Introduction. “Well, Duh!”: Obvious Truths That We Shouldn’t Be Ignoring

The field of education bubbles over with controversies. It’s not unusual for intelligent people of good will to disagree passionately about what should happen in schools. Sometimes these disagreements result from how the available evidence is interpreted, and sometimes they’re due to divergent visions regarding the purpose of schooling or what constitutes an ideal society.

But there are certain precepts that aren’t really debatable—that just about anyone would have to acknowledge are true. While many such statements are banal, I want to argue that some are worth noticing, because in our school practices and policies, we tend to ignore the implications that follow from them. It’s both intellectually interesting and practically important to explore such contradictions: If we all agree that a given principle is true, then why in the world do our schools still function as if it weren’t? I’ll identify about a dozen examples of this phenomenon, mindful that it won’t be possible to explore all the specific issues—and more controversial implications—that are entangled within them. Not so coincidentally, many of these questions anticipate the very topics that are explored later in this book.

I should also mention that several thinkers whose work I admire were kind enough to add to my “duh” list. I wasn’t able to use all their suggestions, but many stimulated my thinking about the items that I did include and helped me to reframe them.1 In any case, the hazard of creating such a list is that “Duh” will inevitably become “D’oh!” as more examples come to mind immediately after it’s sent off to the printer. You, meanwhile, will undoubtedly think of still others, some of which may be even more obvious.

1. Much of the material that students are required to memorize is soon forgotten. The truth of this statement will be conceded (either willingly or reluctantly) by just about everyone who has spent time in school—in other words, all of us. A few months, or sometimes even just a few days, after having committed a list of facts, dates, or definitions to memory, we couldn’t recall most of them if our lives depended on it.

Everyone knows this, yet a substantial part of schooling—particularly in the most traditional schools—continues to consist of stuffing facts into students’ short-term memories. Instruction and assess-ment are largely geared to “the forced ingestion of facts and data,” even though this is “useless for educational purposes,” as literacy expert Frank Smith has written. “What we remember from fruitless efforts to memorize are the stress and the failure inevitably involved.”2

The more closely we inspect this model of teaching and testing, the more problematic it reveals itself to be. First, there’s the question of what students are made to learn, which often is more oriented to factual material than to a deep understanding of ideas. (For more on this, see item #2 below.) Second, there’s the question of how students are taught, with a focus on passive absorption rather than active meaning-making: listening to lectures, reading predigested summaries in textbooks, and rehearsing material immediately before being required to cough it back up. Third, there’s the question of why a student has learned something: Knowledge is less likely to be retained if it has been acquired so that one will perform well on a test, as opposed to learning in the context of pursuing projects and solving problems that are personally meaningful.

Even without these layers of deficiencies with the status quo, and even if we grant that remembering some things can be useful, the fundamental question echoes like a shout down an endless school corridor: Why are kids still being forced to memorize so much stuff that we know they won’t remember?

Corollary 1a: Because this appears to be true for adults, too, why do most “professional development” events for teachers resemble the least impressive classrooms, with experts disgorging facts about how to educate?

2. Just knowing a lot of facts doesn’t mean that one is smart. Even students who do manage to remember some of the factual material that they were taught are not necessarily able to make sense of those bits of knowledge, to understand connections among them, or to apply them in inventive and persuasive ways to real-life problems. To cite an old adage (which was also cited approvingly by Albert Einstein): “Education is that which remains if one has forgotten everything he learned in school.”3 Words like “smart” and “intelligent” are routinely used to describe people who merely know a lot of facts, yet I think most people will admit that there’s a difference.

In fact, the cognitive scientist Lauren Resnick goes even further: It’s not just that knowing (or having been taught) facts doesn’t in itself make you smart. A mostly fact-oriented education may actually interfere with your becoming smart. “Thinking skills tend to be driven out of the curriculum by ever-growing demands for teaching larger and larger bodies of knowledge,” she writes.4 Yet schools continue to treat students as empty glasses into which information can be poured—and public officials continue to judge schools on the basis of how efficiently and determinedly they pour.

