“Beware school reformers,” Alfie Kohn warns darkly in The Nation. In the world according to Mr. Kohn there are “educational progressives,” and then there are reformers who are ”disconcertingly allied with conservatives.” To be a school reformer, Kohn writes with no apparent fear of contradiction, is to support:
- a heavy reliance on fill-in-the-bubble standardized tests to evaluate students and schools, generally in place of more authentic forms of assessment;
- the imposition of prescriptive, top-down teaching standards and curriculum mandates;
- a disproportionate emphasis on rote learning–memorizing facts and practicing skills–particularly for poor kids;
- a behaviorist model of motivation in which rewards (notably money) and punishments are used on teachers and students to compel compliance or raise test scores;
- a corporate sensibility and an economic rationale for schooling, the point being to prepare children to “compete” as future employees; and
- charter schools, many run by for-profit companies.
“Notice that these features are already pervasive, writes Kohn, which means “reform” actually signals more of the same.”
(Deep, cleansing breath) It’s hard to know how to begin unwinding all that is argumentative, tendentious and just plain wrong about this uniquely unhelpful little screed, insisting as Kohn does, that there is a political litmus test for favoring certain ideas in education. E.D. Hirsch could write a book about the inability of educators to differentiate progressive ends from progressive means (Wait. He’s already written at least three such books) and Kohn falls right into the same old pattern.
All but the most diehard accountability hawks seem to have accepted the idea that there’s more to student achievement than can be demonstrated by merely bubbling in a reading test once a year. By my count, about 4% of the nation’s 100,000 public schools are charters. That’s Kohn’s defintion of “pervasive?” And prescriptive, top-down teaching standards? Where, pray tell? Mostly we have a collection of empty “performance” (not content) standards that are so loose and impressionistic that virtually any lesson on any subject can be said to meet some standard.
And then there’s that most dogeared of pages in the familiar Alfie Kohn hymnal: ”disproportionate emphasis on rote learning–memorizing facts and practicing skills.” It’s charge he habitually and dishonestly throws at Core Knowledge schools. In what dark satanic mill is all this rote memorization happening? Show me. Given how “pervasive” it is, it shouldn’t be hard.
Matthew Ygelsias also goes after Mr. Kohn, calling the case for national standards pretty clear:
It’s silly for the federal government to invest a significant amount of money in something without articulating any kind of uniform national goals the money is supposed to be supporting. Beyond that, it’s incredibly harmful to children that when they move — a circumstance that disproportionately impacts poor children — there’s no curricular alignment between what they were learning previously and what they’re being taught now.
Update: The wise and wonderful Nancy Flanagan, while not commenting on Kohn’s piece, says it all over at Teacher in a Strange Land. “The worst possible way to approach any productive reform is to set up adversarial camps, and pit them against each other,” she observes. ”Win or lose. Leaving the winner with a constituency that’s half triumphant and half averse.”
Kohn appears to be describing “pervasive” conventional wisdom in the political media and education think tanks, not pervasive educational practice. It is unclear in context, but an important distinction.
I’m not sure it’s even pervasive in that context, frankly.
Funny, I would say that about an equal number of the charter schools I’ve heard of could be considered “progressive” as could be considered “back-to-basics”. Personally, I think that’s a good thing because it offers families a choice of approach the way private schools have long done. Education is not a “one size fits all” thing, and parents should be free to choose whatever style of education they feel is best for their own children’s needs.
It’s pervasive in the sense that it’s the view that of education world that David Brooks has absorbed. Maybe the people in ed policy think tanks are actually subtler than that, but both Kohn and Brooks are painting about the same cartoons of the education policy world — and many other media types do as well.
Robert,
Two cheers for you and three cheers for Nancy,Ms.Miller,Crimson Wife, and Rachel. Kohn’s argument is argumentative and tendentious, but not wrong. I think your commenters have already done a good job of explaing why, in context, Kohn’s use of pervasive is accurate. Yes, E.D. Hirsch has written three excellent books. Have the so-called “reformers” read any of them? Has Matt Ygelsias invested a fraction of the time needed to read about and think about national standards or the issues of accountability? Matt Miller promises to solve the nations problems in one half hour. But has he spent that much time reading opposing arguments? I’ve never touched a Blackberry, but between her love affair with her two thing-a-magigs, when was the last time Michelle Rhee took the time to read reflectively?
