CON-Test

By Drew Lindsay

Writer, lecturer, hectorer, and instigator Alfie Kohn is speaking before more than 100 students, teachers, and guests at Harvard University's graduate school of education. Known for his quixotic crusades against competition in schools,

Kohn is a pious populist cut from the same cloth as Ralph Nader. And in recent months, he's been as omnipresent as Nader after the 1989 wreck of the Exxon Valdez. A new book (his seventh), Op-Ed pieces in major newspapers, and coast-to-coast lectures have given Kohn a visible pulpit from which to rain down fire and brimstone.

The gospel according to Alfie begins and ends with the notion that what's being billed today as school reform will actually ruin schools. In his entertaining talk—its recipe one part research abstracts, two parts anecdote, and a pinch of sarcasm—Kohn ticks off what he sees as the fatal flaws of the standards and accountability movement that's swept the country over the past decade. It puts control of the classroom in the hands of know-nothing politicians and business executives, he argues, and it makes damnable standardized tests the ultimate arbiter—and engine—of learning. Worst of all, perhaps, it kills creative, progressive teaching, sending classrooms back to the Stone Age of basal readers, back-to-basics instruction,...