Archives for category: Childhood

This article was written by Jennifer Weiner, an education professor at the University of Connecticut. She explains why she refuses to follow the worksheets and detailed instructions for her twin sons. She recognizes that she is privileged as a person who has economic security, healthcare and is white. But there’s no reason to believe that children who lack her privileges need to be subjected to dull routine.

I read her article with pleasure, a welcome respite from the dire warnings issued by the test-and-punish crowd, by various bureaucrats, by think-tanks underwritten by the Gates Foundation, and many others who are certain that children’s brains will wither if they are not subjected daily to worksheets, test prep, and the holy tests themselves.

What happens if there is a respite in our academic Hunger Games? How will we know who will win and who will lose? This mother wants her children to have a timeout. I’m a grandmother now, but I suspect if my children were still in school, I would be in her camp. School is not a global race to the top. It should be a time to learn and explore and to find joy in reading, writing, thinking, and growing. What children miss most now is the personal contact with their teachers and the social interactions with other students. Jennifer Weiner reminds us that the NCLB pressure-cooker is unhealthy for all children, not just her own. When school resumes, we need to rethink the oppressive and pointless regime imposed on children by federal mandates and groupthink. It’s past time to rethink the status quo and place our faith in real education, students, and teachers, not tests and technology.

She writes:

Thanks to the coronavirus, my third-grade twins are home all day for the foreseeable future. I’m not going to recreate school for them.

Judge me all you want.

Out of respect for their amazing teachers, I’m making a good-faith effort to get my kids to do the work that’s been sent home, but that does not come anywhere close to filling what would have been a school day. After accomplishing the bare minimum, the agenda is to survive and watch too much TV. We are eating cookies and carbs and hoping for the best. We are loving one another and trying not to go insane.

When we got the call that our schools were closing, I knew I’d start seeing social media posts with home-schooling schedules and amazing and quite labor-intensive (for adults) activities for children.

My predictions were right: There have been color-coded home school charts with every minute scheduled, online resources on how to lead children through yoga and meditation, French lessons, and building their own rocket ships. Parents are sharing recipes with the right nutritional balance to enhance study productivity. Many have already begun to lament that they’re failing at meeting these new expectations.

I want to send a message to parents, and in particular to working moms, who will inevitably take on most of this home labor along with working remotely: This is going to be messy and that is OK.

I am not an expert in teaching third graders, particularly those like one of my sons, who has special needs and receives numerous services from talented professional educators every day to ensure he can thrive. We are so grateful to them and to our other son’s teachers and their patience, wisdom, and skill. We know that we don’t share these qualities.

I’m also not a parenting expert — a fact that would be clear if you met our wonderful but somewhat feral children. But I do know, from often painful firsthand experiences, that trying to turn mothering into a competitive sport is straight up unhealthy. It’s not a game I want to play.

My husband and I both work full time. Like so many others, we’re attempting to keep our family safe and fed during our state’s Covid-19 shutdown while simultaneously working to convince our boomer parents to practice social distancing, reaching out to other loved ones and friends and trying not to panic. Even when everything in our life is working the way it should, and with all the privileges we have — our solid health care, our economic stability, our whiteness — we often feel overwhelmed. So this pandemic felt like a bridge too far. We had to meet it head on: holding our breath, crossing our fingers. And not judging ourselves.

I’ve heard predictions from other parents about how this time without classroom instruction could lead to my kids (who, remember, are 8) falling behind so far that college will no longer be in their future. I hate to think of how parents who are preoccupied with worry about loss of income and how to provide food and shelter for their families feel.

They must be terrified their children will be unable to keep up as moms and dads with more flexibility, more security, or even full-time help talk about their aggressive at-home enrichment agendas for their little ones. Maybe this is the perfect time to call a timeout on the academic rat-race that was never healthy or fair in the first place.

Yes, we have embraced the need for some schedule, taking turns keeping an eye on the kids as they surf the internet to make sure whatever they are looking at is age-appropriate. (Of course, one of the boys wanted to learn about bombs.)

So far, we’ve seen them digging into mastodons, dwarf planets, the Mars rover and who made Legos and why. They’ve been reading a lot (mostly graphic novels and “Big Nate” books) because my kids were always avid readers and I don’t have to fight with them to do it. But there are no flash cards and no made-up projects to “enrich” them. We do not assign them essays or ensure their explorations are aligned with Common Core standards. There is no official “movement” or music time. We have not set up a makeshift classroom or given our family’s “school” a name.

We bake and have taste tests to see which cookie recipes are the best, because we like cookies and they are among the few things I know how to make. We walk and walk and walk. We eat together. We think about how lucky we are and try to help those who are more vulnerable and without our resources.

So far, the boys have played more video games and watched more television than they did during any given week before schools shut down. It keeps them busy while their dad and I try to finish our meetings before Zoom crashes.

