In response to Stephen Krashen’s post about the likely expansion of testing in the near future, as well as federal interest in tests for “infants, toddlers, and preschoolers,” a reader sent this urgent plea:
LET THE CHILDREN PLAY!!!!!
There was a time when children went to school for kindergarten to learn how to learn. They worked on hand-eye coordination, figure ground discrimination, and other necessary skills. They also learned to listen in a group and play together. They learned to color inside the lines and to cut a straight line. They learned to organize things. Many of the skills they learned in kindergarten helped them be good students later, most importantly to focus. Unfortunately, many students are moving through the school systems and through life without having learned these valuable skills. Because they didn’t learn these necessary behaviors and listening skills at a young age, they aren’t ready to learn in the middle and upper elementary grades. Because of this, they are singled out, pulled out of their classes or, worse yet, out of recess, to get extra help. Would we be spending all this extra money for intervention programs if they had been allowed to be children- to do what is developmentally appropriate?
What if…
What if these children had been allowed to play and to learn these needed skills in kindergarten, or preschool even?
What if they had been allowed recess time in first and second grade? (And we have a child obesity problem why?) Far too many administrators have outlawed recess at their elementary schools, thinking recess time could be better used to shovel more information into the children’s brains. Really? And what does research say about that?
Whatever happened to developmental appropriateness? Many years ago I was asked to give permission for my son to be pulled out of first grade for speech. My reply was yes, but only if they would be working on sounds that were developmentally appropriate for his age. Some children don’t develop certain speech sound (i.e. the zh sound) until age 8. He was six. They did not pull him out, and I never heard anything about speech class again. He developed all his speech sounds by the following year.
What if…
What if parents, when asked for permission to have their children pulled out of class for intervention, asked if it was developmentally appropriate? When the answer is ‘s/he needs this intervention to pass the test’, what if the parent asked if the test was developmentally appropriate?
Why isn’t it considered child abuse to expect an eight year old to take a 2-1/2 hour test? Or a nine year old? Or a ten year old? Administrators will tell you it isn’t really a 2-1/2 hour test. Most students finish in 1to 1-1/2 hours. Sorry. If they have to sit quietly for 2-1/2 hours, until every one finishes, it’s a 2-1/2 hour test. Who determined this was appropriate for these children?
In Ohio in 1995, they started the 4th grade Proficiency Test. This was considered a ‘practice’ for the 9th grade test. Teachers were told the test had to be 2-1/2 hours in 4th grade, because it was 2-1/2 hours in 9th grade. Really? Following that logic, wouldn’t it make sense that we also give 4th graders their driving temps, so they are ready to drive at age 16?
Ask any good teacher, and s/he can tell you who will and who will not pass the test. So why do we waste all the money and resources to find out something we already know? Teachers are no longer being allowed to make the important decisions they are capable of, and so the children suffer.
And how appropriate are the tests? If an adult reads a test question, and can’t figure out what they want, how can a ten year old?
And so now, as we waste money, time and effort on developing assessments for a set of standards that have never been piloted, if the children, teachers and schools don’t meet the standard, will it be the fault of the children and the teachers, or the fault of those who wrote the standards and the tests? Any intelligent person knows the answer to that assessment question.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I think this is on the right track regarding the need for play and developmental appropriateness. My background is in Early Childhood Education (ECE) and I taught Kindergarten and Preschool for many years, so I have to say, however, that I cringe whenever I read something indicating that young children should be learning to “color inside the lines and to cut a straight line.”
Kids must also be allowed to play in Art. Unfortunately, having the expectations that young children, who are just developing small muscle strength, eye-hand coordination and fine motor skills, learn to color inside and cut on lines too often results in adults giving kids coloring books and worksheets with lines to repeatedly practice on, under the guise of “Art”. That’s really drilling and it promotes conformity, not creativity. I’ve seen it done a lot, mostly by people untrained in ECE, and it’s not considered developmentally appropriate practice (DAP) for those ages.
Art for young children must be seen as play, too. It should not be about kids “listening” and doing what they’re told. Art should not be about doing closed-ended activities or cookie cutter projects, where kids are supposed to copy a model or assemble parts the adult provides. Art activities should not be product-oriented.
To promote creativity, kids must be encouraged to explore and experiment, not follow directions. Art for young children should be process-oriented, open-ended and involve a lot of playing with materials. Children should be given a variety of supplies and media and encouraged to use their imaginations and make creations of their choosing. When kids have choices and are given encouragement, that often results in their coloring inside their own lines, as well as cutting out their own pictures.
Teachers can inspire, guide, support and suggest, but Art should be child-centered for young children. We have many ways of promoting creatvity in Art activities, and although kids are developing eye-hand coordination and fine motor skills while engaged, their Art activities should be valued as ends in themselves.
Adults may encourage kids to make different things out of play doh and clay, which helps them build muscle strength, use play doh scissors to cut out their creations, which assists them in learning how to handle and manipulate scissors, or cut paper scraps into confetti for a birthday party, but these are meaningful activities to children, unlike drill for skill, which is not DAP and certainly doesn’t belong in Art.
When Art is used as merely a vehicle of instruction for young children, it becomes a runaway train engineered by adults who rarely, if ever, allow children’s creativity and play onboard.
Wow! I wrote this, and you need to know I agree with you wholeheartedly. That simply wasn’t the main idea of what I wrote. The reality is few fine motor skills/play are being allowed. The teachers know the importance of it, but they are being told, in the name of passing the test, that more emphasis needs to be given to reading and math, far too early for many of the children.