3. If kids have different talents, interests, and ways of learning, it’s probably not ideal to teach all of them the same things—or in the same way. It’s tempting to assume that one-size-fits-all instruction persists only because there are too many students in each classroom for teachers to customize what, or how, they’re teaching. This explanation, however, doesn’t quite match reality.

First, some teachers manage to adjust the curriculum to the needs of each student quite effectively despite class sizes far greater than would be ideal.5 Second, many people seem to value uniformity and consistency in teaching—or overlook the significance of differences among students—to the point that a lockstep curriculum and a single set of (usually traditional) teaching strategies are used even when this is avoidable. Lots of teachers will do pretty much the same thing next year that they did this year, even though they’re teaching different students. Many schools insist on “aligning” the curriculum so that what’s being taught in all the fifth-grade classrooms is virtually identical. (The degree of predictability that this arrangement ensures is convenient for the sixth-grade teachers who will inherit these kids, but why should that consideration trump what’s best for the kids themselves?) Finally, policy makers mandate a uniform set of standards and curriculum topics for all students of the same age across a district, across a state, and now, it appears, throughout the entire country (see chapter 15, “Debunking the Case for National Standards”). Most of us understand on some level that one size is more likely to thwart than to fit all, yet education policies proceed as if that weren’t the case.

4. Students are more likely to learn what they find interesting. There’s no shortage of evidence for this claim if you really need it. One of many examples: A group of researchers found that children’s level of interest in a passage they were reading was thirty times more useful than its difficulty level for predicting how much of it they would later remember.6 But this should be obvious, if only because of what we know about ourselves. It’s the tasks that intrigue us, that tap our curiosity and connect to the things we care about, that we tend to keep doing—and get better at doing. So, too, for kids.

Conversely, students are less likely to benefit from doing what they hate. Medicine may work on the body regardless of your attitude about taking it,7 but that’s not true with education. Psychology has come a long way from the days when theorists tried to reduce everything to simple stimulus-response pairings. We know now that people aren’t machines, such that an input (listening to a lecture, reading a textbook, filling out a worksheet) will reliably yield an output (learning). What matters is how people experience what they do, what meaning they ascribe to it, and what their attitudes and goals are. Thus, if students find an academic task stressful or boring, they’re far less likely to understand, or even remember, the content. And if they’re uninterested in a whole category of academic tasks—say, those that they’re assigned to do when they get home after having spent a whole day at school—then they aren’t likely to benefit much from doing them. No wonder research finds little, if any, advantage to homework, particularly in elementary or middle school.8

Sure, some things have to be done even though they’re not much fun. But quality of life improves when people of any age have more opportunities to do what they find interesting, and so does their productivity. So why does students’ level of interest in what they’re doing have so little impact on education policy despite its obvious connection to achievement?

Corollary 4a: If a certain approach to teaching left most of us bored and unenlightened, we probably shouldn’t teach another generation the same way. As far as I can tell, the vast majority of adults were themselves children at one point or another. So why do educators subject kids—and why do parents allow their kids to be subjected—to the stuff that we found barely tolerable? Have we forgotten what it was like? Or do we, for lack of empathy, regard the lectures, worksheets, tests, grades, and homework as a rite of passage?

5. Students are less interested in whatever they’re forced to do and more enthusiastic when they have some say. Once again, it’s true for you, it’s true for me, it’s true for people who spend their days in classrooms and in workplaces. Once again, studies confirm what we already know from experience (see chapter 6, “How to Create Nonreaders”). The nearly universal negative reaction to compulsion, like the positive response to choice, is a function of our psychological makeup.

Now combine this point with the preceding one: If choice is related to interest, and interest is related to achievement, then it’s not much of a stretch to suggest that the learning environments in which kids get to participate in making decisions about what they’re doing are likely to be the most effective, all else being equal. Yet such learning environments continue to be vastly outnumbered by those where kids spend most of their time just following directions.

