The Case Against Standardized Testing: Raising the Scores, Ruining the Schools.

• Author: Gallagher, Tom
• Position: Brief Article

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...