Nancy Bailey is a retired educator who has seen the damage wrought by No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and the nonsensical grandchild called Every Student Succeeds Act. We can say now with hindsight that many children were left behind, we did not make it to the Top, and every student is not succeeding.
Nancy knows that the greatest casualty of these ruinous federal laws and programs are young children. Instead of playing, instead of socializing, instead of living their best lives as children, they are being prepared to take tests. This is nuts!
Nancy explains in this post (originally from 2021 but nothing has changed) why the status quo is harmful to small children and how it should change. I should mention that Nancy and I wrote a book together—although we have never met!
EdSpeak and Doubletalk: A Glossary to Decipher Hypocrisy and Save Public Schooling https://a.co/d/bXKYsZG
Here’s Nancy on what kindergarten should be:
Let’s remember what kindergarten used to be, a happy entryway to school. Children attended half a day. They played, painted pictures, dressed up, pretended to cook using play kitchens, took naps on their little rugs, learned how to take turns, and played some more. They listened to stories, proudly told their own stories, described something unique about themselves during show-and-tell, mastered the ABCs, counted to 10, printed their names, and tied their shoes. They had plenty of recess and got excited over simple chores like watering the plants or passing out snacks. They had art and music and performed in plays that brought families together to generate pride and joy in their children and the public school.
Then, NCLB changed kindergarten in 2002. The Chicago Tribune described this rethinking well, which I’ve broken down.
- In some schools, kindergarten is growing more and more academically focused–particularly on early reading.
- The pressure to perform academically is trickling down from above, many experts say, because of new state and federal academic standards.
- . . . in one Florida classroom some children “cried or put their heads on their desks in exhaustion” after standardized achievement tests.
- One Chicago public school kindergarten teacher quit in part because of what she considered unrealistic demands of administrators who expected kindergartners to sit all day at desks, go without recess and learn to read by year’s end. The teacher wanted to create centers for science, art and dramatic play but was forbidden.
- In some places, kindergarten, once a gentle bridge to real school where play and learning easily intermingled, is becoming an academic pressure-cooker for kids, complete with half an hour of homework every night.
- Some parents are alarmed enough that they’re “redshirting” their children, holding them back from kindergarten for a year so they will be more mature.
So how will they rethink early childhood again? Instead of kindergarten being the new first grade will it become the new third or fourth grade, with more standards piled onto the backs of 5-year-olds?
What happens to the children who are developing normally and can’t meet the standards, or children who have disabilities and need more time? Will they be labeled as failing, sorted into the can’t do kids who get bombarded with online remedial programs?
The harder they make early learning for young children, the more likely parents will seek more humane alternative placements that treat children like children.
It’s time to start caring more about the children and less about driving outcomes or results that don’t make sense.
I am sharing the best standards for children of all time, written by now-retired teacher extraordinaire, Sarah Puglisi.
Here’s a sample. Please go to the link and read all 100 of them. Then bring back kindergarten!
How I remember the joy that it used to be, from my own childhood. ALAS, the loss!!!!!
Stopping by School on a Disruptive Afternoon
. . . after decades of test-driven education “reform”
Whose schools these are, I think I know.
His house is near Seattle though.
He will not see me stopping here
to watch what kids now undergo.
My better angels think it queer
to see a place so void of cheer
what with the tests and data chats,
the data walls with children’s stats.
Where are the joys of yesterday—
when kids would draw and sing and play?
The only sound I hear’s defeat
and pencils on the bubble sheets.
Disrupters say, unflappable,
“We’re building Human Capital!”
Such word goes out from their think tanks,
as they their profits build and bank.
“Music, stories, art, and play
won’t teach Prole children to obey
with servile, certain, gritful grace
and know their rightful, lowly place.”
The fog is heavy, dark and deep.
Where thinking tanks, Deformers creep
and from our children childhood steal
and grind them underneath the wheel.
Postscript:
Disruption of the Commonweal
is that in which Deformers deal
that they might thereby crises fake
as cover whereby they might take
(the smiling villains!) take and take
and take and take and take and take.
Robert D. Shepherd. Copyright 2020. This post may be shared freely. (Please do!) But please include the attribution. Thanks!
Thank you, Nancy, for remembering and tending a light in all this darkness visited upon our children.
I strongly encourage all readers of this blog to go read that list of 100 “standards.”
Another person who, like Nancy, has a clue. Unlike the Education Deformers.
