Bianca Tanis teaches young children in New York. She is a founding member of NYSAPE, New York Dtate Alliance of Parents and Educators. She is also a teacher of children with special needs.
Frustrated by the state’s indifference to the needs of young children, she wrote this post and interviewed teachers about what matters most for teaching and learning: PLAY.
You know how you can pick up a book, start reading, start annotating with underlining and exclamation points, then realize you are marking up almost every word?
That is Steve Nelson’s “First Do No Harm.” It is chicken soup for the educator’s soul.
Nelson recently retired as head of the progressive Calhoun School in New York City. He also just joined the board of the Network for Public Education because he wants to devote his time to the fight for better public schools for all children.
He describes progressive education as ways to engage children in thinking critically, asking questions, and engaging creatively in play and work. He knows it is endangered, even though children thrive when given the opportunity to love learning.
He recognizes the soul-deadening approach of no-excuses charters and suggests that they exhibit unconscious racism. Maybe not always unconscious.
He points out that affluent communities think they have great public schools, without recognizing that their schools are gifted by the privilege of parents and the community. The same is true of elite private schools, whose students are drawn mostly from wealthy families with every financial advantage.
Every effort to standardize education–whether it is NCLB or Common Core– robs children of the chance to think for themselves. Such top-down programs demand conformity, not critical thinking or creativity. Indeed they punish students who think differently.
Nelson goes into great detail about the harm inflicted on children by no-excuses charter schools like KIPP and Democracy Prep.
He stands strongly against vouchers, which typically are used in religious schools, where children are subject to indoctrination.
Nelson understands the link between education and democracy, education for freedom.
I recommend this book to you.
We learned from Eva Moskowitz that some of the five year old students in her schools are so violent that they throw chairs and must be expelled post haste.
Now Peter Greene has discovered a code of conduct for five year olds that grades them in accordance with their readiness to comply and conform. Those that don’t are anarchists. Really.
https://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2017/08/those-damn-five-year-old-anarchists.html?m=1
Dr. Michael Hynes, the superintendent of the Patchogue-Medford schools on Long Island in New York, wrote a letter to the New York Board of Regents asking them to mandate 40 minutes a day for recess.
In Finland, the highest performing nation in Europe, students have a recess after every class. Educators believe children need to run around and play and move for 10-15 minutes between classes, mostly out of doors. Finland has no standardized tests for students in elementary schools or in the middle grades. Finnish schools value creativity and physical activity. They must be doing something right. It is working.
And our educators must plead for only 40 minutes a day of physical activity!
Here is his video about the importance of recess.
And here is his letter to the State Superintendent and the Board of Regents:
Dear Commissioner Elia and members of the New York State Board of Regents:
On behalf of “whole child” educators and parents across the state of New York, I write to you to strongly consider and discuss a mandate that will benefit ALL children: a declaration that requires all Kindergarten-5th grade students to physically, emotionally, academically and socially benefit from 40 minutes of self-directed recess every day they are in our care at school.
I can certainly cite the multiple benefits about recess but I think this statement from the CDC best sums up why this is a worthy proposition:
Recess is at the heart of a vigorous debate over the role of schools in promoting the optimal development of the whole child. A growing trend toward reallocating time in school to accentuate the more academic subjects has put this important facet of a child’s school day at risk. Recess serves as a necessary break from the rigors of concentrated, academic challenges in the classroom. But equally important is the fact that safe and well-supervised recess offers cognitive, social, emotional, and physical benefits that may not be fully appreciated when a decision is made to diminish it. Recess is unique from, and a complement to, physical education—not a substitute for it. The American Academy of Pediatrics believes that recess is a crucial and necessary component of a child’s development and, as such, it should not be withheld for punitive or academic reasons.
Moreover, I have seen firsthand in my school district what regularly scheduled periods within the school day for unstructured physical activity and play has done for our elementary age students, staff and parents. I have never seen so many happy and well-adjusted children in my twenty years as an educator. I respectfully request that NYSED consider this discussion item and would be honored to speak about the rationale and benefits in person if requested to do so.
If the New York State Education Department truly wants to become a leader and advocate for what ALL children need and deserve, I believe this is an essential first step. I thank you in advance for your attention to this matter and look forward to your response.
Very truly yours,
Michael J. Hynes, Ed.D.
