The New America Foundation has published a report on “early learning” from birth to third grade. The New America Foundation used to be an organization whose purpose was to nurture young journalists (I was on that board several years ago). But as Washington, D.C., think tanks operate, they go where the money is.
The report upset me at the outset by confusing “proficiency” on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (a very high bar, equivalent to an A or A-) with “grade level.” NAEP proficiency is NOT grade level. There is only one state where as many as 50% of students reached NAEP proficient, and that is Massachusetts.
The report, which you can read, has some sensible but not new proposals, like expanding access to preschool. Much in the report is good, but the bad part is the emphasis on assessment and data collection for pre-K and earlier.
It recommends licensing early childhood educators, both teachers and principals, and requiring that they have appropriate education for teaching young children. That leaves out TFA.
It recommends equitable funding. That’s good too.
It recommends a maximum class size for early childhood education of not more than 10. That’s good.
It recommends standards, assessments, and data for the little ones, which turns out to mean that the standards and assessments for the tykes should be aligned with “college-and-career-ready standards,” that is, the Common Core. I wonder what it means for a two-year-old to be college or career-ready? The report includes a long list of data indicators that should inform policy for 0-5.
The report says that assessment for pre-K is often overlooked, which the authors consider a mistake. Ugh! They recommend screenings, diagnostic assessments, milestones, and kindergarten entry tests for children below the age of 5.
The one recommendation that is missing is play. Play is children’s work. Please don’t assess it, other than to record that there was plenty of time for play.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Since NAEP levels seem to be the root of so much confusion (much of it intentional, I know), why don’t they simply relabel “proficient” as “advanced”?
Funny how they confuse learning with “work” as an adult sees it. If you’re not stretching your recall abilities or literacy or math skills then you’re not learning…except that in early grades the emphasis should be on learning to LOVE LEARNING ITSELF. Yes they should be getting basics of literacy, but is the real reason behind this that they aren’t receiving enough formal instruction?
Reading to children and letting them read to you is a far better practice and one that can really only be done (with the child reading to you) at the parent level. Family reading nights, building cultures of literacy in schools and educating parents about what to give their kids (even if their time and energy is sapped) to help their kids succeed.
Formal instruction will not meet this need for a cohesive, safe, and literate culture that encourages children to look forward to going to school and their community each day.
This just sounds bad from a childhood educator standpoint.
Agree, M. Whatever Gates pushes is BAD. Gates has no clue and is in this for the $$$$$. Boondoggle.
Provoked by the last paragraph of the posting, as well as for my own edification, I googled “play is the work of children, quotes.” This was the very first hit:
[start]
“Play is the work of the child.” – Maria Montessori
“Play is the highest form of research.” – Albert Einstein
“It is a happy talent to know how to play.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Play gives children a chance to practice what they are learning.” – Mr. Rogers
“The playing adult steps sideward into another reality; the playing child advances forward to new stages of mastery.” – Erik H. Erikson
“Children learn as they play. Most importantly, in play children learn how to learn.” – O. Fred Donaldson
“The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct.” – Carl Jung
“We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.” – George Bernard Shaw
“Do not keep children to their studies by compulsion but by play.” – Plato
“Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood.” – Fred Rogers
[end]
Link: http://www.oneperfectdayblog.net/2013/02/21/quotes-about-the-importance-of-play/
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Mil gracias por esos dichos.
Sounds like they’re re-thinking some of the score-setting they did in the course of what is a giant experiment on tens of millions of public school students:
“Confronted with the consequences of higher standards, the Regents, like education officials across the country, are now rethinking them.
This fall, they established a committee to study the results on the new exams to determine, among other things, whether the bar for passing, which students would have to meet starting in 2022, had been set too high. (They had originally said the class of 2017 would need the higher scores to pass, but last year decided to push that back.)
MaryEllen Elia, the state education commissioner, said no decision had been made. “Does it look reasonable right now?” she said of the “college-ready” standard. “I would say, no, it doesn’t. And I would say, what we have to do is we have to keep our eye on that.”
One would think such data-driven geniuses would have conducted this experiment on a smaller group of volunteer schools first but I suppose that wasn’t chaotic and incoherent and expensive enough.
