[.ca] The Schools Our Children Deserve: Moving Beyond ... (ISBN 0395940397)

From Amazon.com:
Teacher-turned-writer Alfie Kohn takes on traditional-education giants like E.D. Hirsch, along with practically every state government "raising the bar" and toughening standards, in this attack on the back-to-basics movement. An established critic of America's fixation on grades and test scores, Kohn has written a detailed, methodical treatise that accuses politicians and educators of replacing John Dewey, the father of public education, with test-tutoring king Stanley Kaplan. The current standards movement that demands students learn a list of dates and facts prepares kids for Jeopardy, Kohn argues, not real life. He joins David C. Berliner and Bruce J. Biddle (The Manufactured Crisis) in questioning whether today's schools are truly floundering, warning that romantic memories of the old school, with its tests, worksheets, and drills, are purely that--memories romanticized by time and perception. Kohn backs up his argument with research and observations from like-minded reformers such as Deborah Meier, but his position is nothing new. Rather, it is a volley back at traditionalists, a direct counter to Hirsch's 1996 book The Schools We Need, which Kohn critically dissects at length, even accusing Hirsch of incorrectly generalizing footnoted research. Kohn also takes issue with the backlash against the whole-language approach to reading instruction (though this argument wears thin, given that many schools have already moved beyond the debate to use a combination of whole language and phonics). The overall message of The Schools Our Children Deserve is a valid cautionary tale about the future of American education that deserves to be heard out by teachers, policymakers, and parents. --Jodi Mailander Farrell

Nancy Haas, Educational Tech. Doctorial Student , Pepperdine:
In light of President Bush's recent signing of a national educational plan that promotes standards and high-stakes testing, The Schools Our Children Deserve offers readers insights into social, economic, and moral consequences of these policies. An easy read with plenty of data and thought provoking questions, Kohn challenges these trends to objectify students and teachers through a careful analysis of the process and consequences of these policies. One of the myths perpetuated by politicians and businesspeople, is that raising school standards and high-stakes testing will improve learning. Kohn examines the historical context of the myth within the system. He offers readers data and research that contradict the myth. He has organized the book to examine the destructive nature of implementing standards based education and high testing through a variety of lens: social, emotional, and economic. With an emphasis on grades and competitive test scores that rank students, teachers, and schools, Kohn argues that education has shifted away from student-centered learning. Schools forced to implement standardize curriculum to support high stakes testing have objectified students and teachers. The consequences of these policies results in a curriculum that lacks authentic context and educational goals that are based on grades and test results. The impact on teachers forced to implement rigid curriculum that changes the role of classroom teachers to classroom technicians whose only responsibility is to transmit facts and data through transmission teaching. The impact on children is a misguided educational experience that may have long term emotional and psychological reprucussions. With an emphasis on scores, rigid and mediocre curriculum is designed to improve tests scores but fail to offer students an authentic and engaging learning experience. The reader is reminded that the cost of focusing on "how well" students are doing verses "what" they're doing results in a disintegration of student's interest and motivation. With an emphasis on student grades and school scores, the purpose of education is no longer about providing an authentic learning experience for child, it is about test scores and ranking. Because of the impact that high stake testing has on schools and children, Kohn takes time to examine the variations in testing formats, inequalities, and failures. Since high-stakes tests are norm-reference, he provides readers with an understanding of how these test are used and the consequences awaiting 50% of the testing population that are predestined to fail. Kohn offers compelling arguments to rethink these practices and the purpose of education. If we want to focus on test scores that rank students, standardized curriculums and high-stakes testing will fill the bill. However, if our goal is to create meaningful, authentic learning experiences for our children, these policies must be challenged and abandoned. This book not only informs the reader, but it places a moral responsibility on each of us to become more informed and involved with the purpose of learning in our schools. Kohn's agenda is simple. He is not a politician looking for votes. He is an advocate for children. Kohn is promoting authentic learning opportunities that respect the natural curiosity and motivation of children. After reading this book, Kohn places a moral responsibility on all of us to become informed, involved, and pro-active in the development of schools that our children deserve.

