Susan Ochshorn is an eloquent defender of childhood and an advocate for play-based learning for small children.
She wrote this article for CNN.Com pleading for public understanding of early childhood education. It is wonderful that there is a growing movement for universal pre-kindergarten, she says, but it would be a terrible mistake to align pre-K with the Common Core and insist on “rigor.” Little children don’t need rigor. They need to learn social skills. They need to play. They need to be children, not forced into a mold.
She writes:
Rigor for 4-year-olds? What about their social-emotional development, which goes hand-in-hand with cognitive skill-building? What about play, the primary engine of human development?
Unfortunately, it seems like we’re subjecting our young children to a misguided experiment.
“Too many educators are introducing inappropriate teaching methods into the youngest grades at the expense of active engagement with hands-on experiences and relationships,” Beverly Falk, author of Defending Childhood told me. “Research tells us that this is the way young children construct understandings, make sense of the world, and develop their interests and desire to learn.” She isn’t alone.
Early academic training has become an obsession among child development experts and teachers of young children as the Common Core standards have encroached upon the earliest years of schooling.
Kindergarten has already undergone a radical transformation. University of Virginia researchers Daphna Bassok and Anna Rorem found that in 2006, 65% of kindergarten teachers — more than double the number in 1998 — thought most children should learn to read on their watch. Meanwhile, the exposure to social studies, science, music, and art — the staples of a well-rounded early childhood education — had declined. And nearly 20% of teachers never had physical education.
All these trends have accelerated rapidly with recent education reform policies, including Race to the Top. As a result, kinetic 4-year-olds, squirming in their seats, face the prospect of having to put their noses to the grindstone in a rigorous classroom with little time for play. Never mind that they’re just beginning to get the hang of following directions, staying on task, and paying attention. We keep pushing them along, ignoring the pesky emotions that get in the way of regulation and executive function.
Bravo, Susan! Keep fighting for childhood.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Rigor” Mortis!
“Little children don’t need rigor.”
Does anyone need rigor? According to my dictionary, it means harshness or severity.
In the workplace and labor markets (which so-called reformers openly refer to schools as the pipeline for, to the exclusion of all else) that harshness and severity is what orthodox economists and business people like to euphemistically call “labor discipline,” in which workers are compelled to exist in a constant state of insecurity, intimidation and fear: fear of losing their jobs, fear of quitting jobs they hate (because they’ll lose benefits), fear of talking back to straw bosses, fear of standing up, fear of striking.
Over the past forty years, it has worked remarkably well, to the great detriment of the overwhelming majority of Americans, the overall economy, and the national fabric.
So-called education reform is about “disciplining” the current teacher labor force, via bogus accountability, cutbacks, privatization, neutralization/eventual elimination of the unions and transforming teaching into temporary, semi-skilled, at-will labor. In relation to the kids, it’s about monetizing their data, and instilling that “discipline” (read “fear”) in the future proles.
Why else are children forced to “earn” their desks at KIPP, or humiliated and harshly disciplined for not “tracking” teachers at Moskowitz’s SA plantation? It’s got absolutely nothing to do with instilling “grit” or character, and everything to do with instilling habits of passivity, docility and fear. That there is such an over-the-top racial component places it in the center of the American grain, where class so often speaks and behaves in the language of race.
Some day, historians are going to be utterly flabbergasted when they look back at the words and practices of the so-called reformers, incredulous that such revanchist behavior would not only be tolerated, but encouraged.
This is an outstanding post.
Yes. Unfortunately, the policies that reduce or eliminate play–as the loving way to teach a love of learning–are not yet dead.
Examples: The “read by grade three” legislation puts downward pressure on the early grades, also the ill-conceived Common Core Standards and variants.
Now those pundits who think of test scores are always reasons for economizing on education are claiming that preschool and Head Start effects are a wash by third grade. Therefore, throwing more money at these programs is a waste.