6. Just because doing X raises standardized test scores doesn’t mean X should be done. At the very least, we would need evidence that the test in question is a source of useful information about whether our teaching and learning goals are being met. Many educators have argued that the tests being used in our schools are unsatisfactory because of (a) limitations with specific tests; (b) features shared by most tests, such as the fact that they’re timed (which places more of a premium on speed than on thoughtfulness), norm-referenced (which means the tests are designed to tell us who’s beating whom, not how well students have learned or teachers have taught), and consist largely of multiple-choice questions (which don’t permit students to generate or even explain their answers); or (c) problems inherent to all tests that are standardized and created by people far away from the classroom, as opposed to assessing the actual learning taking place there on an ongoing basis.

This is not the place to explain in detail why standardized tests measure what matters least.9 Here, I want only to make the simpler—and, once again, I think, indisputable—point that anyone who regards high or rising test scores as good news has an obligation to show that the tests themselves are good—in other words, that they really tap the proficiencies we care about, that students and schools we admire based on solid criteria also do well on these tests, and that when one school’s score is higher than another’s, we’re certain that the difference is both statistically and practically significant (and can’t be explained by other variables such as socioeconomic status).

If a test result can’t be convincingly shown to be both valid and meaningful, then whatever we did to achieve that result—say, a new curriculum or instructional strategy—may well have no merit whatsoever. It may even prove to be destructive when assessed by better criteria. Indeed, a school might be getting worse even as its test scores rise.

So how is it that articles in newspapers and education journals, as well as pronouncements by public officials and think tanks, seem to accept on faith that better scores on any test necessarily constitute good news, and that whatever produced those scores can be described as “effective”? Flip through any issue of Education Week and you will see multiple illustrations: This reading program has produced “promising results”; that state has experienced stagnant “achievement”; certain school districts are “outperforming” others—and in every single case, the people being quoted (and those doing the quoting) are relying on the validity of the standardized tests on which these evaluations are based, almost never pausing to question, defend, or even acknowledge the significance of this reliance.

Corollary 6a: The more time spent teaching students how to do well on a particular test—familiarizing them with its content and format—the less meaningful the results of that test. What those results mostly tell us is how well students were prepared for that test, not what knowledge and skills they have in general. (The scores may not even predict how well students will do on other, apparently similar, standardized tests.) Every expert in the field of educational measurement knows this is true, yet administrators continue to encourage, if not demand, a test-oriented curriculum. Astute parents and other observers will then ask, “How much time was sacrificed from real learning just so kids could get better at taking the [name of test]?”

7. Students are more likely to succeed in a place where they feel known and cared about. I realize that there are people whose impulse is to sneer when talk turns to how kids feel, and who dismiss as “soft” or “faddish” anything other than old-fashioned instruction of academic skills. But even these hard-liners, when pressed, are unable to deny the relationship between feeling and thinking, between a child’s comfort level and his or her capacity to learn.

Here, too, there are loads of supporting data. As one group of researchers put it, “In order to promote students’ academic performance in the classroom, educators should also promote their social and emotional adjustment.”10 And yet, broadly speaking, we don’t. Teachers and schools are evaluated almost exclusively on academic achievement measures (which, to make matters worse, mostly amount to standardized test scores). If we took seriously the need for kids to feel known and cared about, our discussions about the distinguishing features of a “good school” would sound very different, and our view of discipline and classroom management would be turned inside out, seeing as how the primary goals of most such strategies are obedience and order, often with the result that kids feel less cared about by adults—or even bullied by them.

Corollary 7a: Students are more likely to succeed when they’re healthy and well-fed. Fourteen million American children live in families whose income falls below the official poverty line, and another 16 million live in families classified as low-income.11 Can anyone possibly doubt the impact that hunger and inadequate health care have on academic achievement?12 Is there a more striking example of the disparity between what we know and what we do?

8. We want children to develop in many ways, not just academically. Even mainstream education groups, averse to challenging widely accepted premises about instruction and assessment, have embraced the idea of teaching the “whole child.” It’s a safe position, really, because just about every parent or educator will tell you that we should be supporting children’s physical, emotional, social, moral, and artistic growth, as well as their intellectual growth.13 Moreover, it’s obvious to most people that the schools can and should play a key role in promoting many different forms of development. In a survey of more than 1,100 Americans, for example, 71 percent said they thought that it was even more important for the schools to teach values than to teach academic subjects14—although of course this doesn’t mean that everyone will agree on what those values should be.

