Archives for category: Childhood, Pre-K, K
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Teacher Tom: I Will Not Permit the Children, My Friends, to Be Turned Over to a Machine!

By dianeravitch
October 9, 2017 //
19

Tom Hobson teaches preschool in Seattle, Washington. He is also a blogger.

He wrote here about the machinations of the greedy profiteers who want children to be taught by machines. He will not permit it. The children are his friends. The profiteers don’t give a damn about the children he teaches.

He begins like this:

I typically wait by the door or gate to greet the children as they arrive, “Hi Sarah! I’m happy to see you!” I say it because it’s how I would like to be greeted. In a way, I guess, you could consider it my version of shouting, “Norm!” the way the Cheers regulars did each time their beloved friend walked through the door.

I also say it because it’s true. I am happy to see each child walk through the door. I’m grateful they’ve come back. I’m grateful that their parents continue to trust me with their baby. I’m grateful that we are going to now spend hours together, just farting around, making stuff, imagining stuff, thinking about stuff and generally just goofing off. I’m even grateful for the times we get sad or angry, because those conflicts are a part of our friendship.

And that’s the thing, that’s the part that people who don’t do this job will never understand: the friendship. These kids are my friends, especially those who are back for a second or third year with me. We’re not even two weeks into the new school year and we’re already finishing each other’s sentences and cracking inside jokes. This is what I will remember from the too short time we spend together. It is also what they will remember. And we’ve got nine months of that ahead of us. Norm!

He adds:

Are we that stupid. People need other people, not just for procreation or telling stories or being happy or forming a team, but also for learning anything worth learning. We will figure out how to read and write and cipher as we always have: virally, by hanging out with other people, which is a system that has worked for most people throughout history. It’s been a largely successful system so why the hell would we mess with it? And that’s also, not incidentally, how we learn everything else: virally, by hanging out with other people. And that requires friendship, deep down real friendship. That, ultimately, is the source of extraordinary motivation.

Read their own documents, and you’ll see that they are planning to turn live, face-to-face teaching into a “premium service.” . . . Meaning that they know face-to-face instruction is a better way to learn, and they have no intention of having their own children learn from machines.

I am not laughing about this academic’s predictions. I’m girding myself because billionaires are behind this and they, despite their philanthropic BS, care primarily about making a killing at the expense of our kids. I will not permit children, my friends, to be turned over to machines. I want them to come to a place where everybody knows their name and where they’re always glad they came.

Friends don’t turn their friends over to machines. People need other people. Children need humans, not machines, to teach them.

Categories Accountability, Childhood, Pre-K, K, Teachers and Teaching, Technology

Susan Ochshorn: New York Regents Just Threw the Young Children Under the Bus

By dianeravitch
September 13, 2017 //
24

Susan Ochshorn is an expert on early childhood education. She runs an organization called ECE Policy Works. She has been urging the New York Regents to throw out the Common Core standards for young children and replace them with developmentally appropriate standards. They ignored her advice.

She writes here.

We are violating everything that is known, which is considerable, about how children develop and learn best. We are stealing their childhood, robbing them of play, the primary engine of human development.

We have empirical evidence that kindergarten has become the new first grade, and preschool the new kindergarten. Across the country, and in New York, we have relegated play to an hour a day or less for five-year-olds, and a growing number of four-year-olds. One three-year-old I know recently brought home work sheets from her early childhood program.

Children are being assessed at younger and younger ages. We’re condemning them to the tread mill before they can even lace up their running shoes.

This is decidedly not how young children thrive. They learn through play, exploration, inquiry, and movement. It’s absurd to expect them to sit quietly, to passively receive information and regurgitate it back. We talk endlessly about producing critical thinkers, innovators, but we’re eliminating the kind of teaching and learning that nurtures them.

With New York’s Pre-K through 2nd grade standards, early childhood teachers are under massive pressure to get children to meet the benchmarks. Growing numbers are convinced that they’re committing malpractice, that they’re actually doing harm. Many have used the term child abuse.