Kohn is argumentative and wrong in attacking Core Knowledge,I’d argue, because I had the same prejudice before I actually read Hirsch, as opposed to the “spin” on him. Just between you and me, if we could persuade the middlebrow press (and I don’t mean that characterization as a criticism because I’m awfully middlebrow myself) to read the evidence and not just the PR of the “reformers,” then we could persuade them. Were I to say it out loud, however, it would just add to the polarization. Ooops!?! Did I just write that?
Which get’s us to Nancy’s great version of Which Side Are You On? She wrote, “I have a good friend—a Lutheran pastor—who says there are two kinds of people in the world: people who think deeply about life, and people who believe there are two kinds of people in the world.”
I hate those people who tell a great joke and then explain it, but seriously the preacher’s joke points out the synthesis. We always have to do some bifurcation in order to conduct a practical discussion, but if we do it with some humor then it can be a “no harm no foul” situation.
Now is not the time for “our” side to get argumentative and tendentious. I want the “reformers” to keep up their loud protests. Their complaints that Obama is too willing to “think deeply about life,” are our best arguments for going with the the balnace and moderation of reformers who were reformers before “reformers” claimed the tile of reform.
Eich bin ein erfahrene Lehrerin.
[Robert] “Isn’t ‘if you’re explaining you’re losing’ a cardinal rule of politics?”
[Nancy] Hmmm. I used to work for a national education non-profit, as a Teacher in Residence (a concept I can’t translate to German, alas). During the time I was in residence, we took some heavy hits from some people–mostly economists, spreading their wings into education policy–about an initiative designed to identify accomplished teaching and use the expertise of said teachers to reform schools.
Our rule was: do not let any public slam go without rebuttal. Talk back. Explain. Because lots of people truly do not understand education policy, even though they think they do. No matter what you think of Linda Darling-Hammond, her politics and her experience, she was right to push back against David Brooks’ irritating column (speaking of people who think they understand the complexity of education policy).
As for Alfie Kohn, isn’t it deeply ironic that he hates to lose?
But–there is truth buried beneath the sarcasm in his remarks. Most schools today do rely on very traditional instructional strategies: memorize the content, test for accuracy, teach to the statewide benchmarks and assessments. I’m a strong believer in a solid core of required content (although not national standards–but that’s another argument), especially in early grades. It’s good practice to codify what kids should know and be able to do. I don’t see, however, any reason why mastery of a solid core curriculum cannot co-exist harmoniously with innovative instruction, different school-funding and governance models, multiple assessment measures and classroom management that doesn’t rely on a trip to the “treasure box” or money for good grades, God help us.
The dark satanic mill school you’re looking for? Could be mine–or the schools in my county or the neighboring Big Failing Urban District. All of us are pretty much doing the rote learning thing, because we get tested every year and our scores are compared publicly. Real estate agents carry MEAP scores in their leather briefcases, pointing out that my school has 85% of kids at basic or above in 7th grade math, while the district next to us has a mere 79% there. I’m not sure that’s productive or healthy.
Content standards (not teaching standards–they’re different)? I’m most familiar with Michigan’s, but I find our GLCEs (Grade Level Content Expectations, familiarly known as “the glicks”) clear and rigorous. Most states have undergone significant review of state standards for learning. The conventional wisdom is that state standards are too low (and their tests too easy)–but many states, including mine, have raised the bar on standards and curriculum requirements. And the last thing we need, as we try to push schools into the 21st century, is cast-in-concrete standards. Curriculum should be a flexible word and concept. And what’s right for kids on a ranch in Montana may not be right for kids living in the Cass corridor in Detroit.
I actually think Kohn is wrong about several — but certainly not all — things on his list. But that’s not my principal issue. It’s this idea that one should judge reforms by their political party of orientation or association, and Kohn’s attempt to play the role of sorter-in-chief. That’s madness. There’s a tradition in American politics that partisanship stops at the water’s edge. That’s an idea I’d like to see gain traction in education.
Let’s remember, and enjoy, the context. How about that Jonathan Alter saying that we know how to fix at risk schools, the problem is replication them? (more on that is at This Week In Education today. When the accountability hawks are making our case by demonstrating their lack of understanding of the complexity of education, are we not supposed to profit from their fumbles?
But I also agree that education should be different. We know that the Lee Atwater, Richard Morris, Karl Rove, Joe Williams, Whitney Tilson approach to politics can succeed in increasing profits for one side or the other. I don’t believe that their take no prisoners approach to politics can help school children. In the politics of business and the business of politics, there is always winners and losers. In education, the winners and losers are children. You are right, we need to take a higher road.
