maximize profit rather than what benifits children, it would be perfectly logical for you to administer a test that many students would fail." Its a capitalist plot. Those who apprently want privatization are a small enough group that they cannot do so legislatively, so they aim to trick everyone else with testing designed to fail. So they are very clever and powerful, but not powerful enough. Sounds like the classic conspiracy. Unfortunatly, a substantial minority of citizens favor privatization of some kind, probabaly a third. So the suggestion that testing is designed to fail to advance the cause of privatization means that this third is more commited to their notions of privatization than they are to the quality of schools of what ever cast they may be. I find this very hard to swallow. Is there someone out there that is so dedicated to market solutions to every problem that they would destroy the schools in order to save them? Certainly someone, somewhere feels this way, but its no where near the numbers that support privatization. This argument is a straw man intended to discredit this substantial minority of Americans. You can find people who want to privatize anything, including the police departments. Somehow we are able to avoid being tricked by their insidious conspiracies. Privatization is a serious issue and should be treated as such.

Its the corporations. The perpetual bugaboo for the Left. Somehow we are made to believe that the corporations have tricked us into purchasing a service we do not need (and without advertising and sexy models) and we can't figure it out. My we are stupid. How did the corporations trick us so? Is there a history of this pernicious influence? Can it be traced, or is it just sufficient to blame the corporations and expect us to uncritically accept the claim. This claim requires that in all the states that use testing government corruption is responsible for the current testing boon, and no one has noticed.

Poiticians want to look good. For whom? On the to next group, members of the public who want accountability, measurements, or "tradtional 'back to basics' instruction." Politicians want what the public demands. With the exception of election law, this is the end of the story. There is the possibility that the public wants wants better schools and the politicians grab onto testing as way to look good quickly, but this argument conflicts with the idea that tests are supposed to make schools look bad. If politcians invented testing to make themselves look good it would be easy to score well. Alfie's whole point is that its hard to score well and that the drive to do so is ruining our schools. So why does he include politcians? He's engaged in conspiratorial thinking and its easy to include politicians in the conspiracy, since they have few defenders as a group. So, we are left with the public, or some portion thereof sufficiently large to spread testing far and wide. So why do they do it? Mostly, Alfie tells us, because they don't know what they are doing.

In fact it works this way. The public demands higher standards and a return to teaching useful knowledge (rather than say, how America is a racist society). The question immediatly follows, how do we know teachers are doing this? Testing is best understood as an institutionalization of parents blaming teachers for low achievement. So a test is designed to measure whether the students are meeting the standards. We are, after all curious. Look at Missouri's standards for Social Studies and ask, should students know this, is it reasonable to expect these concepts be learned? I think its hard to argue that sudents should not or that the concepts are unteachable. Since pundits often shake their heads at studies that show how few of America's students can identify the civil war in even a rough chronology, perhaps they are in on the conspiracy too.