Reflections on The Case Against Standardized Testing

Alfie Kohn's book, The Case Against Standardized Testing opposes choice and judgment in education with the special concern that judgment will promote choosing, and choosing will lead to markets. Kohn also opposes judgment because he believes that differences are false. Kohn is a Marxist who masquerades as someone concerned about standardized testing, but his real concern is that testing will promote market forces in the schools.

Kohn erects a straw man for privatization, attacking the profit motive, even though private schools are longer lived in America than public education. John's hostility to profit is not just that he fears it will crowd out other values in private education, he is hostile to all forms if incentive. His 1993 book, Punished by Rewards, has the subtitle: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes. Indeed, in 2000 and again in 2001 he got an article published advising parents to stop telling thier children "good job". Praise, we find, creates praise seeking behavior. Isn't that the point? Just two weeks ago Education Week published The Folly of Merit Pay. Evidence of the Marxist fetish of labor unmotivated by incentive is well documented. Productivity falls. Lenin's own response to this problem was to reintroduce incentive, Stalin, Mao, and a host of imitators preferred repression. The resurgence of the Liu party in China, and relaxing of the prohibition of private ownership and profit has produced tremendous growth in China, growth long delayed. Kohn hopes to introduce this failed practice into the American schools.

The great danger of the market is not just profit and incentives, since many privatized schools might well remain publicly funded and chartered, funded through public vouchers, or endowed. The great danger is the market itself. The freedom to choose to abandon a school that is failing or one where the school's philosophy was not appreciated by parents. Such an event would make education free in the sense of Austrian economics. (see here and here) School rankings and teacher rankings, something natural in our Consumer Reports society, would promote consumer choice in student placement. If such were the case, the social reconstructionist program Kohn would favor would lose its captive audience. So his opposition to school testing is his Berlin Wall.

Preventing choice requires that Kohn dismiss the possible of judgment. If we have no basis upon which to judge, how can we make an informed decision as consumers? How can we tell whether to cast aside the statist public school system for a market based public system? Kohn argues that judgment is impossible because its technically impossible, that is we can't get accurate enough, and that there really is nothing to judge because we are all the same in quality, though we may possess different strengths and weaknesses. Part of this can be seen as the traditional struggle in America between the meritocracy and the egalitarians. Kohn, however is a radical egalitarian and rejects any concessions to the meritocratic position. He argues that differences between schools, teachers,and students are imagined (or one might presume are the result of capitalist externalities like inequalities in wealth) and therefore judgment which purports to rank, grade, evaluate, or otherwise privledge students is false.

Not content to make the egalitarian case, Kohn also attacks the meritocratic case, by far the bulk of the text, by attacking the mechanism of judgment new to education: standardized testing. Elsewhere he has attacked grades, but John's publishing suggests he would build momentum in attacking testing which could then be applied to grades and all forms of evaluation and incentive.

This then is John's program. He is a radical egalitarian with a hostility to markets and incentives like profit, hence a Marxist, who seeks to preserve the bastion of social reconstructionist and progressive education against essentialists and perennialists by preventing parents and other observers from seeing outcomes of the different approaches to education side by side. No doubt he knows that like residents of East Germany before the Berlin Wall, parents would vote with their feet for a kind of education he rejects.