When Jan Resseger read my post of John Dewey’s pedagogical creed, she thought about how his words apply to our situation today.
Archives for category: Childhood
[I am reposting since I just discovered that I put the wrong link in the original post. Sorry, Susan!]
Susan Ochshorn of ECE PolicyWorks and a new member of the board of the Network for Public educatio, writes here about two polar opposites: Deborah Meier and Eva Moskowitz.
Ochshorn compares the biographies, the lives, and the education philosophy of these two people.
She begins with Meier, an advovate, like Ochshorn, for children’s right to play:
“More than two decades ago, Deborah Meier warned that the idea of democracy was in peril. “Is it ever otherwise?” she asked in the preface to The Power of Their Ideas, her elegantly argued manifesto for public education. A self-described preacher on its behalf, she has spent half a century nurturing “everyone’s inalienable capacity to be an inventor, dreamer, and theorist—to count in the larger scheme of things.”
“I met Meier in the mid-aughts, when I joined a grassroots campaign she spearheaded in New York City to restore creative play and hands-on learning to preschools and kindergartens. This éminence grise of progressive early childhood education and the small-schools movement (for which she received a MacArthur fellowship in 1987) had begun her career as a kindergarten teacher at the Shoesmith School in Kenwood, a diverse neighborhood wedged between the University of Chicago’s Hyde Park and an impoverished black community.”
When she turns to Moskowitz, she sees a power-hungry woman who uses children for her own purposes.
“The Education of Eva Moskowitz” is a torturous read. After 359 pages of copious detail, an internal structure that defies chronology, zig-zagging across Moskowitz’s life, the evisceration of journalists, politicians and “union flacks,” as she refers to people and organizations fighting for social justice, and anyone else who has crossed her, my mind was numb. Not to mention her hubris, greed, narcissism, humorlessness and lack of self-awareness…
“His hypocrisy would have been comical if the fates of real children weren’t at stake,” Moskowitz writes of Mayor Bill de Blasio, her adversary in building an empire. Ah, yes, the children. “While it can be frustrating to teach them because they don’t know how to behave,” Moskowitz writes in a chapter called “Weevils” (an infestation she attributes to snacks from the Department of Education), “the upside is that they are virtually a blank slate…. if you take advantage of that fact to teach them to become good learners, that investment will pay dividends for years to come.”
“Apparently, Moskowitz isn’t aware that the tabula rasa theory of the English empiricist John Locke has been discredited by decades of neurological and developmental science. As Berkeley psychologist Alison Gopnik writes in The Philosophical Baby, “Their minds seem drastically limited; they know so much less than we do. And yet long before they can read and write, they have extraordinary powers of imagination and creativity, and long before they go to school, they have remarkable learning abilities.”
“Moskowitz and other charter network operators such as KIPP’s David Levin have cast their “No Excuses” schools in the mold of Harvard psychologist B.F. Skinner, whose radical behaviorism ignores internal processes—thoughts, feelings, and neurophysiological processes—emphasizing the relationship between observable stimuli and responses. Through a process called operant conditioning, behavior is modified by positive and negative reinforcement. (See Pavlov and his dogs.)
“With harsh discipline, and incentives offered for good behavior and high scores on practice tests, Moskowitz remains convinced she can close the achievement gap between her students, the vast majority of whom are black or Latino living in poverty, and their more affluent, white peers. Her methods are abusive. Students’ every movement is monitored. Daydreaming is prohibited. Children are shamed, their lackluster performances on weekly spelling and math quizzes posted in a red zone on charts in the hallway.”
As we view these two, we see a struggle for the heart and soul of American education, or for the hearts and souls of our children. Big money is betting on Moskowitz. She is the darling of Wall Street, DFER, and other corporate titans. The survival of our democracy and humane ideals is riding on Meier’s vision.
Nobel-Prize winning economist Paul Krugman asks a simple question:
“Would you be willing to take health care away from a thousand children with the bad luck to have been born into low-income families so that you could give millions of extra dollars to just one wealthy heir?
“You might think that this question is silly, hypothetical and has an obvious answer. But it’s not at all hypothetical, and the answer apparently isn’t obvious. For it’s a literal description of the choice Republicans in Congress seem to be making as you read this.
“The Children’s Health Insurance Program, or CHIP, is basically a piece of Medicaid targeted on young Americans. It was introduced in 1997, with bipartisan support. Last year it covered 8.9 million kids. But its funding expired more than two months ago. Republicans keep saying they’ll restore the money, but they keep finding reasons not to do it; state governments, which administer the program, will soon have to start cutting children off.
