PHI DELTA KAPPAN October 2002 The 500-Pound Gorilla By Alfie Kohn The best reason to give a child a good school. . .is so that child will have a happy childhood, and not so that it will help IBM in competing with Sony. . . There is something ethically embarrassing about resting a national agenda on the basis of sheer … Read More
Standardized Testing: Separating Wheat Children from Chaff Children
2002 Standardized Testing Separating Wheat Children from Chaff Children Excerpted from the foreword to Susan Ohanian’s book What Happened to Recess and Why Are Our Children Struggling in Kindergarten? (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002) By Alfie Kohn Of all the chasms that separate one world from another, none is greater than the gap between the people who make policy and the people who … Read More
Fighting the Tests: A Practical Guide to Rescuing Our Schools
PHI DELTA KAPPAN January 2001 Fighting the Tests A Practical Guide to Rescuing Our Schools By Alfie Kohn Don’t let anyone tell you that standardized tests are not accurate measures. The truth of the matter is they offer a remarkably precise method for gauging the size of the houses near the school where the test was administered. Every empirical investigation … Read More
Standardized Testing and Its Victims (**)
EDUCATION WEEK September 27, 2000 Standardized Testing and Its Victims By Alfie Kohn Standardized testing has swelled and mutated, like a creature in one of those old horror movies, to the point that it now threatens to swallow our schools whole. (Of course, on “The Late, Late Show,” no one ever insists that the monster is really doing us a … Read More
The Costs of Overemphasizing Achievement (**)
SCHOOL ADMINISTRATOR November 1999 The Costs of Overemphasizing Achievement By Alfie Kohn Only extraordinary education is concerned with learning; most is concerned with achieving: and for young minds, these two are very nearly opposite. — Marilyn French I. Common sense suggests we should figure out what our educational goals are, then check in periodically to see how successful we … Read More