Call To Arms

By Drew Lindsay

Warren Beatty is the hot ticket this fall night at Harvard. For weeks now, the actor-cum-liberal activist has been hinting that he might run for president—a ridiculous notion, perhaps, but one that has splashed color on a campaign featuring candidates who favor beige at all costs. So with the media hyping the prospect of the once-randy Beatty bedding down in the White House, it's standing room only for the talk he's to deliver at the John F. Kennedy School of Government.

A few blocks away, another liberal holds forth before another packed room, a liberal who, at least in education circles, is also something of a celebrity. Writer, lecturer, hectorer, and rabble-rouser Alfie Kohn is speaking before more than 100 students, teachers, and guests at Harvard'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-eds in major papers, 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 the fatal flaws of the standards and accountability movement that's swept the country. 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,...