“What’s the problem? The other day Senator Orrin Hatch, asked about the program (which he helped create), once again insisted that it will be funded — but without saying when or how (and there don’t seem to be any signs of movement on the issue). And he further declared, “The reason CHIP’s having trouble is that we don’t have money anymore.” Then he voted for an immense tax cut.”
Maybe children’s health is “the Civil Rights issue of our time,” not school choice.
Any chance we could persuade Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump, DFER, billionaire Daniel Loeb, Ted Cruz, and the rest of the school reform gang to agree?
The testing monster is coming for our children.
Helge Wasmuth of Mercy College in New York writes here about the full-steam-ahead plan for international testing of five-year-Old children. As he reports, the planning has excluded experts on Early Childhood Education and has been shrouded in secrecy.
This is the latest and most disgusting manifestation of what Pasi Sahlberg dubbed GERM (the Global Education Reform Movement).
Wasmuth predicts that Baby PISA will lead to:
“increased standardization, high-stakes accountability, predetermined learning outcomes, control over teachers, business-based management models, and privatization.
“The goal of the study is to gather information on children’s cognitive and social-emotional skills as well as characteristics of their home and early education environments. Direct assessment, including actual samples of student work, will measure the domains of emerging literacy and numeracy, executive function, and empathy and trust. Children will be expected to do their work on a tablet, devoting approximately 15 minutes to each domain over a period of two days. Indirect assessment—parents’ and staff reports and administrator observations—will focus on cognitive and social-emotional skills. By participating in the study, OECD asserts, member nations will have access to the primary factors that drive or thwart early learning, developing a common framework and benchmarks.
“The study is now underway. A pilot that was originally planned, which would have provided a valuable opportunity for meaningful feedback and fine-tuning, has been scrapped. The organization has moved forward with data collection, to be conducted from the end of 2017 through 2019. This will be followed by so-called “quality control” and analysis, and the release of a report in 2020.
“While the original plan called for participation by three to six countries in the northern and southern hemispheres, a number of early childhood communities have already successfully registered protest, urging their governments to abstain. (Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Norway, New Zealand, Sweden, and Denmark are among them.) The only outliers are England—Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are not taking part—and the United States…
“Critique of the IELS has been fierce, and numerous concerns have been raised. Most egregious is the marginalization of the wider early childhood community. “The entire IELS project has been shrouded in secrecy from day one,” Mathias Urban, director of the Early Childhood Research Centre at the University of Roehampton in London, told me. Respected researchers and scholars in the field were not consulted, their input unwelcome. As has long been the case with early education policy, decades of research have been ignored.
“The OECD values objectivity, universality, predictability and that which can be measured. The organization seems to be oblivious to alternative ideas about educating and caring for young children. Nor have local contexts and traditions for this process been part of the conversation…
“So, why is all of this shrouded in secrecy? Why are we kept in the dark? Why are the experts and the field’s knowledge marginalized? One needs to ask: Who really benefits from such a study? The children? Will it really inform policymaking and improve educational practices in a meaningful way? Or is it another piece to open up public education sectors to corporate interests?
The disregard of the early childhood community is concerning enough. Don’t even get me started on the collection of child-based data on a global scale without the consent of children, parents, or practitioners. Or with assessing five-year-olds on a tablet. How flawed and meaningless are the results. How do you assess trust and empathy, or the complexities of learning and development?
“The impact on our field will be disastrous—maybe not immediately, but soon enough. OECD is a powerful and influential institution. Everyone should be clear about their goals of creating a common framework with benchmarks and assessing learning outcomes. Early childhood education will be reduced to what can be measured: literacy and numeracy.
“Ultimately, the field will fall even deeper into the clutches of GERM. Many countries will feel compelled to do well on the IELS, and the easiest way to do that is to align the curricula to what is measured. Pedagogical compliance will follow, along with teaching to the test—especially in countries, such as the U.S., with many private providers of early education, who will use their outcomes to win new customers. As in the case of the Common Core, a new market will be created, “Aligned to IELS” the new trademark.
“The quest for predictable outcomes leaves no place for the hallmarks of early childhood—for uncertainty, experimentation, surprise, amazement, context, subjective experiences. OECD values and measures what can be measured, but not necessarily what is important.”
Baby PISA opens a Pandora’s box. Out of it flies standardization, conformity, inappropriate pedagogy. Trapped in the box will Be Children, yearning to play.