Patchogue-Medford Superintendent of Schools
David Gamberg, superintendent of schools in both Southold and Greenport, on Long Island, in New York, had a dream. He wanted to install a custom-made Mother Goose shoe, in which children could play. He wanted it to symbolize the district’s commitment to childhood and play. He started a fundraising campaign. He was just short of his goal. A local businessman, who owns the town grocery store, contributed what was needed to meet the goal. The giant shoe will be built!
There is a lesson here about philanthropy. The donor helped the school do what it wanted to do. He didn’t step up and tell them what he wanted. He supported their goal instead of imposing his own.
Listen up, Bill Gates and Zuckerberg!
What a curiously interconnected world this is! Melissa Heckler read Paul Thomas’s post about his terrible Father’s Day and his reflections on our “gladiator culture.” She is in Namibia. She was moved by it and sent me the speech she gave at Bank Street College in New York City when she received an alumni award.
She said:
Good Evening. Thank you to the Alumni Board for this award.
I am honored. Today, when education is treated as a business and children as products, Bank Street still educates children to be citizens of a democracy, not a business.
Two courses essentially prepared me for my life’s work with the Ju/’hoansi of Namibia, Africa. Observation and Recording, with the inimitable Dorothy Cohen, taught me to observe and meticulously record a child’s behaviors. In contrast to a shallow “skill checklist”, O & R’s valuable and – yes – time consuming work, helps us know and support a child/student through multiple observations of their play-exploration and social interactions.
The second course in storytelling with Diana Wolkstein, I took TWICE! When a dear friend sent folklore from the /Xam of Southern Africa, I was smitten. Fierce Diana, as mentor and friend, supported and guided my exploration of these stories.
Both courses provided critical knowledge and insight for developing Nyae Nyae Village Schools. 1990 found me in the Kalahari to study with master Ju/’hoan storytellers and, at the request of elders, to start schools in remote villages that would prepare children for the new Namibian curriculum. In 1991, my two young children, Annabelle and Paul, joined me in developing a second school.
Believe me: Ju/’hoansi wrote the book on progressive-constructivist education. As elder, !Xoma N!a’an, said:
“Da’abi ge a g/a’a n!ang ko e g/a’asi ko ta e !kasi.”
He said what the culture lives by:
“Our Children are the First Things in our Eyes and Hearts.”
Ju/’hoansi have occupied the Kalahari for at least 35,000 years and possess the oldest human DNA. Their traditional educational practices are the oldest field-tested curricula we have. Ju/’hoan decision-making processes epitomize direct, participatory democracy: one person/one vote enhanced by discussions that lead to consensus. These practices are the basis of Ju/’hoan education. For Ju/’hoansi, Child autonomy is paramount. For democracy to thrive, children require independence to make decisions and experience possible outcomes. Ju/hoansi do NOT have a word for “mistake,” so children are free to experience outcomes, negative and positive! Through millennia this egalitarian culture has demonstrated that the storytelling/problem-solving mind is the foundation of Democracy.
Ju/’hoansi taught me:
• Democracy supports. All. Families. Fundamental to Ju/’hoan democracy is a cultural concept of “Enough”. This is in stark contrast to free market capitalism, riven with competition that fractures society into hierarchies, ensuring someone is left out.
• Greed devours Democracy. Look around and you’ll see we lack a measurement for what is enough, and therefore lack a measurement for what is excessive.
Ju/’hoansi taught me:
• Play is not A tool; it is THE TOOLBOX of problem solving.
• Raising children to celebrate how “Different people just have different minds” endows communities with creativity, dexterity, unity and – yes — wisdom.
Next week I return for the 17th time to continue what began under one thorn tree. Six Village Elementary Schools now thrive. To prepare preschool children for village schools, my colleague and I will create three new village preschools adding to three begun last year.
Education Week reports on the plans of billionaires Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan to redesign American education. They have launched something called the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative–or CZI Initiative–to carry out their plan for “personalized learning”‘( I.e., “depersonalized learning”) to remake education into whatever they think in their limited experience is best. They have hired James Shelton–formerly of the Gates Foundation, formerly in charge of Arne Duncan’s failed SIG program (the School Improvement Grants part of Race to the Top, which federal evaluations found produced nothing of value).