If we acknowledge that academics is just one facet of a good education, why do so few conversations about improving our schools deal with—and why are so few resources devoted to—nonacademic issues? And why do we assign children still more academic tasks after the school day is over, even when those tasks cut into the time that children have to pursue interests that will help them develop in other ways?

Corollary 8a: Students “learn best when they are happy,”15 but that doesn’t mean they’re especially likely to be happy (or psychologically healthy) just because they’re academically successful. And millions aren’t. Imagine how high schools would have to be changed if we were to take this realization seriously.

9. Just because a lesson (or book, or class, or test) is harder doesn’t mean it’s better. First, if it’s pointless to give students things to do that are too easy, it’s also counterproductive to give them things that they experience as too hard. Second, and more important, this criterion overlooks a variety of considerations other than difficulty level by which educational quality might be evaluated. We know this, yet we continue to worship at the altar of “rigor.” I’ve seen lessons that aren’t unduly challenging yet are deeply engaging and intellectually valuable. Conversely, I’ve seen courses—and whole schools—that are indisputably rigorous . . . and appallingly bad.16

Of course, difficulty level can be seen not only as a cause but also as an effect. And that leads us to . . .

Corollary 9a: The more pressure students feel to succeed, the more likely they’ll be to choose easy tasks. After all, the easier the task, the higher the probability that it can be done successfully. The paradox is profound: Some of the same people who love to talk about “rigor” and “raising the bar” have created schools that are all about succeeding, performing, achieving (rather than learning), and that very focus leads students to do whatever’s easiest.17

10. Kids aren’t just short adults. Over the last hundred years, developmental psychologists have labored to describe what makes children distinctive and what they can understand at certain ages. There are limits, after all, to what even a precocious younger child can grasp (e.g., the way metaphors function, the significance of making a promise) or do (e.g., keep still for an extended period). Likewise, there are certain things children require for optimal development, including opportunities to play and explore, alone and with others. Research fills in—and keeps fine-tuning—the details, but the fundamental implication isn’t hard to grasp: How we educate kids should follow from what defines them as kids.

Once again, though, our practices and policies deviate alarmingly from what most people acknowledge to be true in the abstract. Developmentally inappropriate education has become the norm, as kindergarten (literally, the “children’s garden”) now tends to resemble a first- or second-grade classroom—in fact, a bad first- or second-grade classroom, where discovery, creativity, and social interaction are replaced by a repetitive regimen focused on narrowly defined academic skills.

More generally, premature exposure to sit-still-and-listen instruction, homework, grades, tests, and competition—practices that are clearly a bad match for younger children and of questionable value at any age—is rationalized by invoking a notion I’ve called BGUTI: Better Get Used to It. The logic here is that we have to prepare you for the bad things that are going to be done to you later . . . by doing them to you now (see chapter 3, “Getting Hit on the Head Lessons”). When articulated explicitly, that principle sounds exactly as ridiculous as it is. Nevertheless, it’s the engine that continues to drive an awful lot of nonsense.

The deeply obvious premise that we should respect what makes children children can be amended to include a related principle that is less obvious to some people: Learning something earlier isn’t necessarily better. Deborah Meier, whose experience as a celebrated educator ranges from kindergarten to high school, put it bluntly: “The earlier [that schools try] to inculcate so-called ‘academic’ skills, the deeper the damage and the more permanent the ‘achievement’ gap.”18 That is exactly what a passel of ambitious research projects has found: A traditional skills-based approach to teaching young children—particularly those from low-income families—not only offers no lasting benefits but appears to be harmful.19

Another kind of evidence comes from Finland, whose impressive results on international comparisons in several academic fields have lately attracted intense interest. Most of what’s striking about that country’s education policy poses a direct challenge to the conventional wisdom that defines U.S. schooling: Standardized tests are used sparingly, students of different ability levels are taught together rather than tracked, and homework is uncommon. Any of these features might be contributing to Finland’s success.20 But it’s particularly interesting that kids there don’t start school until they’re seven years old, and preschool begins only one year before that. During that preschool year, moreover, “children are encouraged to play with language and numbers,” but “there is no formal teaching of basic academic skills.”21 From all indications, Finland succeeds because of, not in spite of, that fact.