My 4 year old granddaughter’s preschool teacher is concerned about her learning letter sounds. Her body (eyes and brain) is not physiologically ready to process that information yet here we are. I’m so disgusted and I’m a retired early childhood teacher.
Stand firm against this abuse, Laura!!!! KIDS ARE ON DIFFERING DEVELOPMENTAL SCHEDULES AND THAT IS OK. I didn’t speak until after my second birthday. I got a perfect score on the Verbal portion of the Graduate Record Examination and worked as an actor and writer all my life.
When my daughter was in April of her kindergarten year, she suddenly began to read. It was like magic. She went from the Gruffalo to chapter books in two weeks. This was so Impressive to me that I began to informally interview parents of my students (high schoolers) about when their kids began to read. The breadth of behaviors was astonishing. Some kids were reading by 3, others were not really reading until middle school. Some, of course, were having trouble reading into high school.
Laura, have patience and your grandchild will be fine. Her teacher should also know this.
This is child abuse. Sitting small children at desks all day as an effort to extract high test scores on stupid standardized tests is psychological abuse.
That’s exactly what it is. And all these deformers, Gates, Coleman, Jeb Bush, Duncan, the education commissioners in Texas and Oklahoma and Florida, the fools at the Fordham Institute for Securing Big Paychecks from Oligarchs for the Fools at the Fordham Institute, the 74, and on and on ad nauseam, are perpetrating the abuse.
Pretty much, yeah.
Wish these psychopaths would just LEAVE teachers and kids alone. But, alas, there’s $$$$$ to be made. SICK.
Psychopathy, written into law, because of Gates’s money and his idiocy
Nancy explains in this post (originally from 2021
but nothing has changed).
Does a different result require a different strategy?
Are the retired NOW empowered to change
“the damage wrought” during their compliance?
This is an outrageous comment. MANY of the people who post here are NOT retired, and both they and the retired ones often, at peril to their careers and livelihoods, fought within the system to do what was right for kids. Many, for example, mouthed the right responses to administrators, closed their doors, and taught kids as they should be taught DESPITE the deforms. Doing so was and is emotionally taxing, and you dishonor these servants of kids and of our country with this slander.
with this slander about “compliance”
I had the good fortune to work with kindergarten teachers that understood child development. Their classrooms were joyful, active and caring. The standards movement is inappropriate for young children that develop at their own pace. It is like passing judgment on the quality of a cake while it is still in the oven.
The 100 standards for young children reminds us that not all children enter kindergarten in the same place. There are differences in access and experiences. It is unfair to pass judgment on them unless there are severe issues that require early intervention. Young children learn through their senses, and sedentary “workbooks” or screen time impede their natural tendency to explore and learn. I have worked with several “slow to start” literacy students that later became very successful students in high school and college. There is a danger in needlessly mislabeling young children too early.
RT: the cake in the oven is a great metaphor. Add that, with children, you never know when the cake is ready.
The all-day kindergarten issue is a tough one.
Our district in Iowa in the 1990s adopted all-day kindergarten because Iowa (at the time, maybe still) had the highest percentage in the nation of children with two parents who worked outside the home.
This was a non-academic decision. No one maintained the change was necessary to keep up academically with Finland or China or the next district over.
It’s not uncommon to make education decisions for non-academic reasons, of course. Why else have months-long summer breaks? Why else are teens on a bus at 7am?
Steve Abney Winter Haven FL
“Some parents are alarmed enough that they’re “redshirting” their children, holding them back from kindergarten for a year so they will be more mature.”
My daughter was born in 06. As she neared kindergarten age, we began to discuss matters with other parents. I did not do any scientific study, but a huge majority of parents who were capable of paying 5-8000 more per year for daycare were holding their children out for a “redshirt” year. We were forced to consider kindergarten or an additional year of daycare that ran a risk of arresting what seemed to be a good trajectory of her development. When we chose to move her into kindergarten, I knew she would encounter math concepts too soon in her career, because there was a decided gap between her understanding of language and math.
The upshot of our decision has been a confirmation of my predictions. She has progressed through language in remarkable ways, but mathematical ideas are not exciting to her.
The point is that children who have a natural proclivity to learn one thing or another are not harmed by this new kindergarten, but a huge majority of children are harmed. Parents who can afford it are trying to Mitigate the harm by keeping their children out for a year, but people who earn a lower income will not be able to do this.
