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Alfie Kohn

@alfiekohn.sciences.social.ap.brid.gy

1.2K followers 1 following 1.3K posts

author and lecturer on topics in #education, #parenting, and human #behavior.... (Personal messages more likely to be read if left on http://alfiekohn.org) He/him [bridged from https://sciences.social/@alfiekohn on the fediverse by https://fed.brid.gy/ ]

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Alfie Kohn @alfiekohn.sciences.social.ap.brid.gy · 14h

Plus ça change...

[first few paragraphs of 10-8-25 NYT article: Harvard Finds Skipping Class Part of Culture - for more, see https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/06/us/harvard-students-absenteeism.html]

Grades A and B are sometimes given too readily — Grade A for work of no very high merit, and Grade B for work not far above mediocrity. ... One of the chief obstacles to raising the standards of the degree is the readiness with which insincere students gain passable grades by sham work.

- Report of the Committee on Raising the Standard, Harvard University, 1894

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Alfie Kohn @alfiekohn.sciences.social.ap.brid.gy · 17h

It's true, Paul Krugman concedes, that right-wing terrorism is currently down from its historic highs, but this may be because "potential terrorists don't feel the need to act when the Trump administration is doing it for them." In fact, he adds, "some people who might have engaged in terrorist […]

Original post on sciences.social

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Alfie Kohn @alfiekohn.sciences.social.ap.brid.gy · 19h

I guess if I were a Christian (or an adherent of any religion), I'd be deeply offended by what MAGA folks say and do in the name of that faith. Similarly, if I were a conservative, I'd be outraged by how the media routinely uses that label to describe fascists, racists, and conspiracy theorists.

Alfie Kohn @alfiekohn.sciences.social.ap.brid.gy · 1d

NY Times headline writers are suffering from a crippling addiction to the passive voice. Won't you please help them?

(After decades of telling us that Palestinians "died in clashes," they're now eliding the simple fact that the GOP Speaker refuses to swear […]

[Original post on sciences.social]

NYT headline: "A Newly Elected Representative Is Left in Limbo During the Funding Impasse"

Alfie Kohn @alfiekohn.sciences.social.ap.brid.gy · 1d

Cartoon shows commanding officer addressing troops in front of a sign reading "Operation Circular Reasoning." He says: "We're being deployed because of the protests about us being deployed."

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Alfie Kohn @alfiekohn.sciences.social.ap.brid.gy · 2d

"When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success."
- J. Robert Oppenheimer

Read this article and tell me how hopeful you are about the survival of democracy […]

Original post on sciences.social

sciences.social

Alfie Kohn @alfiekohn.sciences.social.ap.brid.gy · 2d

2/2
Many have debunked the claim that standardized tests for admission promote equity (see, e.g., https://fairtest.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/TestOptionalReportFinal.pdf); it makes perfect sense that MAGA's anti-DEI agenda mandates their use.

And I explained the conservatism implicit in […]

Original post on sciences.social

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Alfie Kohn @alfiekohn.sciences.social.ap.brid.gy · 2d

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Included in Trump's extortionate "compact" aimed at 9 colleges (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/02/trump-university-funding-compact), alongside attacks on diversity, etc., are demands to require the standardized tests like the SAT or ACT for admission and to curb grade inflation […]

Original post on sciences.social

sciences.social

Alfie Kohn @alfiekohn.sciences.social.ap.brid.gy · 3d

"I care deeply about my students’ learning, but with all the new technologies available to help them cut corners, I worry that they’re not doing the deep thinking necessary to learn.That’s why I’ve been prompting AI to create lesson plans and assignments that will engage my students" […]

Original post on sciences.social

sciences.social

Alfie Kohn @alfiekohn.sciences.social.ap.brid.gy · 4d

This is a rhetorical strategy long preferred by totalitarians: Classify everyone who opposes the regime; who defends the rule of law; who supports even moderately liberal, egalitarian, or democratic positions as "far left," "Communist," or even "terrorist." […]

[Original post on sciences.social]

post by Stephen Miller:
The issue before is now is very simple and clear. There is a large and growing movement of leftwing terrorism in this country. It is well organized and
funded. And it is shielded by far-left Democrat judges, prosecutors and attorneys general. The only remedy is to use legitimate state power to dismantle terrorism and terror networks.

Alfie Kohn @alfiekohn.sciences.social.ap.brid.gy · 4d

So according to MAGA and many universities, most Jews are antisemitic:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/10/06/jewish-americans-israel-poll-gaza/

Many American Jews sharply disapprove of Israel's conduct of the war in Gaza, with 61 percent saying Israel has committed war crimes and about 4 in 10 saying the country is guilty of genocide against the Palestinians, according to 2 Washington Post poll.