Nancy, the reason you “don’t see any reason why mastery of a solid core curriculum cannot co-exist harmoniously with innovative instruction, etc.” is because there IS no reason. I’ll defer to you about the rote memorization in Michigan schools, but it’s not happening in NYC, except in the $30,000+ upper east side private schools where kids still memorize their times tables and state capitols and nobody seems to mind. Indeed, I suspect parents would object if they didn’t. There’s an expectation that kids will master a certain body of knowledge.
To that end, I want to push back on your assertion that “what’s right for kids on a ranch in Montana may not be right for kids living in the Cass corridor in Detroit.” You hear this argument a lot from people who are opposed to national standards (I happen to favor them, if well designed). Are you suggesting that kids in Detroit need to learn how to add fractions and kids in Montana don’t? Or that kids in Montana should learn the three branches of government, but kids in Detroit need not? Rather than focus on the fact that kids in different communities have different needs, which no one will dispute, can we not agree that there are some broad swaths of common content that are important for all kids to know? Is learning about photosynthesis, the water cycle or the Bill of Rights a BAD idea for any child? If not, that should be a standard piece of an elementary education, no? What’s the harm in saying so and setting that expectation of all schools?
A personal note, John, I’m friendly with both Joe and Whitney. While I may not agree with every single policy they support, knowing them personally, I know them both to be smart, passionate and as deeply committed as you, I, or anyone to improving the lives of the kids we care about. In short, I see myself as on the same team with guys like that. I have no desire, per Nancy’s post, to divide my “teammates” into two groups, those I agree with and those I don’t. I’m not an ideologue. You bring a hammer, I’ll bring a saw, but we both agree we need to fix the roof. I view any proposal in education reform (as I’m sure you do) through the prism of my experience. I believe Individual teachers have an enormous role to play in education policy in this regard and we’re duty-bound to speak up. I hope we bring light, not heat, and on our best days something approaching a hard-earned wisdom.
I’m comfortable with disagreement. I’m less comfortable with (but still willing to work around) confrontation. Personally, I wish there were less of it, but it’s probably an inevitable side-effect of the politics-as-entertainment culture that is the current substitute for debate in the U.S. That’s why the rank partisanship of that Alfie Kohn piece irritates me–it’s unnecessarily divisive. I don’t know him, so I’ll trust his heart is in the right place too, but when you try to draw circles and say “If you believe in X, you’re a conservative; if you believe in Y, you’re a progressive” is precisely what we don’t need. Until or unless there’s a Nobel Prize for pedagogy, I simply cannot be made to care who comes up with a good idea or who gets the credit.
Robert,
OK your complaint in regard to divisiveness is Kohn and my complaint is DFER and Tilson. I think Kohn has a far more defensable position educationally, and you apparently disagree.
There is a FUNDAMENTAL difference though. Kohn is not damaging my students. Kohn did not start war on my union and my profession. You can disagree with Kohn about the best ways to teach kids. Kohn would rankle me if he was a threat to my interests. If I wasn’t afraid of Williams and Tilson, and what they stand for, they wouldn’t rankle me. You can argue whether DFER’s and Tilson’s policies have the potential to help students. I doubt you would disagree that their policies have damaged other kids.
I love to discuss issues and I love to joke. But I think you are overlooking the salient point – who is the aggressor. I think its great that Tilson donated to Obama. But its not like we teachers were sitting around the lounge one day as asked, what hedge fund maanager do we want to destroy? Its not like our union was out looking for a Democrat to harrass.
I want to be as balanced as possible. But, if we want to help kids we need to do something about the extremes. So I’ll be precise. Your friends may be nice people but look at their writings and you don’t see much evidence. Neither do you see much evidence of understanding of educational complexities. They start from first principles and work their way down to their rhetoric. I don’t know them but if they had more knowledge, I think they wouldn’t just throw insults. If they started with complaints about unions and bothered to look into our side of the story, then I don’t believe they would have selected us as being the devil that had to be destroyed. As far as comparing their politics with that of Atwater and Rove, I stand by the comparison. There are plenty of accountability hawks who do more than attack teachers and unions. I agree with you about working around differences, but we teachers can’t get there from here without standing up to Williams and Tilson.
The bottom line is this. The union and the political activists who I admire most believe in disagreeing without being disagreeable while always seeking compromise. Atwater, Rove, Williams and Tilson show no intention of compromising and every indication that they want to destroy their enemies.
