On Alfie Kohn & Not Feeling So Alone - Anymore

Recently in our staffroom we held a discussion regarding the new National Standards. I was struck by the fact that the discussion was moving along the lines of, "National Standards are here and we have to decide if we want the blue or green graph". I, of course, put my hand up and shared my views - that I believe National Standards will spell the doom of a creative education for our children. Some staff carried on staring longingly out the window, while others muttered a few sentiments that needed a degree in twaddle to decipher what stance they were taking. With red cheeks and fire in my belly I turned to the words of Alfie Kohn to remind me that I am not alone and that there are intelligent people out there who understand the harm National Testing will undoubtedly create. So, a few report writing sessions and good-solid-creative-lessons later with my students, I found the time to join an NZEI meeting, be nominated as an Otago Rep for the meet in Wellington, draw some cartoons and write to Alfie Kohn to ask for help - see underneath.

"Alfie

I do not know if you recall the below letters I sent last year?

Since then, New Zealand, with a change of Government, has recently introduced (during school holidays) legislation to bring in National Standards for Numeracy and Literacy for all Primary aged children.
Having developed and interest in your ideas and ideals over the past year, I had spent some time going over your articles (and sparking much debate in the staffroom) regarding National Testing/Standards. I was pleased to say, this was not a reality for me.

However, Anne Tolley, our Education Minister, has been moving across the country in a so called 'consultation' period, explaining that they are with us and we have to decide what they will look like, how we will report to parent and she has been questioned on National Radio regarding league tables (her interview -- http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/morningreport).

Help!

I feel alone in this corner of the world and no one seems to make sense. National Testing is being hidden under the word Standards and I don't feel I am expert enough to make a grand-stand. Most teachers are rolling over and taking it!

Your thoughts would be invaluable.

Kind regards,
Greg MacLeod"

His reply:
"I’ve received a surprising number of messages from Kiwis over the last few years, most dealing with education policy, classroom strategies, and parenting. In particular, folks are concerned about the move to adopt one-size-fits-all educational standards along with standardized tests. (If you’re going to standardize what’s being taught across the country – wiping out innovative teaching and local autonomy – I guess you might as well seal the deal with standardized assessment to enforce compliance.)

I thought it might be interesting for you to know who else in NZ shares your concerns, so I’m taking the liberty of listing some of the educators other than you who have written to me. (I’m leaving out a few parents as well as a union official who wrote to me about the scourge of workplace incentives.) I’m doing so, first, in the hope of raising your spirits: If all these folks feel strongly enough to write to me all the way over in America, imagine how many more allies you probably have who just haven’t been identified and mobilized yet. Second, I wanted to send a couple of resources to all of you at once. And finally, I wanted to encourage you to write to one another as a way of beginning (or continuing) to organize against this juggernaut.

If any of my articles or books about standards and testing (at http://www.alfiekohn.org/standards/testarticles.htm) might be useful to you, feel free to steal from them, adapt them, distribute them, or whatever. Also see Deborah Meier’s important essay called “Educating a Democracy”: http://bostonreview.net/BR24.6/meier.html. Of course, you’ll have to extrapolate a bit, or read selectively, since both of us are talking about the U.S.

Beyond the substantive arguments is the matter of organizing to challenge the top-down push for national standards. Here it’s a matter of figuring out how best to use the media: organize letter-writing campaigns, hold marches and invite reporters to cover them, get experts in front of cameras and microphones, circulate petitions; and also set up websites, use Facebook and Twitter, delegate responsibilities to parents and teachers in different areas of the country who can set up local affiliates of a national effort. The issue has to be framed as a government-imposed mandate that’s bad for children, not just for teachers. Ordinary people have to be educated about the implications, and those who are skeptical have to be organized so their voices are heard.

Have a look at my own (again, U.S.-based) efforts to organize – at www.alfiekohn.org/stdtest.htm. You may also get some ideas from FairTest’s listserv, the Assessment Reform Network (www.fairtest.org/get_involved/k-12).

Hope this is helpful. Good luck!

-- Alfie Kohn"

Turns out, I am not alone. Perry Rush pointed me in the direction of this blog and I suddenly feel a need to take action. I have plenty more to say, but am not sure of a typical blog length so will stop now.

Greg MacLeod

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Comment by Paul Wilkinson on July 6, 2009 at 20:44: Greg

Thanks for this post. I have just bought Alfie Kohn's book 'The Schools our Children Deserve, Moving beyond traditional classrooms and tougher standards'. I haven't finished it yet but I'd love Anne Tolley to have a read. Great to get some input from Alfie Kohn via your questions. Cheers

He said to steal and or distribute his work so I have copied the section below in an effort to highlight the issues.

Five Fatal Flaws

The Tougher Standards movement is fatally flawed in five separate ways.

1. It gets motivation wrong. Most talk of standards assumes that students ought to be thinking constantly about improving their performance. This single-minded concern with results turns out to be remarkably simplistic. The assumption that achievement is all that counts overlooks a substantial body of psychological research suggesting that a focus on how well one is doing is very different from a focus on WHAT one is doing. Moreover, a preoccupation with performance often undermines interest in learning, quality of learning, and a desire to be challenged. (For more on this point, see "The Costs of Overemphasizing Achievement.")

2. It gets pedagogy wrong. The Tougher Standards contingent is big on back-to-basics, and, more generally, the sort of instruction that treats kids as though they were inert objects, that prepares a concoction called "basic skills" or "core knowledge" and then tries to pour it down their throats. State standards documents, in particular, typically contain long lists of specific facts and skills that all students in a given grade level are expected to master. This is a model that might be described as outdated were it not for the fact that, frankly, there never was a time when it worked all that well. Modern cognitive science just explains more systematically why it has always come up short. (For more on this point, see "Beware of the Standards, Not Just the Tests.")

3. It gets evaluation wrong. In practice, "excellence," "higher standards," and "raising the bar" all refer to scores on standardized tests, many of them multiple-choice, norm-referenced, and otherwise flawed. Indeed, much of the discussion about education today is arrested at the level of "Test scores are low; make them go up." All the limits of, and problems with, such testing amount to a serious indictment of the version of school reform that relies on these tests. (For more on this point, see "Standardized Testing and Its Victims", "Emphasis on Testing Leads to Sacrifices in Other Areas", and other articles.)

4. It gets school reform wrong. Proponents of Tougher Standards have a proclivity for trying to coerce improvement by specifying exactly what must be taught and learned - that is, by mandating a particular kind of education. There is good reason to doubt that the way one changes schooling is simply by demanding that teachers and students do things differently. "Accountability" usually turns out to be a code for tighter control over what happens in classrooms by people who are not in classrooms - and it has approximately the same effect on learning that a noose has on breathing.

5. It gets improvement wrong. Weaving its way through all these ideas is an implicit assumption about "rigor" and "challenge" - namely, that harder is always better. The reductive (and really rather silly) idea that tests, texts, and teachers can all be judged on the single criterion of difficulty level lurks behind complaints about "dumbing down" education and strident calls to "raise the bar." Its first cousin is the idea that if something isn't working very well -- say, requiring students to do homework of dubious value -- then insisting on more of the same will surely solve the problem. As Harvey Daniels puts it, the dominant philosophy of fixing schools today consists of saying, in effect, that "what we're doing is OK, we just need to do it harder, longer, stronger, louder, meaner, and we'll have a better country." (For more on this point, see "Confusing Harder with Better.")

On Alfie Kohn & Not Feeling So Alone - Anymore

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