In measuring young children by these standards, we deny their uniqueness, ignoring their strengths and vulnerabilities. We deny their human right to a rich, joyful educational experience.

New York policymakers are deluded in thinking that their efforts can close achievement gaps. Nor will they move us closer to eradicating inequity and inequality. Socioeconomic status has been proven to be one of the most significant factors in academic achievement. Of the 4.6 million children living in New York, a staggering 42 percent live in low-income families. Eleven percent of children under the age of six live in extreme poverty, where they’re severely deprived of basic human needs.

Toxic stress is rampant among these children, their cortisol levels soaring. This powerful neurophysiological process, akin to a 24/7 adrenaline rush, affects, among other things, the ability to focus and plan—executive functions that are critical to school readiness and academic performance. By preserving the Common Core—the attempt to rebrand has not changed its essence—we are condemning children to failure at a very early age, and turning them off to school.

Chancellor Betty Rosa and her colleagues on the Board of Regents have been given an opportunity to act in the best interests of the child. And they’ve squandered it.

Their moral compass is terribly out of whack.

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Common Core, New York, Testing

Emily Talmage: A House of Cards, Built on Kids

By dianeravitch
August 15, 2017 //
6

Emily Talmage writes here about the introduction of “social impact bonds,” an ingenious way devised by Wall Street to make money on kids.

In 2006, in a presentation to ReadyNation marked “Strictly Private and Confidential,” Paul Sheldon of Citigroup proposed a new way to finance preschool: early childhood student loans.

Non-profit organizations could borrow from banks or student loan companies, said Sheldon, and then offer loans to government organizations or individuals. Then, the loans could be pooled and turned into asset-backed securities, and – voila! – an early childhood education market would be created, worth as much as 10 billion dollars.

The idea of preschoolers saddled with debt, however, was clearly going to be too controversial.

Over time, Citigroup’s model was reworked into the more palatable “social impact bond,” which are now proliferating across the country.

These bonds, which are really private loans made to government or non-profit agencies with repayment contingent upon pre-determined “outcomes,” are sold under the premise that they can help tax-payers save money in the long-run by preventing the need for remedial services.

A clever and rather unscrupulous way to monetize early childhood education without providing any services.

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Utah

Preparing Pre-Schoolers for an Automated Economy

By dianeravitch
August 12, 2017 //
31

When I read articles like this, I think I have lost all sense of reality.

The title is the same as this post but the pretentiousness is a mile deep.

Little children play with toys, and the adults who are watching them decide they are preparing for the new economy even though the adults have no idea what the new economy will be or what kinds of jobs will exist in 20 years.

“Technological advances have rendered an increasing number of jobs obsolete in the last decade, and researchers say parts of most jobs will eventually be automated. What the labor market will look like when today’s young children are old enough to work is perhaps harder to predict than at any time in recent history. Jobs are likely to be very different, but we don’t know which will still exist, which will be done by machines and which new ones will be created.”

Since no one knows, there is no time like the present to start pushing career readiness.

“To prepare, children need to start as early as preschool, educators say. Foundational skills that affect whether people thrive or fall behind in the modern economy are developed early, and achievement gaps appear before kindergarten.

“Nervous about the future, some parents are pushing children to learn to code as early as age 2, and advocates say it’s as important as learning letters and numbers. But many researchers and educators say that the focus on coding is misplaced, and that the more important skills to teach have to do with playing with other children and nothing to do with machines: human skills that machines can’t easily replicate, like empathy, collaboration and problem-solving.

“It’s a real misnomer that simply learning to code is the answer,” said Ken Goldberg, a chairman in engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. “We don’t need everybody to be extremely capable Python coders. It’s a way of understanding what machines are good at and what they’re not good at — that’s something everybody needs to learn.”

“It’s not that technology should be avoided; many researchers say children should be exposed to it. But we don’t know what machines will be able to do in two decades, let alone which programming languages software engineers will use. And children learn better, they say, by playing and building instead of sitting behind screens.”

Another way to say this is, let the children play.

