Customer Reviews

The Schools Our Children Deserve: Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and "Tougher Standards"

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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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Kohn's research based argument in favor of a more progressive approach to learning takes a wrecking ball to the traditional or "old school" method of educating elementary through high school students. In his pursuit to change the way our schools teach, he fuses in research, current and dated, that examines the spectrum of issues ranging from how people learn to how high stakes testing may have a detrimental effect on learning. He believes that true learning occurs when one constructs meaning without the emphasis on getting a grade or reward. Using the results of researchers such as: Dewey, Vygotsky, Piaget, Bruner, Holt, and Gardner, Kohn explains that the American K-12 educational system is using methods more consistent with behaviorists such as Skinner and Thorndike. He believes that this old system of teaching does not teach students how to think; rather, it teaches them how to memorize facts and algorithms in the hope of getting a good grade. He believes that the teacher directed instructional model treats students like passive, empty receptacles that need to be filled with the teacher's "all knowing" knowledge. The real question is why does this continue when research does not support this traditional model? Also, why should students treat school as an external force, offering extrinsic motivators, which are doing something to them as opposed to their happening to school? Kohn explains that the traditional model of teaching that we endured through does not justify the continuous use of this model. "Is it possible that we are not really as well educated as we'd like to think?"(p. 35) Kohn, along with numerous researchers, believes that schools should use a more constructivist approach to learning without the grades and standardized tests that "dumb down" the curriculum. He explains that the call to raise standards through multiple-choice norm referenced standardized tests only perpetuate the use of the old model of teaching. In addition, "studies of elementary, middle school, and high school students have all found a statistical association between high scores on standardized tests and relatively shallow thinking."(p. 27) This book is a wake-up call for anyone who is concerned with the future of how we educate people.

The traditional approach is all wrong. Hooked on Phonics is a joke. "Drill-and-Kill" approaches to teaching are inherently, systemically flawed. And only a right-wing conservative wacko nut would disagree.

Gosh, somebody better tell all this to Marva Collins. She's been doing all that and giving inner-city African-American children a quality education. She even has four-year-olds read and comprehend _Les Miserables_ (see interview with Talmadge Griffin in _Awaken the Giant Within_ by Tony Robbins, p. 105). But any African-American woman teaching in the inner city is probably some kind of radical right-winger.

Hooked-on-Phonics is a joke, eh? "If I would have magic beans, I would save the beans. And when I save the beans, then I will give them away. The End." That was a story written by a six-year-old-child who was taught with the Whole Language approach to reading, as quoted in the _San Francisco Chronicle_. That was the oral version; the written one was, "If I wd hf mg ics I wd save the bses and one I sav the bes then I wd f thm way the end" (_The Consipiracy of Ignorance_, by Marin L. Gross, p. 78). This child will probably never even hear of _Les Miserables, much less read and comprehend it, and is already two years older than a child who has already moved past it. And of course, this ignores all the success Hooked-On-Phonics, The Phonics Game, etc. have all enjoyed.

All I can say to anyone who calls learning by rote "drill-and-kill" is-- you are obviously no martial artist, you probably know nothing of playing a musical instrument, and you have certainly forgotten how you learned to type, if you can in fact type.

The kicker in all this is that Kohn claims that "progressive" education has never been tried, and that the current failures are a result of traditional education. WHAT A LOAD! Public schools actually get a combination, and the degree to which they fail usually corresponds to the degree in which progressivism is integrated into the methods and curricula. To quote Tracey Ullman's explanation of why she moved her family back to England: "In California... [t]hey are into this silly outcome-based education where it doesn't matter if she knew HOW to spell her name as long as she knew WHO she was. And it didn't matter that she KNEW that two plus two equals four as long as she had enough self-confidence to ASK how to get 'to the conclusion of the problem.' What a crock! She was going to end up dumb as a mudflap. Had to get her out." (From _Dumbing Down Our Kids_, by Charles J. Sykes, p. 245.)

Little wonder that the same people pushing progressive education are also the same people who decry standardized testing and also such things as "mere knowledge" and "mere facts." Don't waste your time with this book unless you want external validation of your nontraditional methods and/or are a Pepperdine Doctoral Student. Makes me wonder where Kohn teaches (or taught)!

The book The Schools our Children Deserve is a refreshing look into a new method of educating our children. In an era where there is a tendency to create a verticle shift and raise standards in our education system, Kohn offers meaningful alternatives. When we ask our educators to go "back to the basics" what are we really wanting? Kohn points us in new directions beyond creating children who are wharehouses of information to developing children who develop life long learning skills. I recommend this book to all parents, prospective parents, educators and any one interested in the future of education in the United States.

