How our love for numbers warps school reform
Americans have a love affair with numbers. Here Alfie Kohn, the author of 12 books about education and human behavior, explains why this has become a problem when it comes to school reform. His books include “The Schools Our Children Deserve,” “The Homework Myth,” and “Feel-Bad Education... And Other Contrarian Essays on Children & Schooling.” He lives (actually) in the Boston area and (virtually) at www.alfiekohn.org. This is a slightly expanded version of an essay that was first published in the September 19 issue of Education Week”
By Alfie Kohn
“As we tend to value the results of education for their measurableness, so we tend to undervalue and at last ignore those results which are too intrinsically valuable to be measured.”
-- Edmond G. A. Holmes, chief inspector of elementary schoolsfor Great Britain, 1911
The reason that standardized test results tend to be so uninformative and misleading is closely related to the reason that these tests are so popular in the first place. That, in turn, is connected to our attraction to
(bigstock)— and the trouble with — grades, rubrics, and various practices commended to us as “data-
(bigstock)— and the trouble with — grades, rubrics, and various practices commended to us as “data-