This policy becomes yet another way in which the haves get more and the have nots get left
so terribly sad
Here’s what I know and lived…I was one of those kids who had to wait a year to go to kindergarten. I was so excited to go to school when the time came. All the kids were in either the AM or PM session, then later we did a swap so kids could experience going to school in either the morning or afternoon. We got to paint, listen to stories, play games, and finally get to bounce the GIANT red ball. We all got giant paint brushes (and easels) and I painted the Easter bunny, of course, with a guy inside wearing the costume. I remember my painting of the Mercury capsule with parachute hanging on the cork board. Oh, the joy of stale graham crackers and warm milk. Then we got our little mats out for nap time. We played, imagined, and found the joys of “going to school.” Fast forward to today. Believe it or not, I was one of those teachers who had a multi-subject degree with an art supplemental with a bunch of other supplemental credentials as well. I taught nearly all grade levels till I found my niche working with middle school and finally “at risk” youth. I was the “Mr. Finney” of sorts. Many of my first students ended up with me at the continuation high school years later. When I first started (and being totally ignorant to the public education system/terminology/what a newbie can voice/cannot voice) my thoughts were, “Why aren’t these kids being helped? These youngsters need this…and this…and this…” So, I tried to take my time and really focus on their needs, but I soon found, “Mr. Charvet, speed it up. You can’t take that much time to do that or that or that…” To me, instead of “less is more” and teaching kids “to fish,” if was a race to nowhere. I quickly found out I needed to supplement my income to make it as a teacher, so I worked coaching, tutoring, and a host of other stuff to “bring in more bucks.” I tutored all kids and along the way, two kindergarten students. One young student could recite all her site words from the board (she was 5+ age); the other student had no clue what was going on and no matter what I did, everything in his mind was “pink.” He was 4+. But, according to the rules, his birthdate fell within the right time for him to attend school. I knew his teacher and she told the parents, “In my opinion, right now, he is too young for school.” Both of these children were doing a lot of worksheets and then being asked to write a paragraph. I tried my best. When my older son was in kinder (and his best buddy attended a private school) my wife was worried my son was falling behind because of “all the advanced stuff” they were doing at the private school. His teacher, Ms. Marfia (RIP), said, “Don’t pay attention to that school. Those concepts are too much for the kids right now. Your son is doing exactly what he should be doing developmentally. His brain is “absorbing” right now and you wait, next year, he will soar when it is time for reading and such.” She was absolutely right. His best buddy soon floundered and never did well in language arts. My son flourished in reading and writing and went on to earn a Masters in Musical Performance. I fought hard to “do right by all students” and help them at their level. And to remind them it was “okay” because it might now be happening for you NOW. Many of my students who struggled, needed to be taught in a different way not forced into “if you don’t know it now” well we can’t wait for you — the race is on! To where? Geez, most of the time I thought, “Where is the part, uh, for the love of learning?” But teachers need to “go along” to “get along” and be team players. They worry about evaluations. I often felt like a race horse left at the gate, but did my best. Now, students are being pushed into “Dual Enrollment” where they can “get ahead” for college. There are many “bright students” but as my college colleague told me, “Many are not ready for the pacing of college level classes.” The drug and alcohol counselor told me, “You know there is a reason insurance companies don’t deem people “adults” till they are 25 and then rates become a bit lower. The brain is not completely developed.” For crying out loud, if it works for some, great, but can’t kids be kids and enjoy life? Never said my way was right, but what I do know is I did right by the kids. In sum, it would be nice for kids to not say, “I hate reading. I hate writing. This is stupid. I know, I know, this is what THEY want, so I will do it.” I would be nice to developmentally guide them and remind them, “Not everyone is good at all things, but everyone is good at something.” I love Diane’s blog because it gives me an opportunity to share. I appreciate learning from all of you. Oh, and if you haven’t checked this out, do so. While I was at Mills College in Oakland, CA, I experienced an art exhibit. Not until I learned more about the exhibit, did I realize it was done by kindergarteners. Very cool. https://www.reggiochildren.it/en/reggio-emilia-approach/
Wonderful stuff, Mr. Charvet!
I once had a newcomer kindergarten ESL student that didn’t speak at all for the first year and three months of school. Some teachers were worried the boy was autistic. He did, however, follow directions. By the fourth month of the second year, he started speaking in full sentences. He had been a selective mute. He had been taking the instruction in, but he wasn’t going to use it until he was ready to do so. He is one of the reasons I think we should carefully observe, but not necessarily intervene or rush to classify with young children. Let them breathe and develop!