Standardized Testing Revealed:
When asked what a set of national standards should look like, former U.S. commissioner of education, Harold Howe II, stated, "They should be as vague as possible". Alfie Kohn makes a powerful stance against the use of specific standards and standardized testing in his book, The Schools Our Children Deserve. Education heads the news around the nation today. Everywhere you hear the cry for tougher standards for teachers and students, and accountability for schools and districts. Headlines scream that American children are falling behind their counterparts in other countries. The solution: an educational system that is 'back to basics' and has 'tougher standards'. Is this the answer? Alfie Kohn states a resounding 'No'. Mr. Kohn's book takes you on a journey to explore how the American educational system is really doing. He then presents standardized tests for what they are: norm-referenced tests in which 50% of all children taking the test will fail. Kohn dissects how the tests are created and changed from year to year, indicating that if too many students get an answer correct, it is thrown out of the test. He delves into how standardized test scores are published in newspapers, and used by the government and school districts to hold schools and teachers hostage. He shows how the use of such scores are creating an educational community that teaches to the test, is devoid of meaningful learning, and does not address the needs of the individual child. The Schools Our Children Deserve is written for parents and educators alike. It aims to educate its readers, so that they can become informed participants in the design of the schools our children deserve. W.Joy Lopez Pepperdine University Doctoral Student

Parents, Beware!:
The preponderance of positive reviews here speaks to the persuasiveness and appeal of Kohn's arguments. I must say, however, that I was not similarly persuaded. The book reads as though Kohn had made up his mind on the issues before setting out to research them, giving it a shrill, combative, one-sided, pseudoscientific tone. Note the vastly different standards of rigor he applies to evaluating research supporting his own and competing viewpoints. He also sets up dry, impoverished, hypertraditional straw men that are very easy to tear down instead of comparing the best of traditional and progressive models. Guess who wins? Kohn makes the mistake of equating preference for traditional pedagogical methods with social conservatism, an equation that he uses in the service of an ad hominem argument. It's time for less-than-conservative parents to start speaking out about their confidence in traditional teaching methods. Kohn is just plain wrong about the inextricability of sociopolitical and educational views, though extremists on the traditional side also tend to equate their educational traditionalism with traditional social values. The two have historically been intertwined, but are not intrinsically so. A perplexing flaw lies in Kohn's seemingly viewing direct instruction and student understanding as mutually exclusive. This is an absurd assumption (Isn't his book an attempt at direct instruction?) when the direct instruction is in capable hands and when the learner is capable of abstraction. In rejecting direct instruction, Kohn undercredits children's capacity for abstraction and the mental models born of real-world experience into which they are already equipped to fit new information. He would have fifth graders using manipulatives in math class every bit as much as kindergartners instead of arming the fifth graders with formulae. How sad for the children. If progressive schools really want to honor each child's "individual learning style," then they should offer direct instruction to the kids who learn well that way. Parents, beware: Despite the wonderfully warm and truly child-centered environments at many progressive schools, your children will in all likelihood NOT receive excellent math, reading, grammar and spelling instruction there. (See mathematicallycorrect.com for a discussion of the "math wars.") The philosophy at such schools is that learning facts should be supplanted by learning "how to learn." This view has been thoroughly discredited by cognitive scientists. At the very best progressive schools children may gain excellent writing skills, sensitivity to other people's perspectives and maybe even the ability to read for deep understanding (IF they can learn to read in the first place and are given sufficiently challenging material with sufficiently high expectations). They may also be well served emotionally at such schools (just as they may be at traditional schools despite what Kohn would have us believe). But for the sake of their children, every parent deserves to understand the shortcomings of these institutions, which are so appealing on the surface (like Kohn's book). Our country's schools of education and the rest of the educational bureaucracy have done a great disservice to teachers and to our children. Kohn perpetuates the disservice. His approach is not to further parents' educational goals for their children, but to try to get them to change those goals or to believe that those goals can be achieved through unconventional, discredited means. I also daresay he is a professional iconoclast who profits from stirring up controversy.