As an educator in the k-12 system, I found Kohn's book to be very insightful and encouraging. His ideas against standardized testing would make politicians shutter, but ring true to the reason I became a teacher. As the book says, "he has ambitious yet practical vision of what our children's classrooms could be like."

He encourages Constructivist teaching, which strays from the mindset of "teaching to the test" and "teaching the basics" that are so often drilled at teachers these days. He defines constructivism as "derived from the recognition that knowledge is constructed rather than absorbed". (page 132) He encourages teachers to "facilitate" rather than "instruct". He gives the power and creativity of learning back to the children. They are encouraged to create, find, and teach each other new ideas.

He writes with such conviction that his arguments drive you, the reader, to jump up and make a change.

Kohn's well supported arguments, convictions, and ideas towards "progressive school reform" help me to see the kind of teacher I would like to be. It gives me the drive and needed ammunition to help and encourage others around me to do the same. His vision for change, found in the second half of his book, has already encouraged me to make changes in my teaching style.

Whether you are an educator, a parent, or a concerned citizen, this book will drive you to help concerned teachers everywhere enact a change in your school community.

It will be hard to add anything to the fine reviews already posted here, but here it goes...

As an educator, I was very impressed by the conviction of Kohn's arguments, all of which fly in the face of current demands for "standardized testing" and "teaching the basics" that we hear so often in the public discourse on education. These demands are described by Kohn as "top down coercion," which makes a great deal of sense to me since the people we usually hear praising these pedagogical approaches are politicians, most of whom know absolutely nothing about teaching. If they knew anything they wouldn't be so obsessed with achievement and the administration of poorly conceived tests, the only measures of classroom activity that they can appreciate. According to the contemporary education system, when a particular school demonstrates high test scores they are rewarded with more public education funding. The other part of the equation--the schools who for a myriad of curricular, extracurricular and administrative factors have low scores--are penalized by receiving less funding. Such a merit system, I believe Kohn would argue, is reflected on the level of the students themselves, who often make their way through their public school system and enter college without ever considering if they are actually learning anything (instead of simply attaining high scores). Kohn writes, "If they've internalized the imperative to get good grades, they'll still be looking for the easiest possible courses when they get to college" (31). Does this sound familiar? And people wonder where so many students get the "getting by" mentality toward their education.

Not content to challenge just the politicians who would like to determine how and what children learn, Kohn also critiques researchers such as E. D. Hirsch (65-66). Kohn also marshals an impressive array of new research to support his arguments. One of the most compelling sections of the book is where Kohn, for years a public school teacher, depicts the current state of public education. "We are now living through what will surely be classified as a particularly conservative, even reactionary, era in American education" (6). He sees the current era as a resurgence of "traditional" education models that invoke a "good ol' days" vision of school that parents can more easily appreciate. However, according to Kohn, while the traditional model has been prevalent throughout the twentieth century, it is never blamed for shortcomings in American education: "if students aren't learning effectively, it may be because of the persistence of traditional beliefs and practices..." (11). The daunting challenges that face nontraditional models are the fact that the "tried-and-true" practices, such as the "bunch o' facts" model of teaching, have a loyal constituency that thwarts reforms; and nontraditional education is very difficult to do and sustain (11).

Not content to simply describe the problems, Kohn dedicates the second half of his book describing in detail his vision of a productive nontraditional approach. The brief appendix, "What to Look For in a Classroom", should be Xeroxed and send to every educator in this country. I must also say that Kohn writes with a lively, at times mordant, wit. "The Schools Our Children Deserve" is more than a lot of facts (a "bunch o' facts"), it is really quite funny in places. For example, Kohn attacks the phonics approach to reading: "'Hooked on phonics' is a joke. Who gets hooked on the cr sound?" (71). He characterizes the traditional manner in which teachers conduct class as "chalk 'n talk", "stand and deliver", "the sage on the stage" (or, from the student's point of view, "sit 'n git") (61). My favorite Kohnism is found on page 55: "In the Old School classroom, six-year-olds are handed worksheets and told to fill in the missing letters in one word after another (as in: w_ste of t_me)." !!!

This book offers an uncompromising criticism of traditional education, but the arguments are very well supported and Kohn's vision for a model classroom is a viable, albeit labor-intensive, solution. I wish our elected leaders would read it.