Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D.

To the Editor:

Re “New Standards Mean More F’s in State Testing” (front page, July 29):

Why would we assume that when a standardized test is tweaked so that
more students appear to fail, those results are necessarily more
accurate? Are harder tests really better? Is a system more educationally
desirable when fewer children are defined as successful?

You quote someone from a conservative think tank who concludes that New
York’s test is unreliable. But it’s standardized testing itself that we
should be questioning. What we’ve learned is that passing rates (and
difficulty of the questions) can be raised or lowered at will to produce
whatever results are politically useful—rather like shooting an arrow
and then drawing a target around it.

Alfie Kohn
Belmont, Mass., July 30, 2010

The writer is the author of books and articles about education.

Note from KBJ: Of what relevance is the fact that the unnamed person is "from a conservative think tank"? If the person's ideas are good, they're good, independently of the person's affiliation. If they're bad, they're bad, independently of the person's affiliation. Only someone who thinks that all conservative ideas are bad could find this sort of "reasoning" persuasive. What dogmatism! I'd rather have an independent thinker from a think tank than a dogmatist with no affiliation.