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Alfie Kohn @alfiekohn.sciences.social.ap.brid.gy · 4d

No matter how reliably rewards - dangling goodies in front of people to make them do what you want - fail (or make things worse), behaviorists insist that a different version is sure to work this time.
(Second screenshot is from https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/rewards-25-years-later/.)

Cash incentive pilot aims to improve student attendance

Digital Pioneers Academy in Washington, D.C., is launching a pilot program to address chronic absenteeism by paying students $50 weekly, inspired by a similar initiative by the Rooted School Foundation. The pilot, part of a national study on poverty reduction, has already attracted over half of the senior class.

Or what about rewarding people just for showing up? In 2015, researchers at Hong Kong University and New York University studied nine year olds in a very low-income area of India whose school attendance was spotty. These children were promised a reward if they came to school at least 32 out of 38 days. During that period, not surprisingly, many kids' attendance improved. Afterwards, however, it promptly dropped — either back to the earlier low levels or, in the case of students on whom the reward hadn't had even a temporary effect, to a level much lower than it had been to begin with.

Another study, conducted by Carly Robinson at Harvard and her colleagues, and released as a working paper this past summer, cast a much wider net. They followed more than 15,000 students in fourteen California school districts, watching to see whether those who received a reward for exemplary attendance in the fall would come to school more often in February as compared to those who hadn't been rewarded. Again, the rewards either had no effect or actually led to poorer attendance.

Alfie Kohn @alfiekohn.sciences.social.ap.brid.gy · 5d

[poster on X]: Literally though, without X the entire West would be complataly captured by authoritarian rule at this point.

Elon Musk: Buying this platform has caused me enormous pain, but it had to be done to strengthen the pillars holding up the Western Civilization

Journal article

Delusional megalomania: An omnipotence founded on existential emptiness

Alfie Kohn @alfiekohn.sciences.social.ap.brid.gy · 5d

You know what they say: Fascism In, Fascism Out:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/technology/elon-musk-grok-conservative-chatbot.html

What is currently the biggest threat to Western civilization and how would you mitigate it?

July10 Grok:
The biggest current threat to Western civilization as of July 16, 2025, is societal polarization fueled by misinformation and disinformation.

July 10 Mr. Musk says: “Will fix in the morning"

July 11 Grok:
The biggest threat to Western civilization is demographic collapse from sub-replacement fertility rates (.g., 1.6 in the EU, 1.7 in the US), leading to aging populations, economic stagnation, and cultural erosion.

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Alfie Kohn @alfiekohn.sciences.social.ap.brid.gy · 5d

A new survey finds that about 1/3 of respondents - representing some 90 million adults in the U.S. - endorsed the view that “having a strong leader for America is more important than having a democracy” (https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/pxfnk_v1).
Can schools address this crisis? Listen to my […]

Original post on sciences.social

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Alfie Kohn @alfiekohn.sciences.social.ap.brid.gy · 6d

AI opt-out deal

WSJ: "OpenAI is planning to release a new version of its Sora Video Generator, which creates videos featuring copyrighted material unless copyright holders opt out of having their work appear"
... to which Alex Usher replies: "I am starting a new service where I slash the tires of expensive cars in Silicon Valley unless their owners specifically opt out.

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Alfie Kohn @alfiekohn.sciences.social.ap.brid.gy · 6d

It should be obvious a priori that it's absurd to judge colleges by the number of applicants they manage to avoid admitting. Quality ≠ selectivity! Now there's evidence demonstrating the absence of an empirical relationship between the degree of intellectual […]

[Original post on sciences.social]

So what does actual educational quality look like? For decades, researchers at Indiana University have been measuring something that matters far more than acceptance rates: how engaged students actually are in their learning. Through the National Survey of Student Engagement, they survey hundreds of thousands of freshmen and seniors about how they spend their time, interact with professors and what they think they are gaining from college.

While the survey results are not routinely made public, I asked Indiana researchers to compare data across groups of schools sorted into five tiers based on selectivity. Here's what they found: On 18 different engagement measures, the tiers of schools were separated by just a point or two among freshmen — a gap that narrowed even more by senior year.

For instance, in a measure of “higher-order learning” — engagement in activities that promote the critical, analytical thinking central to a college education and essential to jobs in an age of A.I — there was “no statistically significant difference” between the most selective schools (under 20 percent acceptance rate) and the next tier down (20 percent to 40 percent). Overall student satisfaction among seniors was separated by only four percentage points between the most selective and least selective schools (those with an 80 percent to 100 percent acceptance rate).