Buy a copy for every member of your school board !!:
Let's face it... in the past our schools have only rarely been especially powerful centers of learning or emotional growth. But over the past 25 years this narrow educational mediocrity was given a hard look from many quarters. A wide range of ideas for different approaches to schools, kids, and learning started to move into the popular culture and even into the educational establishment. Lots of them were flops - but not all. Nevertheless, as with so many of the suite of powerful ideas for change that have arisen in the last generation, the corporate culture and resurgent cultural contras of the past decade have started to overwhelm fact and reality with a mass re-writing of educational history and practice and values which has swiftly hijacked education from the energized, but messy, path toward reform back onto the clean wide superhighway servicing corporate needs. It is at this intersection - that of the caring, thoughtful professionals, the naturally enthusiastic youngsters and the hopeful parents seeking something better X'ed by the needs of the global marketeers - where so many of the perceived failings of education appear. Here lie the burned-out teachers who fell because they thought to reach high; and also the bland functionaries who offer little more than the next chapter in the teacher's manual. Here are the over-quiet or angry kids whose world is school and hence a universal betrayal; and also the mall-hopping young illiterates who have quickly learned their place as consumers. Here, too, are the parents opting-out for home-schooling, or joining PTAs, or fighting for charter schools or vouchers or basics or something, anything, that will change things; but also the parents who accept bad schools run by distant elites as just the way things have always been. Here the messy mixed-bag of a generation's efforts at reform meets a glossy new suite of old-fashioned lies. Here is where Kohn's book takes its starting point. In a blasting and relentless 100 page assault, he takes on the myriad of ways that the contra-reform movement in education has gotten it wrong: gotten motivation wrong, gotten teaching and learning wrong, gotten evaluation and improvement wrong, and even gotten reform itself wrong. Kohn does not pull his punches, but doesn't stand on loud opinion. With an engaging style, he often starts by quoting some back-to-basics pundit with one of those sound-bites that can appear so compelling. Then he enthusiastically strips the lies and falsehoods away layer by layer - it becomes entertaining to see him filet yet another contra-reform red herring. For those with a footnote'ish bent he also provides a large appendix containing "the hard evidence." Kohn does an overwhelmingly convincing job of making a case that leaves a reader realizing that nudging on the small particulars of educational change is simply no longer an option. Something much larger is afoot. Big lies demand clean slates. We might actually do well to trust our own instincts and look at ways of "starting from scratch" - as he entitles his lead-in chapter of the second part of the book. If the first part of the book was an enthusiastic, sometimes angry, fingering of the emperor's nakedly self-serving distortion of reality, this second half is an uplifting overview of all the ways to do education right. He speaks of broad themes such as how to encourage deep thinking and how to bring real decision-making and cooperation into the classroom. He also outlines particulars reform ideas in reading, spelling and math as well as alternatives to grading and standardized tests. As a math teacher, I know there is much more to that one piece of the discussion, but Kohn does a fine job of summarizing the core value in reform approaches. Although the book is split into these two different halves, it is not two distinct pieces - more than simply a dissected pile of lies and a listing of good ideas. Throughout the first part Kohn is forward looking. Each lie of the "Old School", as he terms it, is exposed in a context of reversibility. This book will open your eyes to a broad and broadening capture of our children's education by ideological pirates, but it will not discourage you on the way. On the contrary it will provide you the courage to grab some rigging and swing into the fray and put the "public" back in public education. Good luck.

Alfie Kohn: A Must Read:
All educators need to read this book. As we face the "Standards" movement, it is imperative that we understand options available lest the "Standards" movement become another "back to basics" fiasco.This book is well written and well researched. The practitioner does not have to take it all to heart but most will get out the highlighter for future reference.