Perhaps they need to fire all the administrators and put seasoned teachers in their place. Maybe then, the schools would turn around. One or two administrators to do the finances should be enough. Let real educators lead the teachers.
Now THAT is an idea I can get behind…’fire all the administrators and put seasoned teachers in their place.’ I would go a step further and institute a teacher panel to keep things in check. There are several schools in my area where the administrators started out as teachers. If you meant fire all the POLITICIANS, then we would be getting somewhere.
This year, without my knowledge, the principal pulled my CPS 8th grader out of lunch/recess for ISAT test prep. She was embarrassed when the office PA called her name — heard throughout the school — for her to come the test prep class, twice a week for two months, instead of lunch/recess. I had never been contacted to give my approval. When I called that afternoon, the a.p. said that one subscore, my child’s reading comprehension, had slipped a bit to 91.5.
I said that I did not wanted her in test prep at lunchtime, and reminded the a.p. this child had been reading chapter books since kindergarten, and more importantly, she is a great writer.
The a.p. refused to take no for an answer, and had the homeroom teacher call me. The discussion continued. But I would not budge.
You see, the school had already thrown out its 8th grade Language Arts class and replaced it with test prep, every day, for two months. Test prep homework every night.
The result? My child’s scores went from 97/99 to 98/98.
And she didn’t read a single worthwhile piece of literature or write a thoughtful essay during the third quarter.
My child pointed to the pile of test prep worksheets she had collected at the end of the two months and said, “I didn’t learn anything from this.”
I am a preschool teacher in Newark, NJ. I agree that there has been a dramatic shift away from developmentally appropriate learning experiences. My students are three and four years old and I was told this year that they should leave my class writing their first and last name. The district has implemented a tracking system so if a kindergarten student is under performing than they can trace his academic history back to preschool and play the blame game. As a mother I have two boys, one is four years old and the other is ten. When my ten year old was in the 2nd grade his TFA teacher told me I should use flash cards to help him with his reading (she had no idea I was a teacher). She had no clue as to what developmentally appropriate practice is (I had him removed from her class). My son comes home with dittos and I toss them in the trash. When his test indicate that he is not proficient in reading I get angry because at his school the only way to receive additional support is if you have an IEP. Oh by the way his school is being leased out by superintendent Cami Anderson in the fall so that means class sizes will increase for the public classroom.
If only we had more parents like those above, then perhaps we can end this nonsense. But only if parents and students become more more active and proactive. As teachers, we can only do so much. Parents and studnents need to step up and STEP UP NOW!
edits: more from second sentence and delete n from students 4th sentence
Here is a letter that I sent to a politician a short while ago. It got no response….
I am going to tell you about a superb preschool teacher who is no longer teaching. Hopefully, you will start to see how terribly wrong this worship of the almighty test score is. It is about my dear friend, and former colleague, Mullien.
Ms. Mullien doesn’t teach Head Start anymore. She’s gone down the hall to be an aide in the special education preschool. Ms. Mullien and I were teaching partners several years ago. She created magic for the children she taught, and she was a joy to work with. Together with our aide, we developed what the district big wigs describe as a model classroom. Children learned through play and exploration. Ms. Mullien rejected the belief that 3 year-olds were incomplete 5-year-olds, and that they all had to hurry up and learn to read before they entered kindergarten. She was dismayed at all the pressure to push academics and the mountains of paperwork that continuously grew bigger. Worse were the bureaucrats with checklists on clipboards. They scrutinized every sentence spoken to the children, as “we needed to fill the children with language …language… language….” “Why hadn’t Ms. Mullien asked Fatima why she decided to put the blue rectangle block on top of the red rectangle instead of the green one?” The goal was to constantly surround the children with language by talking, describing, and forever pushing for more. The result was the constant demand for the teachers to Talk… talk …talk. I’d say yes to guide, but let the children listen to their own voices and to each other. What child wants an adult to question her every move? There are times to speak, describe, and label, but it should not be relentless. Paperwork should not exhaust and burn out a teacher from teaching. Eventually Ms. Mullien, who is one of the best and most innovative pre-school teachers I have ever met, got fed up with the constant push for developmentally inappropriate teaching and the paperwork. She has gone down the hall to the developmental preschool to be an aide. The preschool is thrilled to have her as an aide, but what a loss to Head Start. Even sadder are the other excellent Head Start teachers who are envying her escape from the pressure and ugliness that comes with thinking that education and good teaching is really all about can be summed up in a series of standardized tests. She does not believe that childhood is about racing to the top, and neither do I.
What about me? I’m on the other side of town teaching kids with autism and many other disabilities. Learning is hard for many of them, and my goal is to help make learning and school interesting and joyful. Truthfully, some of them do really well on standardized tests, but there are many other goals that I am legally bound to help them work towards. I’ll carefully explain those in ways that you can understand next time I write.
In the meantime, stop perpetuating these harmful policies. You need to stop and think about how you are directly demoralizing American teachers, and ultimately harming children. How can you possibly expect that children can learn from teachers when people in power are sending a clear message that we not worthy of respect?
Yours truly,
Mrs. Sorrel
What ever happend to teaching to the proper level of childdevelopment? What ever happened to Piaget? Children ARE learning while they play. This country was built by people who colored and thought outside the lines.
Here, Here, but will be ruined by those who don’t.
“Play is the work of childhood.” (Karen Lifter, PhD. Researcher Early Childhood Special Education)