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K

Teacher Reports on Child Abuse in Kindergarten in Ohio

By dianeravitch
June 12, 2017 //
36

A comment by a teacher:

“Young students in kindergarten are now labeled as having specific learning disabilities if they do not receive a certain score on district universal screeners(STAR, iReady, MAP), which are taken on computers. I watch this happen in my district. I’ve watched it happen in other districts in which I’ve worked. First graders are given Reading Improvement Plans if they do not receive a certain score on district universal screeners the first time they take the test in August, in the state of Ohio. Once on a Reading Improvement Plan (RIMP), they are expected to receive instruction from a prepackaged, “research based,” scripted program…with fidelity. Without real books. Kindergarten teachers talk more about close reading strategies, than they do about Eric Carle, Leo Lionni, Dr. Seuss, or Stone Soup. Even the interactive read aloud has become a thing of the past. What did you think would happen to unstructured play? Literacy is being systematically killed. The blood is on our hands.”

My view: This is Child Abuse. State and district education officials who mandate this spiritual and emotional abuse of little children should be reported to child protective services and referred for counseling about the developmental needs of children.

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K

Wendy Lecker: New York Times Endorses Academic Rigor for PRE-Kindergarten, Not Play

By dianeravitch
June 10, 2017 //
43

Wendy Lecker, civil rights attorney, writes here about the New York Times editorial endorsing academic rigor for kindergarten children, because a study said it would produce higher test scores someday. I guess the Times’ editorial board doesn’t read this blog. Too bad for them. They would have learned more by reading Froebel than by reading the latest study of how to raise test scores.

Last week, The New York Times unwittingly provided an example of how bad education policy is made. A front-page article trumpeted “Free play or flashcards? A new study nods to more rigorous preschools.”

The study the article featured purportedly proved that frequent, direct instruction of “academic” content in preschool yielded more “cognitive gains” than play-based preschool. The study even contended that preschools that do not engage in enough direct academic instruction “may be doing their young charges a disservice.” The study’s author, Bruce Fuller, denigrated play, declaring that “(s)imply dressing up like a firefighter or building an exquisite Lego edifice may not be enough…”

Does this obvious observation prove that “academic” preschool helps children learn better? No — as the authors themselves admit. They state that they did not follow children in this study past kindergarten, even though they acknowledge that previous preschool studies find that many effects fade by fifth grade.

To the contrary, decades of research demonstrate that an emphasis on play in the early years provides long-lasting academic and social benefits.

Young children’s brains are not ready for the abstract thinking that direct instruction of “academic” content requires. Children use play to establish the foundation for abstract learning. For example, socio-dramatic play enables children to understand sequencing essential to math and reading. Building with blocks enables children to understand that objects can represent other objects, so later they can comprehend that lines represent letters and words represent ideas. Contrary to the claims in The New York Times article, play is learning for young children.

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Testing

Nancy E. Bailey: Pre-School Rigor Is Child Abuse

By dianeravitch
June 6, 2017 //
35

Well, she didn’t exactly use that term, but I did.

Bailey reviews a study that calls for more “rigor” in preschool and the New York Times’ shameless endorsent of this finding. What if someone did a study and concluded that leeches are the best curative and every hospital should order a supply? Just because someone does a “study” doesn’t mean that it is just or reasonable. Suppose a study found that students get higher test scores if they are threatened with a beating? That might work if you think higher scores are the goal of education and nothing else matters.

She writes:

Prerequisite to Kindergarten: Instead of demanding four-year-olds talk of geometric “attributes,” how about getting them to show up the first day of kindergarten with great big smiles on their faces?

The New York Times is praising a new study in a report titled “Free Play or Flashcards? New Study Nods to More Rigorous Preschools.” The study itself is titled “Do academic preschools yield stronger benefits? Cognitive emphasis, dosage, and early learning?” The authors are researchers from the Institute of Human Development, University of California, Berkeley and the Food and Drug Administration. But I am not going to spend much time reading this study.

