Alfie Kohn to Speak at SUNY New Paltz April 24th

A Talk by Alfie Kohn - Asking Questions About Common Core Standards: The Latest Version of Top-Down School Reform

Thursday, April 25, 2013 at 4:30 PM

SUNY New Paltz, Coykendall Science Center Auditorium

For decades, “school reform” in America has meant prescriptive, one-size-fits-all state standards imposed on teachers and students by distant authorities and enforced by standardized testing. Now that movement has gone national with a uniform set of new “core” standards. In his talk, Alfie Kohn will raise troubling questions about this latest attempt to create a teacher-proof curriculum, asking who has pushed for its passage, whether there is any merit to the claim that such policies tend to improve schooling, why education groups have largely failed to challenge its premises, and what impact the standards are likely to have in classrooms.

Alfie Kohn is the author of twelve books, including No Contest: The Case Against Competition, Punished by Rewards, The Schools Our Children Deserve, Unconditional Parenting, and, most recently, Feel-Bad Education. He has been described by Time magazine as “perhaps the country’s most outspoken critic of education’s fixation on grades [and] test scores.”

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