Kohn: "The Trouble with Rubrics" and "The Case Against Tougher Standards"

           

          Upon reading Alfie Kohn and his ruminations on assessment, I immediately thought of the film, Dead Poets Society.  An English teacher, played by Robin Williams, compels his students to read aloud from the preface of their anthology.  According to the foreword, works of literature can be evaluated by graphing two qualities—significance and implementation.  Midway through the reading, Mr. Williams’ character tells his students to rip out the offending pages.  Art should not be so mechanically reduced! 

            Thus, how is the movie’s warning applicable today?   Driven by state testing and standards, teachers are being pulled toward prompt-and-rubric teaching that bypasses the human act of composing and the human gesture of response.  Please refer to the following article,  http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2000/09/13/02newkirk.h20.html.  According to Newkirk’s article, through the use of rubrics, teachers are providing their students with a more precise and analytic reasons for the evaluations they receive.  However, is that truly the case?

            Alfie Kohn would adamantly respond with NO!  Disparaged by a “tool [that] promotes[s] standardization” (2), Kohn offers the following criticisms of rubrics:

1.      “Just as standardizing assessment for teachers may compromise the quality of teaching, so standardizing assessment for learners may compromise the learning” (3).

2.      “…Students, presumably grown accustomed to rubrics in other classrooms, now seemed unable to function unless every required item is spelled out for them in a grid and assigned a point value…they do not have confidence in their thinking or writing skills and seem unwilling to really take risks” (3).

3.      “Studies have shown that too much attention to the quality of one’s performance is associated with more superficial thinking, less interest in whatever one is doing, less perseverance in the face of failure, and a tendency to attribute the outcome to innate ability and other factors thought to be beyond one’s control” (3).

Rubrics fail to reveal the narrative, moment-by-moment process of evaluation.  Their formal and categorical ratings disprove the work of the reader; moreover, rubrics fail to provide a demonstration of the reading process that can later be internalized by the writer. (Criticism 1) The very authoritative language and format of rubrics, their pretense to objectivity, hides the act of writing or reading. (Criticism 2)  The key qualities of good writing (organization, detail, and a central problem) are represented as something the writing has—rather than something the writing does. (Criticism 3)

            With the present utilization of rubrics, what is left to evaluate in student writing?  Has writing been so mechanically reduced?  Outlined by Kohn, Maja Wilson argues assessment is “stripped of the complexity that breathes life into good writing… [and] we need to look to the piece of writing itself to suggest its own evaluative criteria—a truly radical and provocative suggestion” (4).  So, was Robin Williams’ character in Dead Poets Society “radical and provocative” or was he on point?