Meanwhile, investors ARE throwing money at preschool programs in Utah and in Chicago through investing in so-called social impact bonds. The investors expect to get a 5% return or better, if: (a) the pre-schoolers are cherry-picked to eliminate children with severe disabilities, and (b) a manager is hired to make sure the preschool program is tailored to expectations for investor profits, with freedom to fire program providers at will.
Professional voices with greater wisdom have been cut out of the policy formation process for education. Overall, the policy frameworks for last two decades have focused on beefing up high school curricula, increasing college and career prep programs, then “back-mapping” from those “rigorous” requirements to all of the grade-by grade prerequisites.
The whole idea of “growth” has been reduced to an increase in test scores from year to year, or from the start of a course to the end of course. This is first order travesty. It is a perversion of the educational meanings of growth. It reflects a studied disregard for all of the ample knowledge available about human growth and individual development.
Data systems in wide use demand that we call kindergarten a “course.” New preschool schools signal their college prep focus by calling themselves “academies.” Some charters call the youngest children ‘scholars.” These labels deflect attention from the dominant agenda in many of these schools, especially charter schools; namely training students to follow directions, master content and skills by a specific grade, and so on.
Overall, too many policies in education have become been nothing less than variants of corporate and military training for adults, with prescribed curricula and efficient instructional moves (best practices) designed to be programmable and “at scale.”
The “professional development ” modules and programs flooding schools come from variants of this idea, ginned up with short videos, power-points, discussion guides for trainers. The pervasive use of the words “trainings” and “learnings” is a symptom of the perverse influence of packaged programming from corporate consultants who market their wares to teachers and principals and increasingly teachers in higher education.
The American Diploma Project, from which the so-called Common Core State Standards emerged, was all about rigor–more required courses, fewer electives, with the add-on idea that the same standards had to be met for “21st century” career prep. A top down corporate/military training model, embedded in policies and accountability models, had the practical effect of creating a mental environment where training preschool and kindergarten kids to perform as if miniature adults was fine and dandy. Get them ready to follow directions. Do not waste time. Give the little ones plenty of drills and drill-sergeant disciple.
I do not exaggerate. Note that Bill Gates loves this idea, funds Relay Graduate School and Doug Lemov’s no-nonsense regimen, wants teachers “trained” as if the only mission of schools is to raise test scores and keep children in line.
As an elder who recalls the system of drafting young adults for service in the military during the Vietnam War, I am struck by the many policies and programs targeted to enlist very young children of color who are in low-income families in training programs — to endure their earliest years in school as if these should be an equivalent of boot camps. Meanwhile, the billionaire and political pushers of this agenda exempt their own children from this regimen.
Excellent analysis, Laura. And I would have never thought of comparing the current preK-12 education with military boot camps, but that is also spot on. Preparing young men (then) and children (now) to be unquestioning worker-drones.
I find it ironic that the fed is pushing for data driven decision making for education, but the data and knowledge of child development is totally ignored since it does not fit the political narrative.
ALL early childhood children, Pre-K through grade three, need to play. Here is the full definition of rigor from Merriam-Webster and it’s horrid that we apply this to learning at any age:
a (1) : harsh inflexibility in opinion, temper, or judgment : severity (2) : the quality of being unyielding or inflexible : strictness (3) : severity of life : austerity
b : an act or instance of strictness, severity, or cruelty
2
: a tremor caused by a chill
3
: a condition that makes life difficult, challenging, or uncomfortable; especially : extremity of cold
4
: strict precision : exactness
5
a obsolete : rigidity, stiffness
b : rigidness or torpor of organs or tissue that prevents response to stimuli
c : rigor mortis
But #4 is “strict precision:exactness”. Isn’t that what the edudeformers want to mean by using “rigor” or is it something else, perhaps like “grit”?
Reblogged this on Politicians Are Poody Heads and commented:
Play is necessary for child development. Young children learn by play. They learn to explore their world, they learn socialization, they learn curiosity and how to satisfy that curiosity. Oh, so many things!
Anyone who advocates “rigor” does not understand normal child development. 😦