We love each other, we yell, we apologize, we laugh, they punch each other, we yell some more, we make up. We live, we try to be compassionate and we hope this will all be a memory soon. And when it’s over, the schoolwork will be there.

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Childhood, Education Industry, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Testing

Sing “Happy Birthday” to the Woman Who Wrote the Song

By dianeravitch

March 27, 2020 //

Today is the birthday of Patty Smith Hill, who wrote “Happy Birthday to You.”

I recall that she was a leading advocate for early childhood education and play while a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, in New York.

Garrison Keillor wrote this about her.

It’s the birthday of the woman who wrote “Happy Birthday to You,” Patty Smith Hill, born in Anchorage, Kentucky (1868). Most of her life was spent as a kindergarten teacher. She began teaching in Louisville, Kentucky, and it was there, in 1893, that Hill first wrote the lyrics to the song. But it was originally meant as a welcome to start the school day and was first called “Good Morning to All.” Hill’s sister Mildred, an accomplished musician, provided the melody. Hill was 25 when she wrote the lyrics to the famous song.

But wait? Where is her professional life?

Wikipedia says this:

Hill taught nursery school, kindergarten, and was a “key founder of the National Association for Nursery Education (NANE) which now exists as the National Association For the Education of Young Children (NAEYC).”

Not only was she famous for composing the Happy Birthday song, but she was a prominent advocate for early childhood education.

Hill was an authority and leader in the progressive education movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Patty developed the Patty Hill blocks and in 1924 helped create the Institute of Child Welfare Research at Columbia University Teachers College.[2] The Patty Hill blocks were large blocks with which children could create giant constructions. She was a member, President, and lifetime support of the Association for Childhood Education International.

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

The Current Testing Regime Makes Some Children Hate School

By dianeravitch

November 2, 2019 //

A letter from a parent:

As a parent of a child with anxiety, the test driven culture of our local school has made my third grader hate school. Every day is a battle to get her to school. Her tardy and absentee record is deplorable. She is sick with stomach and gastrointestinal illness much too frequently for a child with no medical conditions. The crime is this is a bright child who loves learning but hates school and is beginning to believe she is “dumb”. In particular, the time limitations on all of the screening tests are crippling.

Don’t vote for any candidate unless he or she promises to stop the federal testing mandate for annual testing of every child.

Categories Childhood, Testing

Nancy Bailey: The Haunted Third Grade Classroom That Traps Children

By dianeravitch

October 31, 2019 //

Nancy Bailey writes here about a zombie policy launched by Jeb Bush called third grade retention. Students who can’t pass a third grade reading test are flunked and held back. Nineteen states have adopted this practice despite a large body of research showing that it hurts kids and leads to future failure, even dropping out.

Children who are held back feel humiliated.

There is one big benefit to this policy, however. Holding back the kids who have not yet mastered reading does wonders for the state’s fourth grade reading scores on national tests like NAEP.

Bailey offers specific ways to help third graders instead of humiliating them.

Categories Accountability, Bush, Jeb, Childhood, Education Reform, Florida, Testing

David Kristofferson: Six Secrets of Dutch Parents for Raising “the Happiest Children in the World”

By dianeravitch

October 24, 2019 //

In case you didn’t open this link in the previous post, David Kristofferson recommends this article that explains why Dutch children are the “happiest in the world.”

Here are three of the six reasons:

1. Babies get more sleep.

2. Kids spend more time with both parents.

3. Kids feel less pressure to excel in school.

To read the author’s explanations and to learn about the other three reasons, open the link.

Here is a 2018 listing of the happiest children and countries in the world.

The Netherlands is still first.

According to the rankings, Dutch kids’ education, their material well-being and behaviors and risks were the best in the world. Their happiness is attributed to a non-competitive, low-stress school culture and a good work-life balance for parents, among other reasons.

Finland is number 4.

Finland was fourth overall but No. 2 in material well-being and No. 4 in education for children. Recently, it was named the happiest country on Earth. What gives? Among other things, their taxation system has narrowed, if not eliminated, a lot of disparity between the rich and poor. And children’s services, including education, child care and health, are well-funded. Men and women are, in general, equal. What’s not to be happy about?

Categories Childhood, International, Joy

David Kristofferson: Something is Very Wrong with the Way We Are Raising Our Children

By dianeravitch

October 24, 2019 //

Shortly after I read this very provocative post by David Kristofferson, I saw a story in Education Week that suicide rates among young Americans have recently soared.

Quoting data from federal sources, it said:

Suicide rates for teens between the ages of 15 and 19 increased by 76 percent between 2007 and 2017. And the suicide rate for 10- to 14-year-olds nearly tripled over that same time period, according to CDC’s data.

