Alfie Kohn on APS cheating scandal: ‘What if we gave a test and nobody came?’
I interviewed education advocate and writer Alfie Kohn a while back. You can read the 2011 interview here.The APS cheating scandal was in the news at the time, and Kohn told me:
The real cheating scandal that has been going on for years is that kids are being cheated out of meaningful learning by focusing on test scores. Standardized tests like the CRCT measure what matters least. The more you know about education, the less likely you would ever be to measure teachers, schools or kids based on test scores.I wondered what Kohn, author of “The Case Against Standardized Testing” and other books, thought about the indictments Friday of former APS school chief Beverly Hall and 34 others.
I asked him a few questions for an editorial I am writing for the print AJC.
Here are his answers in full:
Standardized tests are lousy measures of thinking. They assess some combination of (a) family wealth and (b) how much time has been diverted from real learning in order to make kids better …