Defending the Early Years (DEY) has produced a 2-minute video featuring Boston preschool teacher Roberta Udoh explaining why play is crucial for young children and why the culture of testing is harming children at a point in their lives when play is most important.
Please watch and bear in mind that everyone of every age needs time to play.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Yes, let children play!
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Dont they know that 90 percent of our kids go to public schools? The reformers only think about charters and never about the public schools and the 90 percent are not even in their conversations
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One of the reasons, I think, I was able to help so many ELLs that were “behind” in academics according to our standards is that they came to the learning experience mature, eager and full of positive energy. They had been left to their own devices in their home country and had not been subjected to soulless skill and drill tedium. They had not been taught that they were “deficient.” They came to the learning experience full of promise and hope. My goal was always to foster a love of learning through a positive learning environment. Even though many struggled, most were able to make up for lost time over several years. Fortunately, my elementary students had time on their side. People can learn to read, write and reason at older ages. They just need the right people helping them along the way. All onerous standardized testing does is beat them down and show them that they are “deficient.”
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bingo
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Thank you for posting this, Diane. I’ve spent my life working with children in all sorts of situations including Scouting, After-School Programs, Religious Education Programs, and so much more. I raised three of my own children and, at times, three stepchildren. I think half the neighborhood kids grew up at our house. *PLAY* IS THE WORK OF CHILDREN. It is essential for learning. When the stress of testing is added, a large percentage of children cannot handle it and it affects their self-image. Many of them end up seeing themselves as failures which is tragic.
Kas Winters /The Mother of Family Ideas
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Which is why academics-heavy preschools make no sense.
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I agree with you because I understand what you mean by “academics.” However, the message we want to relay is that young children do indeed learn “academics” through play. It is embedded. With adult support/facilitating they learn knowledge and skills through inquiry-based, self-directed free play.
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And K-12 with no recess and massive quantities of homework is counterproductive.
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My husband is from Ghana, so a friend of mine sent me this article: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/06/19/613655788/when-it-comes-to-preschool-does-father-really-know-best?utm_source=npr_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20180624&utm_campaign=npr_email_a_friend&utm_term=storyshare
I hope they are able to turn the tide and persuade more teachers (and parents!) to give up direct instruction of toddlers!
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As someone that has taught young children from all over the world, I enjoyed this article. Despite individual, cultural and linguistic differences, all students responded positively to hands on learning and a positive learning environment. In fact, these students from poor countries were often more resourceful than many American students. They were adept at solving problems and dealing with scarcity. Many students shared some of the physical punishments they endured in schools in their home countries.
It is unfortunate that the West’s neurotic need to foster competition is being adopted by non-western countries. Standardization and testing represent our insecurities as we have a constant need to weigh, measure, rate and rank. When applied to people, it can have harmful consequences.
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When I was a kid, all my friends were farmers’ kids. They talked about going to the barn with their fathers and helping haul hay. I mooned around a good bit, too weak to help much.
Then, my father took me to the barn and asked if I would be interested in being the one to raise the baby calves on out dairy. As you can imagine, I was only too eager. I was ten. Four years later, my father got brain cancer and never worked again. My brother came home from college and we ran the farm and went to school.
The point is not that I am a great guy, it is that people arrive at the work ethic many ways, one of which is the gentle example my father was. He lived 16 years after that, mostly in a chair with a good sense of humor. He was a man who built our barn with a hand saw and a hand crank drill. But when it came to fighting cancer, he was able to use his extraordinary patience and wisdom to last 16 years after traumatic surgery and radiation.
When he was a boy, he once related to me, he loved to go to the stand of virgin red cedar that stood on their farm, a bank account to send the kids to college. He would wander around, absorbed in his own thoughts. How in the world did he ever develop the ability to work so hard without character education in pre-school and lessons on grit?
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