November 15, 2026

Special Education Is Neither

Listen to the episode here.

Behavior control is widespread in our schools, but it’s visited with particular ferocity on students who are outliers, especially those identified as having special needs or challenges. The more these kids are subjected to a regimen of Skinnerian manipulation (featuring behavior-focused IEPs, charts, points, and rewards for compliance), the more dependent they become on external control and the more they fall behind intellectually and socially. Such approaches, including but not limited to programs like PBIS and ABA, fail not because they’re impr...

November 1, 2026

Learning to Think Like a Scientist

“The heart of science,” said the educator Sylvia Farnham-Diggory, “is the drive to discover, not the mastery of laboratory procedures and report formalities or the ability to recite facts from textbooks.” Traditional science teaching, often geared to memorizing information that will be on a test, is a bad bet in several ways. Students remember little of what they were taught, fail to move past sticky misconceptions about how the world works, and end up with little interest in science. Research tells us that the outcomes are far better in class...

October 15, 2026

Aggressive Nostalgia

“Schools are getting worse and worse; young people today can barely read and write! In the old days, education standards were higher, kids were less self-centered, and people were more moral.” Except…social scientists have shown that none of this is true — and that people have been insisting that things were better back when they were young pretty much forever. Such pronouncements tell us more about the individuals making them than about the reality they purport to describe. Moreover, myths of a halcyon past are wielded by right-wing demagogues and are used to justi...

October 1, 2026

Raising the Scores, Ruining the Schools

More than a quarter-century after “No Child Left Behind” deliberately left millions of children behind by imposing nationwide punitive high-stakes testing, U.S. students are still tested constantly, starting early in elementary school. Children in many states may be forced to repeat a grade based solely on their scores. In a memorable conversation, FAIRTEST director Harry Feder helps us understand just how pervasive testing has become and why that’s very bad news. Standardized exams have largely become, in his words, “tests of test-taking skills” rather than of academic p...

September 15, 2026

Caution: Contents Under Pressure

The psychological consequences of pressuring children to perform well academically (and, worse, to outperform their peers) are distressingly obvious. But some adults rationalize their actions by claiming that pressure can be productive. Here we consider psychological research on different amounts and types of stress, as well as asking what exactly we view as a “productive” outcome. It turns out that internal pressure can be as damaging as external, and pressure on educators (e.g., to raise students’ test scores) can undermine the quality of teaching — and, thus, of learning. Likewise, “no pain, n...

September 1, 2026

How Not to Deal with Bullying

The amount of bullying that goes on in schools is as sobering as the psychological impact it has on its victims, sometimes lasting into adulthood. Alas, common strategies for dealing with this problem are often ineffective and even counterproductive. In fact, we may inadvertently create a climate conducive to bullying by relying on punitive discipline and also by pitting students against each other in contests. Rather than just trying to protect individual kids — or, worse, punishing bullies — we need to work with all students (and adults) to restructure the...

August 15, 2026

Teaching Kindness

How can schools help children to become not only good learners but also good people? What’s involved in cultivating a genuine concern about others, an enduring commitment to helping and caring? Here we consider several strategies, which require us to look beyond behaviors and think about motives: the care we express for students, the prosocial examples we set, the beliefs we hold about them, the explanations we offer (about how their actions affect others), and the opportunities we create to practice caring. Particularly important for helping students to grow into caring pe...

August 1, 2026

The Pseudoscience of Reading

What the real science of reading shows is that there isn’t a single method for learning how to read that’s ideal for all children. Moreover, reading is not just about letter-sound relationships; it’s about making meaning — reading (and talking about) real books for real reasons. In an eye-opening conversation, literacy expert Catherine Compton-Lilly helps us dissect the dishonest claims of the so-called “Science of Reading” campaign and understand why an overemphasis on phonics (mechanical decoding) is not just unhelpful but actively harmful. SOR mandates amount to a kind of “edu...

July 15, 2026

The Remarkable Benefits of Diversity

Even if you aren’t ideologically opposed to segregation in schools, research shows that it doesn’t make sense for practical reasons — and that goes not only for segregation by race but also segregation by gender, ability, or age. What generally proves beneficial, from preschool to college, are heterogeneous environments — diverse schools and, equally important, diverse classrooms. But because proximity doesn’t guarantee affection, the optimal arrangement also provides support for interdependence: guided heterogeneity in which learning is structured to promote shared goals and perspective taking.

