How teaching to the assessment test can be classist and racist

Valerie Strauss, the Washington Post education blogger, reprints a searing essay by education writer Alfie Kohn, "How school reform damages poor children."

It recaps arguments made in Jonathan Kozol's first book, Death at an Early Age, and to some extent, those by Bowles and Gintis in Schooling in Capitalist America, which argues that the purpose of K-12 education is to socialize us and make us employable and relatively unquestioning.