I finally found a page with Kohn's articles, and I found a couple that made me sit up and scream that oh no....it's all going to happen just as he has warned. It is happening openly under a Democratic administration. The new Secretary of Education is open and honest that he wants more and more testing of students, and he wants the scores tied to teachers ratings. Here's what Alfie Kohn wrote in 2004. It gave me shivers.
You must scroll down at the link to see the article.
Test Today, Privatize Tomorrow“FREEDOM” FROM PUBLIC EDUCATION
I try to imagine myself as a privatizer. How would I proceed? If my objective were to dismantle public schools, I would begin by trying to discredit them. I would probably refer to them as “government” schools, hoping to tap into a vein of libertarian resentment. I would never miss an opportunity to sneer at researchers and teacher educators as out-of-touch “educationists.” Recognizing that it’s politically unwise to attack teachers, I would do so obliquely, bashing the unions to which most of them belong. Most important, if I had the power, I would ratchet up the number and difficulty of standardized tests that students had to take, in order that I could then point to the predictably pitiful results. I would then defy my opponents to defend the schools that had produced students who did so poorly.
Do you see that?
1. Discredit public schools.
2. Call them "government" schools.
3. Sneer at teachers and call them out of touch.
4. Ratchet up number of tests and keep making them harder.
5. Point to the ones who do poorly.
6. Ignore the ones who did well.
More from Alfie:
How closely does my thought experiment match reality? One way to ascertain the actual motivation behind the widespread use of testing is to watch what happens in the real world when a lot of students manage to do well on a given test. Are schools credited and teachers congratulated? Hardly. The response, from New Jersey to New Mexico, is instead to make the test harder, with the result that many more students subsequently fail. (Addendum: From Newsday, June 1, 2009: "Math scores are up on Long Island and statewide - enough so that state educational leaders could soon start raising the bar....Meryl Tisch of Manhattan, the new Chancellor of the state's Board of Regents, said...'What today's scores tell me is not that we should be celebrating but that New York State needs to raise its standards.")
You have to admire the sheer Orwellian chutzpah represented by that last word. By definition, a test is “meaningful” only if large numbers of students (and, by implication, schools) fare poorly on it.
That is the very hard truth about what is going in our schools. I also found this article from 2002 by Alfie Kohn. It meant a lot to me, as I retired from teaching before I really wanted to do so. The changes were starting then.
In the article called the 500 Pound Gorilla, Kohn talks about the inroads corporations are making into the schools that used to be free from corporate interference. They are free from it no longer.
"Schools -- and, by extension, children -- have been turned into sources of profit in several distinct ways. Yes, some corporations sell educational products, including tests, texts, and other curriculum materials. But many more corporations, peddling all sorts of products, have come to see schools as places to reach an enormous captive market."
This article is also found at the link I gave above, and you must scroll down for it.
The 500 Pound GorillaFrom 2002
"I give a lot of speeches these days about the accountability fad that has been turning our schools into glorified test-prep centers. The question-and-answer sessions that follow these lectures can veer off into unexpected directions, but it is increasingly likely that someone will inquire about the darker forces behind this heavy-handed version of school reform. Aren't giant corporations raking in profits from standardized testing? a questioner will demand. Doesn't it stand to reason that these companies engineered the reliance on testing in the first place?
Indeed, there are enough suspicious connections to keep conspiracy theorists awake through the night. For example, Standard & Poors, the financial rating service, has lately been offering to evaluate and publish the performance, based largely on test scores, of every school district in a given state -- a bit of number crunching that Michigan and Pennsylvania purchased for at least $10 million each, and other states may soon follow. The explicit findings of these reports concern whether this district is doing better than that one. But the tacit message -- the hidden curriculum, if
you will -- is that test scores are a useful and appropriate marker for school quality. Who has an incentive to convince people of that conclusion? Well, it turns out that Standard & Poors is owned by McGraw-Hill, one of the largest
manufacturers of standardized tests.