No, there is another bottom line – one of values. Its not just that I fear for the threats they pose to my students and profession but also what they stand for. Its not just that they have borrowed the Republican scorch and burn politics. I have a deep reverence for learning. Their anti-intellectualism is repellant to my love of the liberal arts. The words “social science” should mean something. Evidence and facts should mean something. I spent too many years practicing my crafts of scholarly analysis to just shrug it off when they want to chop up knowledge into measurable pieces, and ridicule the canon I love. But as I indicated, I know plenty of people who have opinions that I would rankle me if worried about them enough to think about their insults. I can laugh off almost anything when they aren’t a threat to the people and values I love.
This piece seemed more like a plea for the Obama transition team to avoid “reform”/anti-reform litmus tests in appointments, not vice versa. Kohn attacks the imprecise terms of the current debate, in which education policy professionals who are not Eduwonk-style “reformers” are characterized by generalist observers of the policy process–Brooks, Alter, et al.–as opponents to meaningful systemic reform. (My apologies here to Andy Rotherham, with whom I am friendly.) The Eduwonk coalition relies on the word “reform” as a promotion strategy. That is Kohn’s problem: “Reform” recalls early twentieth century progressivism, which was characterized by the use of government regulation to replicate local social justice initiatives on a larger scale. This education “reform” coalition, in contrast, supports a slightly different means to that end, introducing hybrid public-private competitors into the public school system such that better schools would replicate faster than they could in response to regulation. A primary goal of postwar conservatism is to entrust the distribution of social goods to the private sector, so Kohn seems to believe that the “reform” school’s increasing reliance on private sector support is more accurately described as a conservative policy. Matt Yglesias, a former political philosophy major, seems less concerned with Kohn’s dismissal of national standards than with the precision of Kohn’s rhetoric: Not all of Kohn’s bullet points do not draw from postwar conservative governing ideologies.
My prior post neglected to explain why political labels matter here. As I previously described them, this whole to-do about what’s “progressive” and what’s “conservative” sounds trivial. The concern here–and I think it’s reasonable–is that earlier attempts to privatize social goods didn’t work, and that no one can afford more ineffectual policy experimentation in public education.
RE: Standardized core learning standards.
Yes, all children should learn–memorize–their times tables, state capitols, principles of the scientific method, parts of speech, etc. And if “national standards” were very broad frameworks, covering a well-chosen handful of disciplinary basics–OK.
My problem with national standards is that, having been on standards creation committees, I don’t trust any persons or organizations to judiciously select that small number of essential, critical standards. And–to repeat–standards, even core standards, should change over time. Curriculum should be responsive to context and societal change. The two biggest examples of that are, of course, technology advances and the changing demographic face of our public school students. (I can sense you marshaling your next argument–hold on.)
Most national disciplinary organizations–NCTM and so on–wrote content standards in the early 90s. And then the ongoing wars began. Were we to establish diverse, blue-ribbon committees to write core national standards, it would take considerable time and federal resources–with no guarantee that the standards would be any more useful (and I choose that word deliberately) than the state standards we presently have. Good standards should organize content in logical ways, and set reasonable but flexible benchmarks. If a standard’s only purpose is measuring progress, it’s not a good teaching tool.
I really love the Music Educators National Conference (MENC) music standards–but I’m sure they’d drive you nuts. They are broad and non-specific (read: vague), giving only general guidelines. Nowhere do they say “by second grade, kids should recognize and describe the function of a quarter note.” In some schools that would be a reasonable benchmark (mine, for example). In a school where kids do not have a music specialist, or see her only 6 weeks a year, or do only rote performances in primary grades, it’s an unreasonable standard. Educators often have to make choices. I would rather have my second grader singing than being tested on quarter notes, if opportunity-to-learn standards were unequal. And, let’s face it, they’re not ever going to be fully equal.
And when you’re teaching in the trailer school in Montana, or seeing kids for a total of 8 hours a year, who’s calling the curricular and instructional shots? Teachers. The more prescriptive the curriculum the less room for addressing specific kids’ needs.
About that diverse population–of course, I think kids in Detroit are both capable of and should be achieving at the same levels as kids in the suburbs. But they may well have different learning and curricular needs, both now and in the future. A few years ago, I lived in a small, rural school district with two full-time Agriculture teachers. This was not a staffing throwback to the 1950s–both teachers’ classes were fully subscribed, with boys and girls, and quite rigorous. The 4H and Future Farmers thrive here, and the most successful students went to Michigan State and majored in Ag Management. And then came home to work on local co-op farms. The HS did not, however, have a foreign language teacher. When MI passed its merit curriculum, hard choices had to be made–lay off the least senior Ag teacher (who had been there for two decades)? Hire a part-time language teacher? They’re still trying to sort it out (and are currently doing languages via distance learning). But I would argue that they were meeting students’ needs and parents’ goals successfully.