Nancy Bailey knows that the high priority given to test scores has driven many important activities out of elementary schools. Some have cut back on recess, or eliminated it. Some have cut back on the arts. Some no longer can spare the time to stage a play. When the school lines by the credo of “no excuses,” dramatics goes the way of the dinosaur.
She bemoans the lost pleasure and learning that comes from putting on a play.
She provides a list of the positive benefits that derive from participating in a play, such as socialization, self-confidence, and self-discipline.
In years ahead, what will you remember? The play you brought to life or your test scores?
The Network for Public Education just held its fourth annual conference in Oakland, California, on October 14-15.
It was a fabulous conference, with great speakers, roundtables, panels, and camaraderie.
I opened the conference on October 14. I introduced our wonderful board and staff (we have 1.5 staff members and hundreds of amazing volunteers).
I described what we are for and what we oppose.
If you agree with us, please join, donate whatever you can, and help us continue our grassroots efforts to strengthen and support public education.
In the days ahead, I will post all the keynote addresses. They were fantastic.
If you knew how inspiring these two days were, you will want to join us next year. I can’t give the location yet, but we will meet in the Midwest.
Denisha Jones, a professor of early childhood education at Trinity Washington University, gave this talk at Sarah Lawrence College this past summer. Please read her talk in her entirety.
An excerpt:
I inspire my teachers—regardless of the label they give themselves—to be advocates or activists for their profession. I don’t want them to spend the next several years in survival mode until they burn out and leave the field altogether. Advocacy and activism serve as nourishment for the soul. They can sustain you even when things look bleak and the future is uncertain.
As I move forward, determined to protect public education as a right, what drives me is the acceptance of our failure. I am ready to declare our efforts, and the efforts of those who came before me, as failures. This may seem harsh, but as we know, failure is essential for success. “Failure is instructive,” John Dewey once said, “The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.”
We know that protecting children from the experience of failure is not good for their development. Failure can be a tool for learning how to get it right. Without failure, how do we know that we have even really succeeded? This doesn’t mean that education activists haven’t won some important battles. But they’ve tended to benefit one school or one community, and haven’t reached the national or state levels. Our attempts to stop the spread of the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) have failed.
Before we examine our failures more closely, I want to quickly review what I mean by GERM so that we are all on the same page. Pasi Sahlberg notes that the movement emerged in the 1980s and consists of five global features: standardization; focus on core subjects; the search for low-risk ways to reach learning goals; use of corporate management models; and test-based accountability policies. Although none of these elements have been adopted in Finland, where he does most of his research, they have invaded public education in the U.S. and in other countries.
Here, education activists typically refer to GERM as the privatization of public education, driven by neoliberalism, which favors free-market capitalism. Under this scenario, there are no public schools: public services are turned over to the private sector. Healthcare, prisons, even water, are now being put in the hands of corporations, whose sole desire is to make a profit. When profit is the goal, the needs of human beings are discarded, unless they can generate a measurable return on investment.
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.
We must acknowledge these failures so we can understand the limits of our collective efforts and decide how we can refocus our energies toward a future that will lead to more successful outcomes. We need to change the narrative. Attacking the push for accountability and tougher standards has proven to be a losing strategy. Our insistence that these measures harm student development and learning has branded us unwilling to be held accountable for ensuring that all students can achieve.The more we resist test-based accountability and inappropriate reforms, the more we are seen by the corporations, policymakers, and privateers as resistant to innovation.
We must make the protection of childhood a nonpartisan issue. We need to revise our message. The assault on public education is not just a conservative attack by Republicans against progressive education. Democrats are also aligned with many aspects of GERM, including choice, privatization, and test-based accountability.
Nancy Bailey describes one of the worst ideas that is current in the world of corporate-style reform: Forcing little children to read at a very young age, as early as kindergarten or first grade, which turns reading into a chore, not a joy.
Then, if they have not met arbitrary standards in third grade, shaming them by holding them back.
This is a child-hostile idea that got started in Florida, where so many bad ideas have begun. It did wonders for fourth grade reading scores, because the kids with the lowest scores flunked.
But it is a truly dumb idea because it forces reading on children before they are ready and it does not make children better readers. Whether children begin to read at age 5 or 6 or 7 or 8 doesn’t matter. What matters is that they learn that reading is a wonderful skill to master and that it opens worlds of enchantment and knowledge. By the time they are 10 or 11, no one remembers when they first began to read. Little children are not global competitors. They are children.
