Center X

Alfie Kohn is my hero. I first met him through his book, Beyond Discipline.Then through articles in various professional journals, then through email. I wrote to him because I was seeing teachers use the writing of “standards” as punishment in the classroom, the writing of the same thing 100 times. I found out in some schools it was the policy! I wrote, "Although you write about many kinds of punishments, as well as rewards, in your book, you don't address this."

He wrote back the next day. “Thanks for ruining my week. I had naively hoped that few people still did this to kids.” He admitted he couldn’t be much help because it had occurred to him “that anyone who would do this is unlikely to be persuaded by logic or evidence.”

At the National Council of Teachers of English in Denver I attended two Alfie Kohn sessions. If you have seen those little toy dogs in the back of cars whose heads wiggle up and down all the time, that was what I was doing while he was speaking. And that was what I was doing as I read his latest book, The Schools our Children Deserve. I was agreeing with every word.

This book should be read by every legislator, every presidential candidate, every governor, every school board member, every superintendent, every administrator, every teacher, every parent. Who is left? Every child old enough to understand it. The children, especially the children, should be aware of what they deserve.

He refers to John Dewey: “He made the case that schools shouldn’t be about handing down a collection of static truths to the next generation but about responding to the needs and interests of the students themselves.” He writes about better education, motivation, teaching and learning, evaluation, school reform. He discusses solutions.

This issue of the Center X Quarterly is about testing. This is what Kohn says about testing and his belief that the kinds of testing being advocated hampers thinking: “All of us with children need to make it our business to understand just how much harm these tests are doing.” He writes, “Once teachers and students are compelled to focus only on what lends itself to quantification, such as the number of grammatical errors in a composition or the number of state capitols memorized, the process of thinking has been severely compromised.”

Later he says, “At best, high test scores for a given school or district are probably meaningless; at worst, they’re actually bad news because of the kind of teaching that was done to produce those scores.” He adds, “The problem with tests is not limited to their content. Rather, the harm comes from paying too much attention to the results.” His mission is this: “If we’re going to hold schools accountable, it should be for something that standardized tests do not and cannot measure: the creation of an environment that supports and enhances students’ interest in learning.” He points out, however, that “right now, of course, the mission of most school boards and legislators has nothing to do with interest.”

I don’t know what we can do about this statewide testing program. We know that test preparation takes up too much valuable class time that could be used reading wonderful stories about history and science and fictional characters. Kohn feels it is important for us to take a stand—to educate ourselves first and then educate everyone we know and meet.

Go to school board meetings, talk to real estate brokers, write legislators, submit articles to the local papers. He says to say to the editors of the newspapers, “Every time you treat standardized test scores as a legitimate measure of learning—or worse, publish a chart ranking local schools by their scores—you inadvertently make our schools a little bit worse.” And then go on to tell them why.

I had to email Kohn one more time. Would he, could he, write an article for the Quarterly. He gave us permission to “reprint any [pieces] that strike your fancy.” We have done that. Thank you, Alfie Kohn.

One Size Fits Few: The Folly of Educational Standards
Susan Ohanian
Heinemann Press, 1999

Reviewed by Meredith Louria, Santa Monica High School

Sometimes a book makes you want to stand up and applaud, to meet the author and thank her for writing it, to go out and change the world. One Size Fits Few is such a book. Susan Ohanian challenges teachers, parents, and society to recognize and fight against the commercialism and social injustice of standardized education.

She writes, “Handing out standards in the name of preparing everyone to meet the high skills that will be demanded for employment in the twenty-first century is as cynical as handing out menus to homeless people in the name of eradicating hunger.” Ohanian argues passionately about the injustices standardized testing wreaks on good teaching, and on “the young of the poor as well as the middle- and upper-class young who don’t respond well to lock-step command, i.e., kids who don’t want to go to MIT and become technocrats.” She exposes who really benefits from the nation’s push to standardize education: politicians and corporate leaders. Her well-documented facts and figures burn through the haze of doublespeak which the military-industrial-infotainment complex uses to support standards-based education and testing.

One of the pleasures of reading Ohanian’s book is the wit that accompanies her wisdom. She refers to those who impose standards on teachers as “Standardistos” and discusses California’s 10-year history of standardization as “Californication.” Another pleasure is meeting Ohanian’s students. Like a good Dickens novel, One Size Fits Few is peopled with memorable characters such as Leon, a former eighth-grade terror who bumps into Ohanian years later at the Boston Book Fair or Carol, a severely abused child who refuses to smile or read, but who gives Ohanian “the gift of empathy and compassion.”

Ohanian cautions, “To do what educators too often do—sit back and say, ‘This too will pass,’ is to condemn hundreds of thousands of students to the academic refuse bin.” After reading One Size Fits Few, I can no longer allow myself to be one of those educators.