Corollary 10a: Kids aren’t just future adults. They are that, of course, but they aren’t only that, because children’s needs and perspectives are worth attending to in their own right. We violate this precept—and do a disservice to children—whenever we talk about schooling in economic terms, treating students mostly as future employees (see chapter 13, “Against ‘Competitiveness’”). Which reminds us of another unarguable fact. . . .

11. Education policies that benefit (or appeal to) large corporations aren’t necessarily good for children. I say “aren’t necessarily” to ensure that this item qualifies for a place on the “duh” list. Replace that phrase with “often aren’t” and I believe the claim is still true, even though it would then be contestable. Some years ago I made an observation so obvious that it should have been prefaced with the phrase “needless to say,” but current developments in U.S. education reform suggest that it needs to be said again:

Corporations in our economic system exist to provide a financial return to the people who own them: They are in business to make a profit. As individuals, those who work in (or even run) these companies might have other goals, too, when they turn their attention to public policy or education or anything else. But business qua business is concerned principally about its own bottom line. Thus, when business thinks about schools, its agenda is driven by what will maximize its profitability, not necessarily by what is in the best interest of students. Any overlap between those two goals would be purely accidental—and, in practice, turns out to be minimal. What maximizes corporate profits often does not benefit children, and vice versa. Qualities such as a love of learning for its own sake, a penchant for asking challenging questions, or a commitment to democratic participation in decision making would be seen as nice but irrelevant—or perhaps even as impediments to the efficient realization of corporate goals.22

To say this is not in itself to criticize those corporate goals, but merely to observe that the people who pursue them should not enjoy a privileged status when it comes to formulating education policy.

12. Substance matters more than labels. A skunk cabbage by any other name would smell as putrid. But in education, as in other domains, we’re often seduced by appealing names when we should be demanding to know exactly what lies behind them. Most of us, for example, favor a sense of community, prefer that a job be done by professionals, and want to promote learning. So should we sign on to the work being done in the name of “Professional Learning Communities”? Not if it turns out that PLCs have less to do with helping children to think deeply about questions that matter than with boosting standardized test scores.23 The same caution is appropriate when it comes to “Positive Behavior Support,” a jaunty moniker for a program of crude Skinnerian manipulation in which students are essentially bribed to do whatever they’re told. More broadly, even the label “school reform” doesn’t necessarily signify improvement; these days, it’s more likely to mean “something that skillful and caring teachers wouldn’t be inclined to do unless coerced,” as educator Bruce Marlowe put it.24

Corollary 12a: What it is matters more than when it’s done. Just about anything that one happens to like can be rebranded as “twenty-first-century schooling” (or skills). It’s sort of like “new and improved” except that what’s being sold are books, confer-ences, and ideas rather than dessert toppings or floor waxes. Take the educational stuff that you regard as truly valuable—student-centered learning, critical thinking, understanding ideas from the inside out, compassion, collaboration, democracy, authentic assessment—and then ask whether any of it was (or will be) less important in a different century. When modifiers turn out to be mostly marketing ploys, it’s enough to drive one to an act of satire (see chapter 14, “When Twenty-First-Century Schooling Just Isn’t Good Enough”).

Once we acknowledge that any given item on this list is true, we’re compelled to consider its implications for both big-picture (macro) policies and little-picture (micro) practices. While the two obviously overlap—a state law that imposes high-stakes testing affects what Ms. Dewey can do tomorrow morning with her sixth graders—I’ve noticed that some people seem to make a lot more sense when they talk about one realm as opposed to the other.

For instance, certain scholars of cognition and pedagogy who demonstrate a keen sense of what can be done in classrooms to help children learn have enthusiastically endorsed the idea of prescriptive state (or even national) standards. Their assumption seems to be that the best and brightest theorists, using government as their instrument, ought to reach into classrooms and make the instruction more thoughtful. I find this at once naive and arrogant, troubling for moral as well as practical reasons. Some of these thinkers have contributed significantly to our understanding of the limits of a behaviorist model of learning—and the importance of having students construct knowledge rather than passively absorb it—but they assume that teachers’ behaviors can (and should) be controlled from above, that public policy ought to be based on a model of “doing to” rather than “working with.”