What’s wrong with CZI? First, neither of its founders understands that public education is a democratic institution, in which parents and communities make decisions about their children’s education. It is not a start-up or a venture fund or an app. Did someone elect them to redesign American education without telling the public? What arrogance! Why don’t they pick a District and ask for permission to demonstrate their vision before they spend hundreds of millions to lobby for it?
Second, if they want to help children, why don’t they open a health clinic in proximity to every school that needs one? Dr. Chan is a pediatrician. Children’s health is something she knows about. Mark knows code. Children don’t need code. They need care.
Third, the article describes this as a “high-stakes venture,” but there are zero stakes for Chan and Zuckerberg. If they drop $5 billion, so what? Who will hold them accountable when they get bored and move on?
Why don’t they do what is needed, instead of foisting their half-baked ideas on the nation’s children?
And last, it is beyond obnoxious that they dare to call their tech-based approach “whole-child personalized learning,” which is an oxymoron. What part of “whole-child learning” happens on a computer?
Where are their plans to feed the hungry, heal the sick, create opportunities for play and imagination to run free?
Sad to say, this is a vainglorious and anti-democratic imposition of C and Z’s ideas on people who have nothing to say about it. The one-tenth of 1% toying with our children and our schools, for their enjoyment.
An excerpt from the Education Week article?:
“Pediatrician Priscilla Chan and Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg are gearing up to invest hundreds of millions of dollars a year in a new vision of “whole-child personalized learning,” with the aim of dramatically expanding the scope and scale of efforts to provide every student with a customized education.
“The emerging strategy represents a high-stakes effort to bridge longstanding divides between competing visions for improving the nation’s schools. Through their recently established Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the billionaire couple intends to support the development of software that might help teachers better recognize and respond to each student’s academic needs-while also supporting a holistic approach to nurturing children’s social, emotional, and physical development.
“The man charged with marrying those two philosophies is former Deputy U.S. Secretary of Education James H. Shelton, now the initiative’s president of education.
“We’ve got to dispel this notion that personalized learning is just about technology,” Shelton said in an exclusive interview with Education Week. “In fact, it is about understanding students, giving them agency, and letting them do work that is engaging and exciting.”
“To advance that vision, Shelton has at his disposal a massive fortune and a wide array of levers to pull.
“Chan and Zuckerberg created CZI as a vehicle for directing 99 percent of their Facebook shares-worth an estimated $45 billion-to causes related to education and science, through a combination of charitable giving and investment.
“The initiative is structured as a limited-liability corporation, rather than a traditional foundation. That means CZI will be able to make philanthropic donations, invest in for-profit companies, lobby for favored policies and legislation, and directly support candidates for elected office  Â-all with minimal public-reporting requirements.
“For now, Shelton said, CZI is “one of the best-resourced startups in the world, but still a startup,” with fewer than 20 people on its education team.
“In the near future, though, he expects the initiative to give out “hundreds of millions of dollars per year” for education-related causes. Such a figure would place the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative among the highest-giving education-focused philanthropies in the country.
“Within five years, Shelton said in the June 22 interview, CZI’s work should have helped launch a “meaningful number” of schools and learning environments “where kids are performing dramatically better, and feel more engaged, and teachers feel more engaged in the work that they’re doing.”
“Chan, 32, and Zuckerberg, 33, also have embraced the idea of a long horizon for the initiative’s work, saying their support for personalized learning will extend over decades.
“From the outset, however, the couple’s attempt to engineer big changes in the U.S. education system faces significant obstacles.
“Personalized learning” was an amorphous concept even before this new attempt to integrate it with equally hard-to-define “whole child” strategies. It remains unclear how Chan, Zuckerberg, and Shelton intend to balance the organization’s support for research and development with their desire to quickly bring to scale new products and approaches, many of which have limited or no evidence to support their effectiveness.
“And CZI won’t commit to publicly disclosing all of its financial and political activity or to making the source code for its software open and accessible to the larger education community. That stance has stirred complaints about a lack of transparency.”
The current absurd obsession with test scores is destroying schooling and childhood. Nowhere is the devastation more visible than in state and local policies turning kindergarten and nursery school into academically rigorous boot camps. Pre-K is supposed to get children ready for kindergarten. Kindergarten is a time to learn reading and writing and math. Kindergarten prepares the child for first grade. It is the first step towards “college and career readiness.”
But kindergarten has been warped beyond all recognition from what it is supposed to be. The founder of the kindergarten was Friedrich Froebel. His ideas were first brought to America by William Torrey Harris, the superintendent of schools in St. Louis (later the U.S. Commissioner of Education for 18 years under various presidents) and a devotee of Hegel.