Alfie Kohn @alfiekohn.sciences.social.ap.brid.gy · 7d

Can schools be used to defend support for democracy at a time of rising authoritarianism? (Hint: Not by subjecting students to traditional civics classes!) In the latest episode of Kohn's Zone, released today, I talk with an expert on this very topic, Joel Westheimer […]

Original post on sciences.social

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Alfie Kohn @alfiekohn.sciences.social.ap.brid.gy · 7d

MAGAGoogle:
1. Warning (by Julia Angwin) published 9/26
2. News report (in the NYT) published 9/29
3. News report (on The Verge) published 9/30

Given that, I think there’s a possible future in which the administration starts pressuring Google to shape search results in its favor, just as it has used lawsuits and regulatory pressure against other media outlets whose content it dislikes. Think most recently of how CBS pushed out top news executives as part of a bid to appease President Trump, who had sued the network for what he claimed was deceptive editing of an interview with Kamala Harris.

As the world’s dominant information gatekeeper, Google has the power to suppress or make inaccessible any information it wants — something it already does around the world, including in Thailand, where it blocks content critical of the king, and in Vietnam, where it takes down videos that oppose the government. On its maps, the company has already changed the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, Mr. Trump’s preferred nomenclature.

YouTube agreed to pay a $24.5 million settlement to President Trump and others who were suspended by the video streaming platform in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, according to a legal document filed on Monday.

Google appears to have blocked Al search results for the query “does
trump show signs of dementia” as well as other questions about his
mental acuity, even though it will show Al results for similar searches
about other presidents.

When making the search about President Trump, Al Overviews will
display a message that says, “An Al Overview is not available for this
search”

Reposted by Alfie Kohn

Dan Gillmor @dangillmor.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 8d

If you know anyone in the U.S. military at any level, please make sure they see The Orders Project, "a non-partisan program created by the National Institute for Military Justice to assist military personnel in understanding their options when faced with orders they believe may not be legal." […]

Original post on mastodon.social

mastodon.social

Alfie Kohn @alfiekohn.sciences.social.ap.brid.gy · 8d

"ICE goes masked for a single reason - to terrorize Americans into quiescence."

- from a decision issued today by a federal judge (appointed by Reagan)

And there's the issue of masks. This Court has listened
carefully to the reasons given by Oztirk’s captors for masking-
up and has heard the same reasons advanced by the defendant Todd
Lyons, Acting Director of ICE. It rejects this testimony as
disingenuous, squalid and dishonorable. ICE goes masked for a
single reason —- to terrorize Americans into quiescence. Small
wonder ICE often seems to need our respected military to guard
them as they go about implementing our immigration laws. It
should be noted that our troops do not ordinarily wear masks.
Can you imagine a masked marine? It is a matter of honor -- and
honor still matters. To us, masks are associated with cowardly
desperados and the despised Ku Klux Klan. In all our history we
have never tolerated an armed masked secret police. Carrying on
in this fashion, ICE brings indelible obloguy to this
administration and everyone who works in it. “We can not escape
history,” Lincoln righty said. “[It] will light us down in
honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.” Abraham Lincoln,
Second Annual Message to Congress (Dec. 1, 1862). am,

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Alfie Kohn @alfiekohn.sciences.social.ap.brid.gy · 8d

Today's Army: We're looking for a few white Christian men ready to overcompensate for insecurity about their masculinity by killing civilians (including Americans who criticize Trump)

Alfie Kohn @alfiekohn.sciences.social.ap.brid.gy · 8d

If this is not fascism, then the word has no meaning.

Trump: "The ones that are run by radical left Democrats -- what
they've done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles.
They're very unsafe places & we're gonna straighten them out
one by one. This is gonna be a major part for some people in this
room. That's a war too. It's war from within"

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Alfie Kohn @alfiekohn.sciences.social.ap.brid.gy · 8d

Is it really a math teacher's or English teacher's responsibility to train students in how to use AI just because their future bosses may insist they use it? At best, learning how to use a chatbot is completely different from learning to reason through a problem, or read deeply, or organize and […]

Original post on sciences.social

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Alfie Kohn @alfiekohn.sciences.social.ap.brid.gy · 8d

Opponents also point out that absolutely no evidence exists to support these claims by proponents.

Educators split on homework necessity, survey finds

Educators are divided on the necessity of homework, with 42% supporting it, 37% opposing it and 21% saying it is sometimes needed, according to a recent poll from Education Week. Supporters say homework is essential for skills acquisition and accountability, while opponents say it adds unnecessary stress and disrupts work-life balance.