The first mistake these researchers make, is that many Americans want to see the word “rigor” buried. It’s mean-spirited, and we recognize that people who use rigor and preschool, in the same breath, know little about children, or, worse, they don’t like them. So “rigorous” in the title, especially when it is getting a nod, is troubling.

It’s a study done on low and middle class children. I think many are also tired of pushing this group of children to learn. We understand that poor and middle class students do well with all the stuff wealthy students have in school. Why didn’t this study include a private school like Sidwell? At least then, if children grow up mal-adapted due to rigor, their parents will be able to afford therapy…

“Why go through the trouble of having a child, if they are made to become an adult before their time? Why do these researchers care so much about who “outperforms” who? Most of us don’t want preschool teenagers. That period comes soon enough! We’re sick of hearing young children can and should work above and beyond their age and development!…

“We don’t want child oddities, children forced to know facts and figures, and pushed to read before they’re ready. Little children don’t need to be browbeaten to learn. It could backfire. They could easily learn to hate learning.

“Preschools should be about love. They should encourage children to enjoy learning about other preschoolers who are different, but fun and interesting. And play is sacred. Dressing up and playing make believe, and building a Lego structure are critical. Play is where children really learn. And good teachers help make this happen through good guidance.

“A preschooler should never be hungry or have a toothache. They should have lovely books to read and be read to often. Dancing, art, and joyful music should be a daily affair.

“So I’m not interested in this study. I’m just not.”

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K

Bianca Tanis: New York’s New Standards Are Bad News for Young Children

By dianeravitch
May 19, 2017 //
26

Bianca Tanis is a teacher of special education in a K-2 classroom in the Hudson Valley of New York. She is also a member of the board of NYSAPE (New York State Allies for Parents and Educators), the statewide group that has led the Opt Out movement.

In this post, she excoriates New York’s new standards and says the New York State Education Department ignored the voices of early childhood educators. From the perspective of young children, she says, the standards are fundamentally flawed.

She writes, in part:

We should never have to fight for the right of children to play. Nor should we have to fight for them to spend more than 20 minutes at recess. Instruction should never come at the expense of the creative, spontaneous, and joyful exploration of 4- and 5-year olds. But, increasingly, it does. With the unveiling of New York State’s “Next Generation of English Language Arts and Mathematics Standards,” the struggle to maintain these experiences for young learners—already underway—will intensify.

When New York’s Education Department released the draft standards last September, Commissioner MaryEllen Elia claimed they represented substantive change. Yet most revisions consisted of minor tweaks to language and placement. There were very few shifts in content, and the Common Core anchor standards remained mostly intact. The latest iteration walks back any positive content changes, increasing the rigor of the prekindergarten through second-grade grade standards over and above the draft released in September, and moving some first-grade standards to kindergarten.

While many policymakers profess their commitment to play-based learning and meeting the needs of the whole child, their actions say otherwise. This problem is not unique to New York. But in a state with one of the largest parent uprisings against high-stakes reform and the arbitrary imposition of rigor on child-centered practice, Elia’s reaction is disturbing. She and the New York Education Department have missed an opportunity to deliver developmentally appropriate learning standards that align with early childhood’s robust evidence base.

They’ve also systematically denied teachers who work with young children the chance to advocate for their students and reasonable expectations for development as well as practice that engages them in the critical early years of learning.

Although some teachers working with children in prekindergarten through second grade took part in the review, their voices were marginalized. Not a single early educator was a member of the Standards Review Leadership and Planning team. None were facilitators, or on any of the advisory panels that made the final revisions.

Those who took part in the original standards revision work in August of 2016 were so dissatisfied with the process that they ultimately requested the formation of an early learning task force. These outspoken educators were barred from serving on the 32-member committee, of which only a quarter were early educators.

It’s easy to understand why they were largely excluded from this process. In a room full of teachers working with prekindergartners to second-graders, you would be hard-pressed to find consensus around the idea that all kindergartners should “read with purpose and understanding”—an expectation that Governor Andrew Cuomo’s Common Core Task Force report cited as concerning to early childhood experts.

Ten out of 14 members of the PreK-2 review committee issued a letter of dissent, expressing concern that the number of skills included in the revised standards would make it difficult to find time for play-based and child-led learning.