Kristofferson writes that something is clearly wrong with the way we raise our children. His own district in California surveyed high school students and reported that nearly a third of them describe themselves as”sad.” A sizable fraction have recently used drugs or alcohol.

He then goes on to contrast two parenting styles: the wholesome Dutch approach, which produces”the happiest children in the world” and the strict Tiger Mom approach, which establishes rigid standards of behavior: all work and no play, a phenomenon that captured media attention a few years ago.

As a grandmother who was once a very loving non-Tiger Mom, I think there is something terribly wrong with the absurd pressure we put on our children today. What they need most of all, after their basic needs are met, is unconditional love, the knowledge that someone is crazy about them. That’s a line I heard many years ago from a celebrated Yale child psychologist, Dr. Alfred Solnit: Every child needs to know that someone is crazy about her or him.

Categories Childhood, Education Reform, Love

Critics Protest Outrageous Award for Corporation Hawking Online Instruction for Pre-Schoolers

By dianeravitch

April 14, 2019 //

The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood is outraged that The Audacious Project is honoring the Waterford online preschool program, which will use this platform to expand their efforts to open additional online preschools. Early childhood experts agree that this is harmful to children. I say it is a mean and stupid idea. Efforts to put little children in online schools should be denounced, not celebrated. Children need real interaction with real human beings.

Please sign the petition.

For Immediate Release

Contact:
David Monahan, CCFC: david@commercialfreechildhood.org; (617) 896-9397

Early Childhood Advocates Call On The Audacious Project to Reconsider Major Award for Online Preschool
A TED philanthropy project would widen educational inequality and deprive children of the hands-on preschool experiences they deserve.

BOSTON, MA – April 12, 2019 – Early childhood advocates are calling on The Audacious Project, housed at TED and designed to fund ideas for social change, to postpone plans to designate Waterford UPSTART, an online “preschool” program, as one of the participants in its funding program for 2019. Award winners will be announced at TED2019 in Vancouver on April 16. Last year’s award winners averaged $63 million in new funding. According to a Waterford representative, the funding will allow UPSTART to dramatically increase the number of children enrolled in its program.

In their call for The Audacious Project to postpone funding, Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC) and Defending the Early Years (DEY) point to their October 2018 Position Statement on Online Preschool, which has been endorsed by more than 100 experts in child development and early education. The experts and advocates say that online preschool programs like UPSTART are poor substitutes for high-quality early education, and that funding online programs instead of high-quality early education will make inequality worse, not better.

“There is a tremendous need for universal pre-K, and it’s admirable that The Audacious Project wants to address educational inequalities, but online preschool is not the answer,” said Nancy Carlsson-Paige, EdD, Professor Emerita at Lesley University and DEY Senior Advisor. “Kids learn by playing, exploring, and interacting with peers and caring adults – not by memorizing letters, numbers, and colors presented to them on screens. Children who receive UPSTART’s screen-based version of a preschool experience will be disadvantaged compared to children from more resourced communities who have play-based, experiential early education. A truly audacious project would take the funding intended for these online programs and direct it instead to giving low-income, rural, or otherwise underserved children the high quality, face-to-face education they deserve.”

UPSTART, which started with public funding from the state of Utah and has spread to at least seven other states, claims to promote “kindergarten readiness” through 15 – 20 minutes per day of online instruction. But advocates say that UPSTART’s lessons are poorly designed and developmentally inappropriate. An analysis of one UPSTART lesson by DEY found it was pedagogically unsound, “confusing” and “overloaded with distracting images.” UPSTART also recommends that children wear headphones and complete lessons alone, contrary to the American Academy of Pediatrics’ recommendation that parents “co-view with your children [and] help children understand what they are seeing.”

“Online preschool should never be rewarded or considered a legitimate alternative to high-quality early care and education,” said Denisha Jones, PhD, JD, Director of Teacher Education at Trinity Washington University and Director of Organizing for DEY. “I implore The Audacious Project to reconsider giving money to a screen-based program at a time where early childhood experts are increasingly concerned with screen time and the loss of high-quality interactions between children and educated early childhood teachers. Programs like UPSTART may be less expensive than real universal preschool, but those savings come at the expense of the low-income kids and kids of color they purport to help. We should be investing our money, time, and resources to ensure all children have access to affordable, high-quality, early childhood education.”

Last year, seven of The Audacious Project designees were granted a total of $441 million from partners including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. It is not yet known which groups are funding UPSTART, or exactly how much money the program will receive, but an email from a Waterford PR representative indicated that the award will be enough to “provide an opportunity for every four-year-old to be ready for kindergarten.” (Emphasis in original.)

The DEY/CCFC letter pointedly states, “We don’t believe your impressive list of funders and partners would be satisfied if their own children spent 75 minutes a week on a computer in isolation as a substitute for face-to-face preschool rooted in caring relationships and social interaction.” It also warns that a major expansion of online preschool could derail the growing movement for real universal preschool. It asks The Audacious Project to postpone the award and meet with advocates to better understand their concerns.