To learn more about what kindergarten should be, go to the Froebel website.
Here is an excerpt from the opening page:
“The name Kindergarten signifies both a garden for children, a location where they can observe and interact with nature, and also a garden of children, where they themselves can grow and develop in freedom from arbitrary imperatives.
“In 1837, having developed and tested a radically new educational method and philosophy based on structured, activity based learning, Froebel moved to Bad Blankenburg and established his Play and Activity Institute which in 1840 he renamed Kindergarten.
“Kindergarten has three essential parts:
*creative play, which Froebel called gifts and occupations)
*singing and dancing for healthy activity
*observing and nurturing plants in a garden for stimulating awareness of the natural world
“Play is the highest expression of human development in childhood for it alone is the free expression of what is in a child’s soul.
“To Froebel belongs the credit for finding the true nature of play and regulating it to lead naturally into work. The same spontaneity and joy, the same freedom and serenity that characterise the plays of childhood are realised in all human activity. The gifts and occupations are the living connection which makes both play and work expressions of the same creative activity. ” W N Hailmann
“Friedrich Froebel introduced the concept of gardens for children, where they could participate in all aspects of growing, harvesting, and preparing nutritious, seasonal produce. As educational tools, these gardens provide real world applications of core mathematical concepts. The Edible Schoolyard educates children about the connections between food, health, and the environment through activities which are fully integrated into the curriculum.”
Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology at the University of California (Berkeley) who studies children. She wrote this article comparing Trump’s behavior to a four-year-old child. She thinks the typical child has far better behavior than Trump. Her article may have been a response to David Brooks’ article stating that Trump is a child.
Bianca Tanis teaches a combined kindergarten-first grade special education class in the Hudson Valley in New York. She is on the board of New York State Allies for Public Education, the group leading the campaign against high-stakes testing and privatization in the state.
She writes:
I had the opportunity to spend the day visiting a public Montessori school in Kingston yesterday. I have been considering this approach in my classroom and was able to tour the school along with my principal and one of our ENL teachers. I have not been this inspired in a long time.
Kingston is considered a small city school district and George Washington Elementary School is one of seven elementary schools in the Kingston City School district. Over 80% of the students receive free and reduced lunch, 17% are English Language Learners, and 26% are students with disabilities. When the principal first took over the school, they had 2,500 discipline referrals per year. They are not down to a handful and attendance has gone up exponentially. The lobby has couches for parents sit in and the principal’s dog roams the halls and often comforts anxious or upset students. The tables in the cafeteria have flowers on them and there is a library in the corner. The walls are covered with photographs of the students laughing and playing and student artwork. They are swapping out bench-style tables and replaced them with round,family style tables so that the students can converse with each other.
In every classroom students were engaged, working purposefully on self-selected tasks that are based on NYS curriculum. In the upper elementary classrooms each student has an individual work plan for their “independent period” of what tasks they must complete but within that period, they are free to work at their own pace and in the order they choose. During this independent period, teachers pull small groups or 3 to 4 students for lessons. Many of the classes are multi-age and students complete whole class science and social studies projects together. We saw older students helping younger students and children taking ownership over their learning. The teachers seemed relaxed, enthusiastic and HAPPY.
In the combined Pre-K-Kindergarten rooms the classes were very large, but you would never know it. The students were independently engaged in “tasks” and when they needed to speak with the teacher who was talking to me, the kids waited patiently and calmly, asking each other for help and then solving the issue themselves and walking away. If you work with 4 and 5 year olds, you know how amazing this is. The noise level was a productive hum…not silence, but not the cacophony you would expect from almost thirty 4 and 5 year olds. The children were independently drawing, making words with letter tiles, working on fine motor skills, counting beads, and pouring beans back and forth between two jars, etc.
There are about 320 students. The school has several inclusion classes, two self-contained special education classes and a dual language program. This a school that welcomes ALL children and provides them with a truly child-centered education. Their discipline policy is best described as a restorative justice model that does not focus on rewards, incentives, or punishments, believing that intrinsic motivation works. It was AMAZING.
These schools exists and are proof of what is possible when we look beyond test scores and look at what really matters. I just wanted to share because I think we can all use some good news 🙂
Diane Ravitch's blog 