RESOURCES

For...

July 1, 2026

Raising Reflective Rebels

We’re faced with a silent epidemic of obedience, a pervasive failure to become outraged by outrageous things. Adults whose highest accolade for a child is “well-behaved” often themselves suffer from a crisis of moral courage. This episode offers practical suggestions for teachers and parents who want to help kids acquire not only the capacity but the inclination to question what they’re told — and, when necessary, to refuse to go along.

A note from Alfie Kohn:

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June 15, 2026 Fun Without Winning or Losing We have been raised - and, in turn, raise our children - to take on faith that recreation requires competition, that half the people playing a game must try to defeat the other half. (They "cooperate" only with their teammates, and only in order to triumph over the other team.) In a true cooperative game, by contrast, everyone on the field - or gathered around a table indoors, in the case of cooperative board games - is working together toward the same goal. There are loads of such games for kids and adults, and...

June 1, 2026 "PROGRESSIVE HIGH SCHOOL" IS NOT AN OXYMORON In theory, the fact that all but a handful of states have eliminated do-or-die exit exams allows high schools to finally do right by teenagers, to help them become engaged intellectuals and caring people. A leading theorist and practitioner of secondary education - author, professor, and long-time Midwestern principal George Wood - examines the barriers to creating meaningful high school reform as well as how they can be overcome. That means reducing school size and class size; having students take fewer classes and giving them more autonomy; eliminating tracking; creating advisory systems...

May 15, 2026 Grade Inflation Is Not the Problem When you look at student transcripts (rather than at self-reports), it's less clear that average grades are rising over time. And even if some grades are higher, that doesn't mean they're "inflated" (i.e., undeserved). But many conservative critics don't seem troubled by their inability to prove those claims; they're indignant whenever a lot of kids get high grades, as if that outcome were inherently objectionable. Four troubling assumptions inform their outrage: that higher grades imply lower standards; that a teacher's job is to sort students (rather than to help everyone succeed); that...

May 1, 2026 Beneath the What and the How Is the Why In the absence of an affirmative definition of mental health, psychology doesn't become value-free; its values - and the goals of therapy - are just driven underground. Similarly, if we don't reflect on the purpose of education, schooling by default is oriented just to collecting a credential. The point of this episode is not to recommend one specific educational goal but to sharpen the questions we ask about that topic (and emphasize the importance of asking them). For example: Should the goal(s) of education be the same for all...

April 15, 2026 The Best Classroom Discussions, Hands Down In traditional classrooms, students may contribute to a discussion only by raising their hands and waiting for the teacher to call on them. In even more controlling environments, students must contribute when the teacher calls on them, even if they'd rather not. The latter practice, "cold calling," puts kids on the spot and forces them to perform on command. But the former practice, too, could be described as teacher-centered. Is there a way to change this dynamic in such a way that everyone won't talk at once while also making sure that a...

April 1, 2026 The Assault on Public Education: A Conversation with Jennifer Berkshire Public schools, says Jennifer Berkshire, are the places "where we start to solve problems together" and from which no child can be excluded even if she has special needs or two moms. Public education is really the foundation of a pluralistic secular democracy, which is precisely why it has long been the target of the religious right. This extended episode of Kohn's Zone features a conversation with Berkshire, who expertly guides us through efforts not only to impose religion, book bans, and a right-wing curriculum on public schools but...

March 15, 2026 Friendly Excursions into Disequilibrium Enforced harmony is counterproductive. Pushing students (or employees) to come to agreement prematurely tends to undermine learning (or produce bad decisions). Sometimes that's motivated by a desire to avoid conflict. But conflict handled carefully is not only tolerable; it's valuable. What's problematic is debate - disagreement where the point is not to learn or seek the truth but to win. The ideal arrangement in a classroom (or workplace) is cooperative conflict, where spirited disagreement is non-adversarial and nested in a caring environment. RESOURCES: David W. Johnson & Roger T. Johnson, "Energizing Learning: The Instructional Power of...