Conversely, consider the case of Diane Ravitch, a prominent conservative education scholar, who has undergone a conversion experience and begun to write trenchant critiques of the corporate-style version of education reform that many of us have been decrying for years: merit pay (mostly based on test results), more charter schools (which often siphon public funds to for-profit companies), less job security for teachers, and so on. But when the conversation turns to what happens inside classrooms, she remains steadfastly traditional. By way of analogy, imagine a health care critic who cheers progressives with her brilliant arguments for a single-payer plan and fiery, if belated, attacks on insurance companies—but, if asked what doctors should actually be doing in the examining room, waxes nostalgic for the curative value of leeches.

The essays that follow reflect what could be described as a progressive sensibility that applies to both macro and micro questions. I make a case against uniform national standards but also against the use of rubrics for evaluating kids’ individual assignments; I object to using “competitiveness in a global economy” as the touchstone for formulating education policies, but I’m just as concerned about simplistic attempts to crack down on student cheating or the ideology that lies behind inspirational posters of the sort found in so many schools.

These and other positions developed in the chapters that you’re about to read are obviously controversial. Yet I remain convinced that most of them, whether addressed to policy makers or teachers, derive from much more basic and widely accepted beliefs—in some cases from assertions so straightforward as to make us say, “Well, duh!”

Notes

1. Thanks to Dick Allington, David Berliner, Marion Brady, Bruce Marlowe, Ed Miller, Nel Noddings, Susan Ohanian, Richard Rothstein, and Eric Schaps.[back]
2. Frank Smith, “Let’s Declare Education a Disaster and Get On with Our Lives,” Phi Delta Kappan, April 1995, p. 589.[back]
3. Albert Einstein, Out of My Later Years (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 2000, orig. published 1950), p. 36.[back]
4. Lauren B. Resnick, Education and Learning to Think (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1987), p. 48. The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm put it this way: “The pathetic superstition prevails that by knowing more and more facts, one arrives at knowledge of reality. Hundreds of scattered and unrelated facts are dumped into the heads of students; their time and energy are taken up by learning more and more facts so that there is little left for thinking” (Escape from Freedom [New York: Avon Books, 1965, orig. published 1946], p. 273).[back]
5. The usual term for this is “differentiation,” but it’s important to distinguish between, on the one hand, a commitment to working with students individually to create projects that reflect their interests, strengths, and needs, and, on the other hand, a behaviorist protocol in which the difficulty level of prefabricated skills-based exercises is adjusted on the basis of each student’s proficiency as determined by standardized test scores.[back]
6. Richard C. Anderson et al., “Interestingness of Children’s Reading Material,” in Aptitude, Learning, and Instruction, vol. 3: Conative and Affective Process Analyses, eds. Richard E. Snow and Marshall J. Farr (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1987).[back]
7. For the sake of argument, we’ll ignore some intriguing findings from the field of mind-body connections that have the effect of raising questions about even this assumption.[back]
8. See Alfie Kohn, The Homework Myth (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2006), especially chapters 2 and 3.[back]
9. This is the place: Alfie Kohn, The Case Against Standardized Testing: Raising the Scores, Ruining the Schools (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2000). For a list of books on the subject by other authors, see www.alfiekohn.org/standards/resources.htm. Also see the resources at www.fairtest.org.[back]
10. Lisa Flook, Rena L. Repetti, and Jodie B. Ullman, “Classroom Social Experiences as Predictors of Academic Performance,” Developmental Psychology 41 (2005): 326. This particular study focused on the academic relevance of peer acceptance and social relations, but other research has found similar academic benefits from a feeling of “classroom belonging,” which includes being accepted by the teacher (Carol Goodenow, “Classroom Belonging Among Early Adolescent Students: Relationships to Motivation and Achievement,” Journal of Early Adolescence 13 [1993]: 21–43); the extent to which a classroom or school feels to students like a “community” (Victor Battistich et al., “Schools as Communities, Poverty Levels of Student Populations, and Students’ Attitudes, Motives, and Performance,” American Educational Research Journal 32 [1995]: 627–58); and attending to students’ social and emotional needs more generally (Joseph E. Zins et al., eds., Building Academic Success on Social and Emotional Learning: What Does the Research Say? [New York: Teachers College Press, 2004]; and Catherine Gewertz, “Hand in Hand,” Education Week, September 3, 2003, pp. 38–41). At the same time, it’s important to keep in mind that caring, like the chance to make decisions and to do interesting things, is an end in itself, not merely a means of boosting academic performance.[back]