Would this fly in NYC? No. But–and I hate to say this–it’s easy to extrapolate what happens in Gotham or inside the Beltway to my school or the rural school with the thriving Ag program. Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee are not teacher-lounge fodder here in flyover country. I’m not taking a hard line local-control stance here–but people who believe that states (states!) have no business setting standards for their own schools, that we “need” national standards usually have something other than enriching the curriculum in mind.
Nancy, I see your points. The problem with broad, non-specific standards is that districts then mistake them for specific content standards. They will set up models that actually prevent the teaching of literature: teachers will be required to teach “strategies” and then send the children into their little groups to read different texts. If you want to teach literature, you may be up against a battle. The same applies to music: what if your music teacher is well versed in music theory and wants to teach musical notation? The district may not like that.
Specific content standards protect the integrity of the subject matter. It should then be the responsibility of the districts to find teachers who know the subjects. Of course there should be some flexibility. But vagueness can be awfully rigid.
Diana–I have often admired your incisive comments, here and in other blogs. In this case, however, you may be conflating poorly written standards with ineffective instructional choices. And–you’re assigning way too much agency to districts in requiring certain instructional models.
Say that a standard prescribes “interaction” with a variety of literary texts (one of those too-broad, too-vague standards). A good teacher will know that for some students, that interaction needs to be very traditionally structured–a group read, direct instruction on theme, POV, etc. Because some students need familiarity with some content basics in order to benefit from those little groups reading different texts. These decisions should be made by teachers capable of diagnosing their own students’ learning needs, setting the right goals, and analyzing student learning following the lessons.
When you pull the decision-making power back several steps, assuming that all kids should learn the same things at the same time (and imply that certain instructional techniques are optimum), it’s a recipe for failure. A good standard will describe an essential chunk of content or skill, but the more prescriptive the standard, the less useful it becomes for teachers in different schools and contexts.
The perfect example of this is 8th grade algebra. Yes, all students should leave HS with a working knowledge of algebra. And some–perhaps most–8th graders are ready, given quality preliminary instruction, to tackle the abstract thinking of algebra. But establishing 8th grade algebra as a new rigid “standard” can and has been counterproductive. It doesn’t protect the integrity of algebra at all–it just forces teachers and districts to make unwise choices.
This kind of thinking puts huge responsibility in the hands of teachers, and I freely admit that a significant percentage of American teachers aren’t up to the challenge. But–they should be, and a greater number of them could be. Expert teachers like standards, because they organize and sequence critical content. But the bottom-line instructional choices must be made in the classroom, not at the district or state level.
Nancy,
Thank you for your kind words. I enjoy your insights as well.
I agree that it would be absurd to have an eighth-grade algebra requirement without adequate preparation in the elementary grades. But why couldn’t we have that preparation in elementary school? You write that “some–perhaps most–8th graders are ready, given quality preliminary instruction, to tackle the abstract thinking of algebra.” Well, why don’t we provide quality preliminary instruction?
As for literature, I am wary about leaving curricular choices to the teacher, given how vague ELA is as a subject. You write, “A good teacher will know that for some students, that interaction needs to be very traditionally structured–a group read, direct instruction on theme, POV, etc.” But doesn’t it make a difference what we’re reading?
Many schools have lost sight of the importance of literature. If the curriculum were left to the teacher, some would focus on skills and strategies, others on works of literature. Some might teach grammar explicitly; others might insist that it is wrong to do so out of context. Though each teacher might invoke the standards, the students in each class would come out with substantially different levels and types of preparation. One student might finish eighth grade having studied Hamlet thoroughly. Others might not know any literature beyond the “chapter books” they themselves chose from the classroom library. These differences would likely have less to do with the students’ needs than with the teachers’ own inclinations.
Diana Senechal
Do we really want to have a “one size fits all” mandatory national reading list? Sure, we might all agree that it’s important for students to read Shakespeare, Dickens, Homer, Austen, etc. but do we really want to micromanage teachers’ decisions about whether students should read “Hamlet” vs. “MacBeth”, “Great Expectations” vs. “Oliver Twist”, “The Iliad” vs. “The Odyssey”, “Pride and Prejudice” vs. “Sense and Sensibility”, etc.?