Categories Accountability, Childhood, Pre-K, K, Common Core, New York, Testing

Susan Ochshorn: The Danger of Universal Pre-K

By dianeravitch
May 15, 2017 //
20

Mayor Bill de Blasio’s major initiative in education was implementation of universal pre-K for four-year-olds. Now he has announced his plan to provide universal pre-K for three-year-olds. The earlier initiative was popular, so what could go wrong?

The Mayor needs the state to fund it with $700 million, which is far from certain.

Leonie Haimson, founder of Class Size Matters, says there are too many overcrowded classrooms, and the Mayor should attend to them before launching a new initiative.

Susan Ochshorn of ECE Policyworks fears that the cost of the new grade will be other than financial. She worries that the addition will banish play from the lives of three-year-olds.

She writes:

“I was over the moon when de Blasio pioneered free preschool for four-year-olds. New York’s children and families had been waiting since 1997, when Republican Governor George Pataki first enacted legislation. The state’s movement toward universal access and adequate financing has been erratic, at best, and the mayor’s initiative was bold. But with kindergarten as the new first or second grade, expectations for preschoolers have increased. The pressure is on.

“The tradeoff for early education’s legitimacy and funding has been painful—a Faustian pact. The kind of playfulness that we see in the smartest mammals has lost its pride of place. Our littlest children have been abandoned, left to wander in the desert. We need to bring them to the oasis, before it’s too late.”

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Education Reform, Play

Education Reform? Put Your Baby in Front of A Computer, Please!

By dianeravitch
April 15, 2017 //
39

Indiana legislators intend to introduce virtual pre-K as part of their expansion of preschool for the state. It is no doubt a way to save money for the state, just plopping babies in front of a computer, supervised by a parent, and calling it “pre-school.” Would they do it to their own children? Peter Greene wrote about this UPSTART program here.

The news report says, in all seriousness:

“It’s really attractive because it involves the parent specifically in providing the program for the kid and many times the issue with children who are not ready for school is unengaged parents,” Senator Luke Kenely, R-Noblesville, said. “This really engages the whole family. I just believe it’s a much more wholesome approach that will have a better lasting effect.”

The UPSTART online curriculum calls for parents to spend 15 minutes a day with their child five days a week. The program started in Utah and lawmakers hope to bring it to Indiana to reach low-income families in rural counties that might not have access to pre-K education otherwise.

“I think it will be a huge benefit for about 60 counties in the State of Indiana that they have never had that chance before,” Senator Kenley, who serves as the Senate Appropriations Chairman, said.

Lawmakers are planning to allocate $1 million toward the program in its first year. Senator Kenley said the average cost per student is about $1,400 and the program could serve about 700 Hoosiers in its first year.

Peter Greene describes the program, which will be adopted in Utah and probably Indiana, and says:

Pre-K can be done in so many beneficial ways, but none of those ways are focused on academic achievement. What four year olds need to do is play, play slightly organized games, play unorganized games, play by themselves, play with others, and also play. If they feel inclined to explore reading or math or science or art or whatever, that should be encouraged. But enforced or required. No, no, no, and also no.

Supporters will say, “Lighten up– we’re only talking about fifteen minutes a day, five days a week.” And I agree that beats some Pre-K classroom where students are expected to sit and study academic subjects for hours, just as being hit in the face with a hammer is better than being assaulted in the chest with a jackhammer.

But UPSTART also gives tiny humans an early close connection with a screen, introduces them to the idea of learning as a chore that must be done to someone else’s satisfaction, and gets the whole family acclimated to being data mined. It’s a sweetheart deal of the Utah-based Waterford company which makes out well whenever it can get legislators to purchase its product in bulk. Is this good use of Indiana taxpayer dollars? I doubt it. If I were an Indiana voter and taxpayer, I think I’d seriously question the aims of any Pre-K program, and I think I’d want my tiny humans to be interacting with real live humans, not software.

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Indiana, Play, Technology, Computers, Utah
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