Standards and testing are destroying our schools, Kohn charges

First he’ll cut recess. Then music and art. Then discovery-based science (“not on the test”) and classroom projects. Test scores will rise, Kohn says. “And I guarantee not a politician or a newspaper in the area will say, ‘My God, what have you done to your schools?’ ”

Kohn, author of The Schools Our Children Deserve, won’t really do all that, of course, but he’s only half joking. He believes an “idiotic, misguided, unethical, and extremely dangerous standards and accountability movement” has created “nothing short of an educational emergency.”

At a Focus on Education lecture April 10, Kohn criticized the standards movement, which calls for a more rigorous curriculum by formulating specific measurable standards, testing students frequently, and holding students and teachers accountable for improvement.

This focus on results is not only wrong; it is dangerous, Kohn says.

He described an experiment in Colorado in which students were separated into two groups.

The teachers for the first group were told they would be held accountable for raising student performance. Teachers in the second group were simply asked to help their children understand the material.

The second group outperformed the first, Kohn says. When he asked people in the audience why that happened, several people responded that the teachers in the first group relied on fear and intimidation.

Kohn agreed, saying, “the teachers felt controlled, and they responded by being controlling.”

According to Kohn, “the notion that accountability makes school better is an urban, suburban, rural myth.”

If the teachers in the first group represent the norm in American education today, they aren’t the only ones getting pressure to improve test scores, Kohn says.

In the “food chain in American education,” he says, mandates come from politicians who know little about schools or how children learn, then work their way through to school board members, superintendents, principals, teachers, and students.

Kohn had equally damning things to say about standardized tests. Studies show that up to 90 percent of test results have nothing to do with the quality of learning in classes, he says.

What they do measure, quite accurately, is socioeconomic status. When schools with large numbers of disadvantaged children do poorly on state tests, these schools are pressed by top-down mandates like the “Leave Many Children Behind Act” to drill them and teach to the test.

“My gut churns when I see classrooms turned into test-prep centers,” Kohn says.

“Of course there are shamefully second-rate schools,” he notes, but the standards/testing movement “is turning them into third-rate schools.”

Kohn says studies show 50 to 80 percent of improvement in test scores has nothing to do with real instruction. “The more time that teachers spend getting students ready for the test, the less valuable that test is as a measure.”

Kohn also cited a study of students in elementary, middle, and high schools in which the students were tested on what they had learned and interviewed on how well they truly understood and could think about the material. “The kids with high scores on standardized tests were more likely to be shallower thinkers,” he says.

Kohn says there are much better ways to assess student performance, such as portfolios and ongoing teacher observations of classroom skills.

Why, then, are students subjected to more and more tests? The reason, he says, has nothing to do with excellence and everything to do with determining winners and losers.

If this trend is allowed to continue, the ultimate victors in the testing/standards movement will not be the public schools, Kohn says, but those who seek to discredit public schools and pave the way for privatization and vouchers. This, Kohn asserts, was their goal all along.