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May 1, 1999
5 min (est.)
Vol. 41
No. 3

The Dark Side of Standards

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      Writer and activist Alfie Kohn, noting that more than 1,200 educators chose to attend his session "The Deadly Effects of Tougher Standards," remarked, "That in itself is a message, at least as I see it."
      Then Kohn asked his audience: "When you hear a public official, a corporate spokesperson, a reporter, or a member of your state's board of education talk about the need to raise the bar, demand accountability, do more high-stakes testing, and in general demand tougher standards for the 21st century, how many of you have a reaction, on balance, that is negative?" A forest of raised hands was the response.
      Kohn distinguished between two kinds of standards. Horizontal standards, he said, are guidelines for changing the way we do teaching and learning, such as the standards developed by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. "I have no objection to standards in that sense," he said.
      Vertical (or "tougher") standards, on the other hand, call for us to take the existing approach to education and do it more intensely. "Here we're not talking about reconceptualizing instruction and learning," Kohn said. "We're talking about intensification of the status quo. That's what concerns me."
      1. It gets motivation wrong. "When you get kids too focused on how well they're doing, they tend to lose interest in what they're doing," he said. "Learning comes to be seen as a chore the more we overemphasize results."
      2. It gets improvement wrong. "The emphasis placed on difficulty is out of proportion to its actual significance in judging how good a classroom, school, or district is," Kohn said. When words like rigor or challenge refer simply to places on a single continuum of difficulty—rather than referring to "genuinely engaging stuff that requires kids to apply their minds in a concerted fashion that is intrinsically satisfying—then we're not talking about something that's rigorous; we're just talking about something that's onerous."
      3. It gets teaching and learning wrong. "The bunch-o'-facts model is implicit in virtually every statewide standards document," Kohn said. In addition, he criticized the standards' "implicit assumption that all kids should be able to do the same things at the same rate. Any practice that requires marching in lockstep is bound to leave a lot of failures in its wake."
      4. It gets assessment wrong. "When districts teach to the test in order to raise test scores, this typically means worse teaching is going on," Kohn said. "Kids are [merely] prepped to do well on the tests."
      5. It gets school reform wrong. "Right now accountability is just a code word for more control over what happens in classrooms by people who are not in classrooms," Kohn said. "And it has essentially the same effect on learning that a noose has on breathing."
      At the end of the session, Kohn recruited members for a new organization opposed to the tougher standards movement. For more information, visit www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/standards.htm.

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