March 1, 2026 Who's Cheating Whom? We're often warned about an "epidemic" of academic cheating and urged to do more to deter and punish the devious culprits. But we've had a century of research showing that the frequency of cheating is predicted not by the compromised morality of individual students but by the policies, priorities, and practices of schools. Specifically, cheating is far more common in competitive, achievement-oriented environments and much rarer when students experience the learning as meaningful and engaging and believe that their teachers care about them. In this episode we consider how systemic features not only increase the likelihood...

February 15, 2026 The Whole Point Is That There's No Point Early-childhood educators remind us how vital it is for kids to have plentiful opportunities to engage in free play - which, sadly, is often denied to them as academic pressures are imposed too early and too intensely. But let's consider some perspectives on play that are less obvious: how the word is sometimes applied to activities that really aren't play at all; how important play is for older students and adults, too; how play isn't the only alternative to "work" in a school setting; and why we shouldn't try to justify...

February 1, 2026 Beyond "Electronic Flashcards": A Conversation with Gary Stager Computers in classrooms may have the potential to radically enrich and democratize student learning, but the reality of ed tech typically looks very different. This extended episode of Kohn's Zone features a stimulating conversation with Gary Stager, one of our foremost experts on this topic. He takes us beyond banal generalities ("technology has pluses and minuses") in order to tease out which types, uses, and purposes are constructive and which are a waste of time - or worse. In what he calls our current "age of rising pedagogical authoritarianism," tech often...

January 15, 2026 How to Kill Kids' Interest in Reading Surveys reveal that fewer children and adults are reading for pleasure. This might be due partly to social media, but certain classroom strategies and school policies likely play a role. In this episode we come at the issue backwards: What would teachers do if their goal was to extinguish kids' enthusiasm about books? Well, they would adopt a "fonix fetish" when teaching young children. They would require older students to read for a certain length of time -- and keep a log to prove they complied. They would assign books rather than...

January 1, 2026 Who Gets to Decide? - Part 2 Intellectually vibrant classrooms are distinguished by teachers who do a lot more asking than telling. Their motto when confronting challenges or planning lessons is "Bring the kids in on it!" Regular class meetings offer a significant role for students to reflect on "how we want our class to be" (rather than focusing on specific rules). This second of a two-part episode digs deeply into strategies for supporting student autonomy and then explores some of the structural and psychological reasons why some teachers are reluctant to move in this direction. It's tough to give...

December 15, 2025 Who Gets to Decide? - Part 1 An impressive body of research shows that people of all ages - including students in classrooms - are happier, healthier, and more productive when they have some say about what they're doing. Indeed, the way children learn to make good decisions is by making decisions. Why, then, are so many classrooms more focused on eliciting their compliance than supporting their autonomy? In this, the first of a two-part episode, stories and studies illustrate the benefits of giving students a real voice about what and how they learn, how problems are solved, and even...

December 1, 2025 The Curious Case of the Incurious Children A Conversation with Susan Engel Everyone agrees that it's good to be curious, but that doesn't mean schools are committed to fostering children's curiosity. This extended episode of Kohn's Zone features a provocative conversation with early-childhood expert Susan Engel of Williams College, who draws on a deep background of theory and research (some of it her own) to probe the nature of curiosity -- that remarkable desire we have to resolve discrepancies between what we encounter and what we expected. Curiosity can feed on itself, generating new and subtler questions, yet classrooms...

November 15, 2025 It's Not Just You The most popular initiatives in education tend to be strategies for "fixing the kids." A focus on the deficits of individual students, rather than a critical analysis of systemic issues, is the common denominator of academic remediation, behavior management programs, and efforts to equip children with more self-regulation, grit, or a "growth mindset." Yet the entire field of social psychology warns us that we err in underestimating the impact of the environments in which people, including students, find themselves. Alas, this message has become muddled because some classic social psych research is widely misunderstood, including...

November 1, 2025 Making Kids Work a Second Shift Too often the debate over homework is restricted to its quantity -- or, at best, its quality. But such discussions take for granted the need for some homework, as if it were impossible to question that premise. It may come as a surprise, therefore, to learn that research generally fails to support the value of, let alone the need for, requiring children to complete more academic tasks when they get home from school. (For elementary and middle school students, no controlled studies have found a meaningful benefit to assigning any type or amount...

