The Case Against Grades

Alfie Kohn is an independent writer and lecturer who has built a thirty-year career as a critic of the standard machinery of American schooling — grades, rewards, homework, competition, and standardized testing. He holds no university appointment and runs no research lab; he writes books, gives talks, and maintains an archive of his articles online. His best-known books are Punished by Rewards (1993), which gathers behavioural research to argue that incentives undermine the motivation they are meant to produce, and The Schools Our Children Deserve (1999). "The Case Against Grades" sits squarely in that line of work — it is Kohn restating, for a practitioner audience, a thesis he had already argued at book length.

The article appeared in November 2011 in Educational Leadership (vol. 69, no. 3, pp. 28–33), the membership magazine of ASCD — the association formerly called the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, whose readership is school administrators and teachers. Educational Leadership is a trade publication, edited but not peer-reviewed; the filter between Kohn and the page is an editor commissioning a known voice, not anonymous review. The piece is dated to the year it was written and carries no underlying dataset of its own — it is an argument assembled from other people's findings, written for the moment when "standards-based grading" was gaining traction in districts, a reform Kohn explicitly attacks as repairing the wrong thing.

The work is a secondary, essayistic synthesis. Kohn reports no original data; he marshals existing studies — on how evaluation shifts students toward easier tasks, shallower thinking, and lower interest — to support three claimed effects of grading. The studies he leans on can be chased, and one of them sits in this same set: Ruth Butler's 1988 experiment finding that students given grades, even alongside written comments, did worse and showed less interest than students given comments alone. The article is the reform-side anchor that the two book-length proposals in this set both build from — Susan Blum's edited collection Ungrading, which carries a foreword by Kohn, and Linda Nilson's Specifications Grading, a how-to that takes the diagnosis as given and supplies a mechanism.

Kohn's stake is the one a public intellectual carries: the piece advances a position he has staked his name and his book sales on for decades. He is not neutral on grades, and the article does not pretend to be — it is advocacy, and a reader weighing it should read his selection of the literature as the selection of someone arguing a case rather than surveying a field. There is no financial tie to a grading product or a district reform; the interest is reputational and ideological, the consistency of a thirty-year argument.