For me, the real goals of education have been overlooked so very much. History’s greatest minds taught us to love, integrity, virtue et al. PEOPLE were important, the things that made us human, not the things mechanistic that made us cogs in a machine, indentured servants, stifled imagination, creative et al.
What should be the bottom line, what makes life worth living. [The unexamined life is not worth living.]
Myopic, short sighted goals have overtaken the things that really matter in life.
When one reaches my age and looks back over life the things that really matter, the things that were taught by my teachers that made so much difference to me were not the academics, important as they are, but the things that at least made me more human.
Come all you young fellows so fair and so fine, seek not your fortune in a dark data mine, it will form as a habit and seep in your soul, till the stream of your blood runs as black as the coal.
It’s dark as a Duncan and damp as a Dave,
Where testing is double and teacher’s a slave,
Where the brain never calls and the sun never shines
It’s dark as a Duncan way down in the mine.
It’s a-many a Raj I have seen in my day,
That lived just to fire the teachers away.
Like a fiend with his dope and a drunkard his wine,
A Raj will have lust for the lure of the mines.
I hope when I’m gone , on the darkest of nights
My body will digitize and turn into bytes.
Then I’ll look from the door of my heavenly home,
And pity the VAMmer a-diggin’ my bones.
The midnight, the morning, or the middle of day,
Is the same to the teacher who labors away.
Where the demons of death often come by surprise,
One fall of the scores and you’re buried alive
“One fall of the scores and you’re buried alive”
love it all!
Great comment on where we are in education.
Dark as a Dungeon (Merle Travis)
SomeDAM Poet: you outdid yourself!
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They are tracking customers *in bloom*.
Apparently, in the world of school reform and high stakes testing, there is no such thing as IQ. IQ measures convergent thinking and spatial reasoning (and executive function and working memory too…). 100 is the average score in the US. NAEP appears to be normed for those with IQs high above 100. If only 16% of the population has an combined IQ score above 115 and 34% with IQ scores between 100 and 114, wouldn’t it stand to reason that 50% of children are not going to jump that bar?
Does that make them less valuable? Can’t they live a good life as a graphic designer (maybe they’re very talented in art), a tile setter ($40/hour), maybe a pet groomer (someone who is highly sensitive to animals and grooming know-how) and my hair stylist who hated school now earns $50K a year for her aesthetic talents. Why are we trying to create a nation full of people with the skills of academics? We have lost the trees in the forest? We have stopped valuing the many human qualities that make each child unique and special? We must now measure them against one kind of measure. There are academic proficiency skills needed to manage a functional life and then there are aspirational academic skills—we have effectively confused the two.
You do know that IQ scores can change. Please don’t start assigning jobs by IQ. Duane will tear you apart! 😉 As a special ed teacher, I was very aware that some of my students were going to be limited in their career choices because of cognitive factors, some much more than others. I also knew/know that an IQ test will never tell you who a child is, and what they can do.
As long as we group and assess children by age cohorts standardization will prevail. The grouping of children by age cohorts leads to the notion that a “child is not ready” for Kindergarten which leads to policy makers objectifying and quantifying “Kindergarten readiness”. These “readiness standards” are then mapped backwards to age levels— a constant that is easy to determine— and then measured by “standardized tests”.
Over 25 years ago Ron Edmunds decried the fact that we had it backward in our public schools: we had time as a constant and learning as a variable. And here’s the real shame: we are about to see Congress pass yet another bill that mandates that standardized tests be administered to batches of students grouped by age… the factory school model from the 1920s lives on!
And here’s the real shame of it: we have the capability to match our curriculum to the child instead of setting the curriculum and then proclaiming there is a “gap” between the child’s “ability” and the ultimately arbitrary standards we set. We need to get it right. We need to make time the variable and learning constant.
Diane, this makes so much sense. Why can’t our leaders come to an agreement on what it takes to promote learning? This is a struggle we’ve had for more than one hundred years. Keep writing. I find your work to be incredibly insightful
The report is cute, rates states by policies that have an unrelenting focus on literacy and tests thereof especially reading by grade three. States are called toddlers, walkers, etc. DUMB and condescending. I found no evidence of expertise in early childhood education among the framers of this report. They have clearly cherry-picked ideas and research to forward policies that comport with the a theory of reform based on “proper management” of human capital meaning adults and tykes. More third grading reading laws are part of this slick, cutsy promotional package. As Diane notes, not a single reference to play.