Business-Managed Education
Standardised Testing Agendas
Standardised testing achieves many objectives for business including those that are publicly stated:
- measuring whether schools are performing – accountability
- providing a basis for parental choice of schools
and those that are unstated:
- ensuring teachers and school principals focus on standardised curricula
- screening and sorting students for employers
- facilitating discontent with public schools
- shifting the blame for economic and social problems to schools
- enabling a few corporations to make hundreds of millions of dollars a year from test preparation materials, tutoring, and running and evaluating tests
Reference: Alfie Kohn, ‘Introduction: The 500-Pound Gorilla’, in Alfie Kohn and Patrick Shannon (eds) Education, Inc. Turning Learning into a Business, revised ed. Portsmouth, NH, Heinemann, 2002b, p. 4.fostering a corporate ideology of competition, evaluation, obedience to authority, reward and punishment
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