School's Out - One man's idea of education - Alfie Kohn's crusade against school testing

National Review, Oct 15, 2001 by Richard Nadler

'When I'm doing a workshop, I like to ask teachers, 'Which is larger, 5/19 or 7/22?' Almost everyone gets this wrong, especially math teachers. The correct answer is, Who cares?"

These are the words of Alfie Kohn, de facto leader of the anti-school- testing movement. He helps coordinate political action against standardized tests in 38 states through his website, on which one may read inspiring stories-about Japanese teachers unions scrapping tests, Massachusetts students refusing to take them, a brave Colorado teacher declining to administer them, and so on. The website, www.alfiekohn.org, provides comprehensive information on how activists can lobby elected officials, local media, and business leaders to block graded testing.

Kohn, who taught at Phillips Andover, cheerfully admits that his own theories of education are not experience-based. "I would like to be able to say that my current ideas about education spring directly from my own classroom experience," he has written, "but they really don't." It was, rather, his "search for practical alternatives to competitive structures" that led him to the idea of "cooperative learning."

Kohn's post-classroom career took off in 1991, when Phi Delta Kappan, the prestige journal of public-school teachers, published one of his talks. The magazine's parent organization subsequently invited Kohn to develop workshops for its 170,000 members; he has been conducting these workshops nationwide for the past decade. His theories deriding conventional tools of accountability-tests, rewards, punishments-are regularly published in organs of the public-education establishment; they soothe pedagogues who feel beleaguered by the clamor for educational results.

The goal of classroom practice, according to Kohn, should be to produce children who are empathetic and interested in learning. To this end, he endorses a standard range of progressive policies: whole-language instruction rather than phonics; cooperative learning rather than individual mastery; and intergenerational problem solving rather than adult-imposed discipline. He trashes objective knowledge and its measurement, and meritocratic hierarchies in general. He loathes competition among students, teachers, and schools, and particularly disdains mechanisms that would enable parents to choose schools; he believes parents' concern for the welfare of their own children can end up undermining the welfare of all children.

This is standard left-wing pedagogy. What distinguishes Kohn is his single-minded endeavor to place the elements of that pedagogy beyond criticism. This he achieves by denouncing the very idea of objective assessment: The real problem with testing resides not in the particular criteria a test uses, but in the desire of the tester to sort kids into a discriminatory hierarchy. The real problem of discipline, similarly, is not with any particular mix of rewards or punishments, but in the sickness of the authority figure who believes that children somehow need to be fixed. And the real problem of curricula has to do not with their details, but with the unhealthy lust of the pedagogue to impose extrinsic thought on children.

If one accepts these premises, Kohn's entire analysis is irrefutable. Any educational failure-an absence, say, of math skills or spelling knowledge-shows only that the process of schooling is incomplete, and that the child has not yet been sufficiently engaged by the cooperative-learning enterprise.

Kohn's problem, however, is that very few people with a stake in the system-parents, teachers, taxpayers-agree with these premises; and their growing desire for content standards, measured through tests, has put educational progressives on their heels. "There are independent schools that have a tradition of progressive pedagogy," Kohn told the periodical Independent School, "but have lately been back-pedaling in a way that many of us find terribly discouraging."

He blames these reversals on some easily identifiable enemies. First, there are the corporate chieftains, whose insistence on curriculum content, mastered skills, and workplace discipline casts a debilitating pall over U.S. education. Then, there are the religious fanatics. "It is common knowledge," wrote Kohn, "that the Christian Right has opposed all manner of progressive reforms." Catholics have played a particularly baneful role. "Let us be clear," Kohn wrote: "It is of no relevance that almost all of the leading proponents of character education are devout Catholics. But it is entirely relevant that, in the shadows of their writings, there lurks the assumption that only religion can serve as the foundation for good character . . . What they do on Sundays is their own business, but if they are trying to turn our public schools into Sunday schools, that becomes everybody's business."

Parents are also a problem, according to Kohn's essay "Only for My Kid: How Privileged Parents Undermine School Reform." In Amherst, Mass., parents fought to preserve the tracking of students according to ability; in Buffalo, they rallied to preserve letter grades; in California, they overturned "conceptual" math in favor of skills-and- drills. And it's not just privileged parents who impede Kohn's enterprise: Blue-collar parents in New York City formed PURGE-"Parents United to Restore Graded Evaluations."