By Alfie Kohn

I keep thinking it can’t get much worse, and then it does. Throughout the 1990s, one state after another adopted prescriptive education standards enforced by frequent standardized testing, often of the high-stakes variety. A top-down, get-tough movement to impose “accountability” began to squeeze the life out of classrooms.

A decade ago, many of us thought we had hit bottom—until the floor gave way and we found ourselves in a basement we didn’t know existed. Now every state had to test every student every year in grades 3-8, judging them (and their schools) almost exclusively by test scores and hurting the schools that needed the most help. Ludicrously unrealistic proficiency targets suggested that the federal law responsible was intended to sabotage rather than improve public education.

Today, we survey the wreckage. Talented teachers have abandoned the profession after having been turned into glorified test-prep technicians. Low-income teenagers have been forced out of school by do-or-die graduation exams. Countless inventive learning activities have been eliminated in favor of prefabricated lessons pegged to state standards.

And now we’re informed that what we really need … is to standardize this whole operation from coast to coast.

Have we lost our minds? Because we’re certainly in the process of losing our children’s minds.

Let’s be clear about this latest initiative, which is being spearheaded by politicians, corporate CEOs, and companies that produce standardized tests. First, what they’re trying to sell us are national standards. They carefully point out that the effort isn’t driven by the federal government. But if all, or nearly all, states end up adopting identical mandates, that distinction doesn’t amount to much.

Second, these standards will inevitably be accompanied by a national standardized test. “Standards alone,” warns Dane Linn, a key player, “will not drive teaching and learning”—meaning, of course, the specific type of teaching and learning that the authorities require. Even if we took the advice of the late Harold Howe II, a former U.S. commissioner of education, and made the standards “as vague as possible,” a national test creates a de facto national curriculum, particularly if high stakes are attached.

Third, a relatively small group of experts—far from classrooms—will be designing standards, test questions, and curricula for the rest of us. Incredibly, the official Web site of the Common Core State Standards Initiative insists that these will be “based on evidence” rather than reflecting anyone’s “individual beliefs about what is important.” But evidence can tell us only whether a certain method is effective for reaching a certain objective—for example, how instruction aligned to this standard will affect a score on that test. The selection of the goal itself—what our children will be taught and tested on—unavoidably reflects values and beliefs. Should those of a single group of individuals determine what happens in every public school in the country?

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