11. See publications by the National Center for Children in Poverty (www.nccp.org).[back]
12. For a good summary, see Richard Rothstein, “Equalizing Opportunity,” American Educator, Summer 2009, pp. 4–7, 45–46. Elsewhere, Rothstein suggests that schools might raise achievement more by making sure children had access to dental and vision clinics than from changing instruction (“Reforms That Could Help Narrow the Achievement Gap,” Policy Perspectives, p. 5; available at www.wested.org/online_pubs/pp-06-02.pdf).[back]
13. What’s more, even a desire to promote intellectual growth doesn’t necessarily translate into support for what we commonly think of as an academic agenda. In many of her writings, early-childhood expert Lilian Katz has distinguished between engaging children’s minds and deepening their understanding of themselves, on the one hand, and the more circumscribed skills associated with a focus on academic achievement, on the other.[back]
14. Jean Johnson and John Immerwahr, First Things First: What Americans Expect from Public Schools (New York: Public Agenda, 1994). In a Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll with about the same sample size, meanwhile, when respondents were asked what “the local public schools should give the main emphasis to,” 39 percent chose “academic skills of students,” while 59 percent chose one of the other two options: “ability of students to take responsibility” or “ability of students to work with others” (Lowell C. Rose and Alec M. Gallup, “The 31st Annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll of the Public’s Attitudes Toward the Public Schools,” Phi Delta Kappan, September 1999, p. 51).[back]
15. This reminder from education philosopher Nel Noddings is quoted in chapter 12 of this book (“Feel-Bad Education”).[back]
16. For more on this topic, see my article “Confusing Harder with Better,” Education Week, September 15, 1999, pp. 68, 52, which appears as a chapter in What Does It Mean to Be Well Educated? (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004) and is available at www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/edweek/chwb.htm.[back]
17. For more, see my book The Schools Our Children Deserve (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), chapter 2.[back]
18. Deborah Meier, “What I’ve Learned,” in Those Who Dared, ed. Carl Glickman (New York: Teachers College Press, 2009), p. 12.[back]
19. One study, for example, found that young children subjected to “Direct Instruction” (DI) were subsequently less likely to graduate from high school than those who experienced a more developmentally appropriate form of teaching. Another study found that DI children ended up with more social and psychological signs of trouble later on and were less likely to read books. See Kohn, The Schools Our Children Deserve, pp. 213–17. This section is also available at www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/ece.htm.[back]
20. Also possibly relevant: the fact that Finland is a small, mostly homogeneous country with egalitarian sensibilities and an institutionalized respect for teachers.[back]
21. Kaisa Aunola and Jari-Erik Nurmi, “Maternal Affection Moderates the Impact of Psychological Control on a Child’s Mathematical Performance,” Developmental Psychology 40 (2004): 968. Also see Ellen Gamerman, “What Makes Finnish Kids So Smart?” Wall Street Journal, February 29, 2008 (available at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120425355065601997.html).[back]
22. Alfie Kohn, “The 500-Pound Gorilla,” Phi Delta Kappan, October 2002, p. 118 (available at www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/500pound.htm).[back]
23. For more, see my essay “Turning Children into Data: A Skeptic’s Guide to Assessment Programs,” Education Week, August 25, 2010 (available at www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/edweek/data.htm).[back]
24. Bruce Marlowe, personal communication, May 2010. Also see my comments on the uses to which the phrase “school reform” is put, in “Test Today, Privatize Tomorrow,” Phi Delta Kappan, April 2004, pp. 569–77 (available at www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/testtoday.htm); and in “Beware School ‘Reformers,’” Nation, December 29, 2008, pp. 7–8 (available at www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/soe.htm).[back]