October 15, 2025 A.I., as in Anti-Intellectual People who express concern about the use of AI in schools often focus on how it allows students to get away with something (by using OpenAI to write their essays). But shouldn't we be talking more about its potential effects on teaching and learning than whether it will impede our ability to evaluate students? The problem is not just that we seem to be overestimating the capabilities of LLMs but that we seem to be underestimating the essence of education, which is a process, not merely a series of products. Moreover, is it really...

October 1, 2025 Death by Civics A Conversation with Joel Westheimer About the Role of Education in Democratic Life   Suppose you wanted young people to develop a commitment to democracy, particularly at a time when it's under assault. How would you do that? Not by creating a school culture in which following the rules is valued more than critical thinking. And not by offering conventional civics courses with mind-numbing recitations of facts about how government is supposed to work. There's a big difference between teaching about a country's political system (or even about democracy), on the one hand, and preparing students to b...

September 15, 2025 The Failure of Failure The notion that kids today have it too easy and would benefit from more experiences with failure is no longer a surprising, contrarian claim; it has become the conventional wisdom. But it's dead wrong on two levels: Most children deal with frustration and failure quite a lot, and those experiences tend not to be beneficial, according to research. Either naïveté or conservative ideology leads many adults to believe that when students fall short, they'll react by trying harder next time. But more commonly students are trapped in a vicious cycle such that they're even mo...

September 1, 2025 Bad Signs The posters and signs adorning school walls speak volumes about the people who put them there, revealing a surprising amount about their views of children, their assumptions about learning, and even their beliefs about human nature. There's the enforced positivity of slogans that basically tell students: "Have a nice day....or else," the individualistic worldview of inspirational slogans with their messages of strenuous uplift, the chirpy banalities airily informing kids that structural barriers don't exist: All they need is perseverance and a dream, so they have only themselves to blame if they fail to achieve greatness. Nothing...

August 15, 2025 Confusing Harder with Better What do the following have in common? a) parents who don't seem particularly concerned about whether what their kids are doing in school is engaging or meaningful, but are quick to complain if their assignments aren't sufficiently challenging b) people who assume that Advanced Placement classes must be the best that a high school has to offer just because these classes are really tough c) proponents of school reform who use the language of "rigor" and "raising the bar" d) legislators and administrators who require students to take standardized tests that many successful adults would...

August 1, 2025 Number Sense and Nonsense A Conversation with Jo Boaler About Learning Math(s)   Question: Why do so many people write off math as uninteresting if not downright unpleasant, and as something they just don't have a knack for? Answer: Years of traditional instruction with textbooks and worksheets and quizzes, memorization of math facts and algorithms, direct instruction of the approved technique for arriving at the right answer (followed by endless practice problems) that leaves you with no understanding of what you're doing, let alone why. This extended episode of Kohn's Zone features a spirited conversation with math educator Jo B...

July 15, 2025 Skip the Sugarcoating If your company is offering unappealing food, you'll be tempted to add artificial sweetener. And if your schools are offering unengaging lessons (which students had no role in creating), you'll be tempted to use some kind of gimmick to make them seem less dreary. This episode considers how, long before "gamification," John Dewey hit on the metaphor of sugarcoating to describe efforts to distract kids from the "barrenness" of what they were being made to do. Half a century later, give or take, a pair of early-childhood educators, Rheta DeVries and Betty Zan, hit on the...

July 1, 2025 Little Ed Koches Grades and tests get in the way of learning for multiple reasons, but this episode digs deeper to explore how any practices that lead students to focus on how well they're doing in school -- as opposed to what they're doing -- are bad news. Policy makers who trumpet their demands for higher standards, "rigor," and "raising the bar" may not realize that this focus on achievement makes kids think less about learning because, like a certain bald former mayor of New York City, they're constantly asking, "How'm I doin'?" For details about how an overemphasis...

July 1, 2025 The Back-to-School-Night Speech We'd Like to Hear This introductory episode offers an overview of education issues that will be discussed on the podcast -- a sort of a Cliff's Notes to what distinguishes traditional from progressive education. It takes the form of a (fictitious) principal's remarks to parents delivered one evening in a school auditorium. The premise was inspired by a movie-satire feature that occasionally appeared in Mad magazine called “Scenes We’d Like to See.” It was also inspired (or, um, counterinspired) by some back-to-school talks we’ve actually heard.   A note from Alfie Kohn: I made two decisions...