William Doyle was a Fulbright Scholar in Finland, and his child attended the local school. When Doyle returned to New Tork City, he went in search of a Finnish-style public school and found it. It is called The Earth School.
“My child now goes to PS 364, also known as the Earth School, a little-known gem of a public K-5 elementary in the East Village.
“The student population is some 50% black and Latino children. Half the students qualify for free and reduced priced lunch, and 23% of students receive special education services.
“If American teachers built a school, instead of politicians and bureaucrats, it would look a lot like this. Founded as an experimental program in 1992 by a group of New York City teachers who wanted, in the words of the school’s website, “to create a peaceful, nurturing place to stimulate learning in all realms of child development, intellectual, social, emotional and physical,” the Earth School is guided by the values of “hands-on exploration, an arts-rich curriculum, responsible stewardship of the Earth’s resources, harmonious resolution of conflict and parent-teacher partnership.”
“While “working rigorously in literacy and math” the students are encouraged “to explore, experiment, and even sometimes make a mess in the pursuit of learning.”
“The atmosphere of the school is one of warmth and safety. Teacher experience is prized here — the principal, Abbe Futterman, was one of the founding teachers of the school a quarter-century ago, and many other staff members have worked here for at least five or 10 years.
“Children at the school are assessed every day, not primarily by standardized tests — the majority of parents opt their kids out of state exams — but by certified, professional childhood educators who provide the ultimate in “personalized instruction”: the flesh-and-blood kind.
“Children at the school learn in part through play in the early years. They are encouraged to ask challenging questions and think for themselves. They are encouraged toto be creative and compassionate, and to make their own decisions. Children get unstructured, free-play outdoor recess in the big play yard most days.
“Like employees at Google who are given 20% of their time to devote to projects of their own choice, children are given a free afternoon every week to pursue their own self-chosen “passion projects.”
“In a striking innovation I especially appreciate, parents are actually invited into the school and directly into the classrooms for the morning drop-off, and given a room in the heart of the schoo, to relax, chat and plan much-needed school fundraisers.
“The school is not perfect, and it is not for everybody. If you’re looking for universal iPads, data walls, digital learning badges or boot-camp behavior modification in your child’s classroom, you won’t find them here.
“But somehow, this oasis of child-centered, evidence-based childhood education has managed to survive and flourish for a quarter-century in the heart of the New York City public school system.“
If it can happen in New York City, it can happen everywhere. If we ever get over our love affair with testing, anything is possible. Even a normal childhood.
Bianca Tanis is a parent and teacher in New York, and a member of the board of the New York State Alliance for Parents and Educators.
She reviews the new new new brand-new Next Generation standards of New York State.
There are a few nice tweaks here and there, but overall it is the same old Common Core with a new name.
The most glaring issue is the State’s refusal to veer from the flawed Common Core Anchor Standards. Given what we now know of the Common Core–the lack of grade level practitioner input, the lack of a basis in research, and the lack of any pilots or studies–the commitment to these anchor standards reveals the State’s commitment to a failed reform agenda and a misguided adherence to the belief that “rigor” will ameliorate the impact of poverty, under-funded schools, and institutionalized racism.
For many months, parents and educators have been expressing concerns regarding the PreK-2 standards. These concerns were well-founded. The newly adopted prekindergarten standards require that 3 and 4 year-olds display “emergent reading behaviors with purpose and understanding.” The prekindergarten standards also require that preschoolers make “connections from read-alouds to writing.” I would imagine that nothing kills a 3 or 4 year old’s love being read to than being asked write a reading reflection.
Many young, vulnerable children are being set up for failure. May children will be considered “behind” on day one of kindergarten. These children are not lagging behind according to developmental norms. Rather, they have failed to live up to a standardized expectation that has nothing to do with their needs. Children are meant to move and explore, and sadly these standards ensure an increased focus on direct instruction and rug time.
Universal PreK programs will likely be obligated to adopt these standards, either by future regulation or by the need to meet expected outcomes. By creating a situation where only those who can afford private preschool programs will have a developmentally appropriate school experience, we are widening the opportunity gap and setting impoverished students up for failure and to be falsely identified as having “behavior issues.”
Don’t be fooled. It is the same rancid wine in the same old bottles.
It is the curse of David Coleman, who is determined to crush the joy of learning with standardized, lockstep inappropriate mandates.
Diane Ravitch's blog 