With such pressure to look good by boosting their test results, low-scoring districts may feel compelled to purchase heavily scripted curriculum programs designed to raise scores, programs such as Open Court or Reading Mastery (and others in the Direct Instruction series). Where do those programs come from? By an astonishing coincidence, both are owned by McGraw-Hill. Of course, it doesn't hurt to have some influential policy makers on your side when it's time to make choices about curriculum and assessment. In April 2000, Charlotte K. Frank joined the state of New York's top
education policy-making panel, the Board of Regents. If you need to reach Ms. Frank, try her office at McGraw-Hill, where she is a vice president. And we needn't even explore the chummy relationship between Harold McGraw III (the company's chairman) and George W. Bush. Nor will we investigate the strong statement of support for test-based
accountability in a Business Week cover story about education published in March 2001. Care to guess what company owns Business Week?
Amazingly our district ordered the Open Court series in reading the moment it came out. We had a fairly new and quite effective reading series, but they purchased another. Math texts were ages old, pages falling out. Science texts were so ancient they were unusable. But they ordered Open Court reading and let the others go unordered. Yes, I taught at a school in a poor neighborhood my last few years before retirement, but those are just ridiculous priorities.
Arne Duncan is for continued testing, and he is for continuing NCLB which is test test and more test. He does want to fund it, but he wants to continue this failed program. He wants to use part of the education stimulus fund to build a testing database to more easily tie teachers to student's results.
I thought of this part today as I see a group of charter schools getting money for being charter, while the county itself is waiting to see what they get.
Part of the stimulus money, he told Sam Dillon of The New York Times, will be used so that states can develop data systems, which will enable them to tie individual student test scores to individual teachers, greasing the way for merit pay. Another part of the stimulus plan will support charters and entrepreneurs.
Arne ties stimulus to testing.And on No Child Left Behind, also known as no child's behind left...which is testing and more testing.
On fixing No Child Left Behind:
...Asked if he will push for passage of a new version of NCLB, Duncan says that he first wants to go on a cross-country listening tour and that he hopes that Congress will reauthorize a new version of the law late in the year. "Having lived with this, I have a good sense of what makes sense and what doesn't," he says. "But I want to be clear that I want to get out there and learn from people. And I think ultimately we should rebrand (the law)."Asked what he would call a new version of the law, Duncan answered, "Don't know yet. I'm open to ideas."
Arne Duncan and NCLBOne of the things I most admired during Howard Dean's campaign in 2003 was that he was not afraid to speak out on NCLB. He said if he were still governor he would urge that the program be refused by his state...that it doomed public schools to failure.
2003 Howard Dean on NCLB... "every school in America by 2013 will be a failing school.""The president's ultimate goal," said former Gov. Howard Dean (D-Vt.), one of the Democrats who now harshly attacks NCLB, "is to make the public schools so awful, and starve them of money, just as he's starving all the other social programs, so that people give up on the public schools."
He went further while others remained silent.
MANCHESTER, N.H. (AP) Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean on Sunday urged states to reject federal No Child Left Behind funding, and said he would if still governor of Vermont.
"It's going to cost them more in property taxes and other taxes than they are going to get out of it," Dean told The Associated Press following a campaign stop.
.."Dean criticized President Bush, saying his administration will lower the standards for good schools in New Hampshire, making them more like poorly performing schools in Texas. The Bush administration believes "the way to help New Hampshire is to make it more like Texas," Dean told supporters in Manchester, adding that ''every school in America by 2013 will be a failing school.''
"Every group, including special education kids, has to be at 100 percent to pass the tests," Dean said. "No school system in America can do that. That ensures that every school will be a failing school."
There has been some very ugly criticism of teachers here at DU. I am not sure why, but I think the point Alfie Kohn made is probably the reason. I repost that part for emphasis, because oh boy has it worked well.
He said:
"If my objective were to dismantle public schools, I would begin by trying to discredit them. I would probably refer to them as “government” schools, hoping to tap into a vein of libertarian resentment.
I would never miss an opportunity to sneer at researchers and teacher educators as out-of-touch “educationists.” Recognizing that it’s politically unwise to attack teachers, I would do so obliquely, bashing the unions to which most of them belong.
Most important, if I had the power, I would ratchet up the number and difficulty of standardized tests that students had to take, in order that I could then point to the predictably pitiful results."Congratulations, Arne, you get to take our country over the threshold on this issue. I consider it a dubious honor. It's a tragic thing in my mind that with Democrats in full control of Congress and the White House...that we will be the party that takes us through the door to privatization that Alfie Kohn speaks about.
We are going to test, test some more, tie the test scores to teachers and schools...then they will fail after being talked about negatively for decades.
Test today, privatize tomorrow.
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