Added Josh Golin, Executive Director of CCFC, “Over and over, we’ve seen educational technology such as 1:1 programs, virtual charter schools, and personalized learning software falsely marketed as a panacea for inequality. Now the EdTech evangelists have set their sights on preschoolers. Isolated children on computers guided by algorithms can never replicate the joyful exploration and interactions at the core of the preschool experience. We urge The Audacious Project to rethink this award.”

The DEY/CCFC letter can be read in full here.

Categories Childhood, Childhood, Pre-K, K, Corruption, Disruption, Education Industry, For-Profit, Fraud, Online Education

Denisha Jones: First, Protect Childhood and Children from Harm

By dianeravitch

April 5, 2019 //

Denisha Jones was recently invited to give a lecture at Sarah Lawrence College, and she turned it into this article.

She describes the corporate threat to education and children, which was named GERM (the Global Education Reform Movement) by Pasi Sahlberg.

Jones calls on teachers to become advocates and activists on behalf of children, protecting them from GERM.

You will enjoy reading the article, from which this brief excerpt is drawn:

We can see how GERM has infected U.S. education policy and reforms. The Common Core drives standardization and aligns with a narrow focus on math and literacy. The use of scripted learning programs, behavior training programs, and online learning is evidence of the search for low-risk ways to reach learning goals. While charter schools claim to be nonprofit, most are managed by companies with CEOs and CFOs who apply corporate models to education.

Teach for America and other fast-track teacher preparation programs also use a corporate model, developing education leaders who get their feet wet teaching before moving on to become policymakers or head up charter schools.

Pearson’s PARCC and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium are drowning public education in test-based accountability. Systems that punish and reward schools and teachers based on student achievement on standardized tests are the norm today.

While the new Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) includes language that protects the right of parents to opt out—a movement that has been growing in recent years—it also maintains the requirement that 95 percent of students participate. Test-based accountability is here to stay and rapidly evolving into competency-based and personalized learning, in which assessments occur all day every day as students are glued to computer screens.

We have failed to stop the expansion of choice, which threatens the existence of public schools through the proliferation of charters and vouchers. In the U.S., most school-age children are educated in traditional public schools, but we can expect to see this trend reversed under the administration of Betsy DeVos. We have failed to stop the assault on public education through school closures in communities of color.

And then there’s the inexorable push down of developmentally inappropriate standards onto young children. The Common Core, adopted by most states, imposes expectations on young children that are out of step with their development, not to mention the research. Empirical data confirm that kindergarten is the new first grade, and preschool the new kindergarten.

On top of this, we have failed to stop racist school discipline practices that suspended 42% of black boys from preschool in the 2011-2012 academic year. This failure stems from our inability to address the systemic and institutional racism that is prominent in public education but often masked by teachers with good intentions who lack an understanding of culture, bias, and systems of oppression.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Childhood, Common Core, Education Industry, Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), Privatization, Testing

DEY Opposes Vouchers for Pre-Kindergarten

By dianeravitch

February 2, 2019 //

The New Republic, usually a liberal publication, recently published an article recommending vouchers instead of universal pre-K in public institutions.

Defending the Early Years, an organization that fights for developmentally appropriate education for young children, issued the following response:

DEY Response to The New Republic Article, “Give Parents Money, Not Universal Pre-K”

The experts at Defending the Early Years find fault with the premise of the article which pits family support and high-quality preschool education against one another.

Haspel is correct, we need greater family support, starting with maternal and paternal paid leave for the first year of life; but we also need publicly funded rich, progressive, play-based early care and education for young children until they start formal school. As we learned after Hurricane Katrina, giving people money does not ensure that their life will improve.

The U.S. has never had the political will to spend the billions of dollars it would take to provide universal coverage. Recognizing the estimated $70 billion a year “preschool market,” investors are happily filling in the gaps in an ECE mixed-market system that has long been broken.

Haspel fails to realize that by ensuring every child has access to high-quality, fully-funded, play-based early care and education, we are doing more for parents than simply giving them a voucher. Voucher experiments in DC and other cities prove that rarely do they cover the full cost of tuition. Parents will be expected to find care that matches the amount of the voucher or supplement the additional costs out of their pocket. This does not help families but instead leaves them trapped between choosing affordable care that could be lower quality or paying out of pocket for high-quality care. Instead of expecting states to abandon their role in ensuring every child begins with a solid foundation of high-quality early care and education experiences, we should encourage direct support to families and demand each state provide access to early care and education. The only thing wrong with a demand for universal pre-k is that play-based programs are often excluded by states that prefer academic instruction. If giving parents a choice is truly the end goal then we would support parents who chose play-based programs over academic instruction. And we would support parents who chose universal pre-k over vouchers.

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