Thank you! And, amen. I experienced the same thing. And isn’t that what is taught in the “Krashen Theory?” I had to take the CLAD and LSD courses to keep my credential. I remember, “…the kids are like sponges. Absorbing, absorbing, absorbing until it is time to ‘put it all together.” And didn’t they say Einstein “just needed to learn the language?” Let them grow, play, and experience life.
Einstein was a late talker and was thought to be impaired. Clearly, he had other things on his mind.
We need this book on the best seller list….again….and fast! Read the Kindergarten Credo excerpt.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/56955/all-i-really-need-to-know-i-learned-in-kindergarten-by-robert-fulghum/9780345466396/excerpt
“Children (before adolescents) learn best through open-ended, natural resources that encourage them to use all of their senses to find out about the world around them. It is the role of an Early Years teacher to allow time and space for children to engage in their play and then take this play in any direction that they wish.” — The British International School, Shanghai, PUXI, 2022
The international destroy public education crime syndicate wants to program children as if their brains are computers and not biological. Even the rank and punish standardized tests assume children retrieve data from files like a computer does.
Finland treats their children like, well, children and not computers.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/why-are-finlands-schools-successful-49859555/
I taught Kindergarten and first grade. I totally agree with this. I imagine it as calling a baby who doesn’t walk by 9 months as highly proficient, 12 months as proficient, 15 months below level and 18 months far below level. Yet all of the ages are developmentally normal. It is crazy to call a normally developing child far below level. But our testing does it many times each year.
I taught Kindergarten and Preschool for 25 years, from the late 60s to the mid 90s. By the 80s, things were changing, at least in part, due to the bogus “A Nation at Risk” under Reagan, when schools in my area started pushing reading requirements into Kindergarten. Ugh! Whenever that happens, as I witnessed, it often follows that academics get pushed into Preschool too… Double Ugh!…
In my experience, creative and well prepared Early Childhood Education (ECE) teachers were most likely to adapt to such requirements by teaching in fun and exciting ways, such as by incorporating discovery learning, games, arts & science and in-depth projects, not presurring kids who aren’t ready. Others who were less skilled just became more strict amd used boring rote, didactic methods often seen with teachers of older kids… Triple Ugh!
When I returned to college for three more degrees in 1990, my professors (who had observed me teaching in my Kindergarten class) talked me into going into Teacher Education (training people to be teachers) and they gave me my first job doing it. I then taught ECE in college for the next 25 years. Since that work includes supervising ECE students in their practicum and student teaching placements, I continued to be actively involved in what goes on in Kindergarten and Preschool classrooms. It became the most challenging when all the testing requirements hit schools… Quadruple UGH!!!!!
It’s been a long, difficult journey, which I recently retired from due to health problems, but I adored my work and I miss it a lot. All along though, I have been thinking that teaching involves both art & science, and letting unskilled non-educators such as politicians decide what goes on in classrooms is like allowing those same people to tell doctors how to do their jobs… Would those politicians want to be treated personally by doctors who were required to follow the directions and rules that THEY themselves had made up? I highly doubt it…
Sorry, the last part of my post was omitted, which was regarding reseach for my doctoral disertation, conducted in the 90s on a related matter, when we first started seeing the business model being adopted in education, which made me wonder: Who do people think the experts on education are, and can just anyone decide those matters or be a teacher? This concerned me a lot, due to politicians and people like Bill Gates taking over education, as well as folks such as Oprah and Martha Stewart declaring themselves to be teachers –even though none had teacher training, so they knew virtually nothing about learning, teaching, human development, individual differences or their students. Plus their subject matter knowledge was usually rather limited. I suspected people thought virtually anyone could do it because of all the years people had spent in school, though it turned out that home schooled students thought that, too. It came up in my classes often, so I used to say that eating food every day doesn’t make you an expert chef, and going to the doctor all your life will never make you a skilled physician…
ECE Pro,
And anyone who flies often should be a pilot
Great one! No wonder tRump has long thought that he’s qualified to pilot our country (and the rest of the world)
He’s qualified to be President because he played one on TV.
Or thinks he did.
Right. And because running a family business that he inherited is just like being the leader of 336 MILLION people. Or so he thinks.