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At the Bottom of the Chain, Where the Kids Are

By dianeravitch
August 25, 2012 //
4

The discussion of the relationship between the Common Core standards and early childhood education (K and pre-K) continues with this comment, responding to Karen Nemeth’s earlier post:

“The federal government has in no way established requirements for what must be taught in preschool. Standards do not equate to a curriculum. As I often tell my audiences, standards are like ingredients, but each classroom still needs its own recipe for how to use those ingredients. A curriculum is more like a recipe.”

This is a fine example of the detachment and misunderstanding of those who are no longer in the classroom but rather members of organizations facing “audiences” and who have little comprehension of the radical changes that have taken place in the day-to-day realities of teaching today.

Because the federal government has established no requirements states are interpreting those requirements themselves (with great support from profit-making publishers and political agenda-driven authors of the CCSS), based largely upon the in-place curriculum established under NCLB and Reading First. I have recently read several articles lamenting the fact that in many places the CCSS are being treated exactly as a curriculum by states and checklists are proliferating everywhere. The interpretations of the CCSS into state and district curriculums have little to do with best practices and teacher professional knowledge. While NJ may have created a model plan the proof of the metaphorical recipe is in the pudding produced by the local districts and school administrators as head chefs with ultimate control, not the teacher “cooks”.

From required formats for lesson plans that must be turned in and approved weekly by administrators to a constant barrage of memos and emails from district personnel highlighting the latest mandates, required assessments, and ever-changing expectations that will be monitored, checked off on a list during frequent inquisitor visits, and answered to through VAM, scrambling to meet the requirements of grants, local and state laws that change yearly, and federal guidelines that rival drug testing protocols, the effect and power of teachers to control the impact of CCSS is greatly constrained and a work of great risk and peril. Why won’t academics and professional organizations admit this obvious truth?

Limited, personal anecdotal experiences of freedom and power notwithstanding, this apologia and defense of the CCSS amazes me.

“I do believe it is possible to address the preschool skills and knowledge that lead up to what is expected in K and 1st in a hands-on, creative, project-based, child centered way. We just need to make sure we do what needs to be done to prepare preschool teachers AND the administrators who supervise and support them.”

The author apparently has little knowledge or experience of Title I schools in many states where the curriculum is (and has been for the last 11 years of NCLB) delivered from on high and compliance is mandatory and enforced with great vigor and rigor, as the reformers like to say. It is fascinating to see how the author uses her own anecdotal experiences to undermine and dismiss the experiences of real PreK and K teachers who have posted their heartrending experiences and cri de coeur here on this very blog as a a warning and condemnation of CCSS.

She chooses instead to address her colleagues in academia and professional organizations. “We know better and we are more qualified to speak on these issues” is the message I received, intended or not. We all were told for years that NCLB had great potential to fix the problems of poverty and education. We were told that Reading First was not an end to good reading instruction and that “good” teachers would be able to subversively resist the worst of the many foolish requirements. We were told that we should see all the reforms as “opportunities” to speak out professionally and have an impact. None of that was true then and it is not true now.

The professional organizations, the schools of education, and the pillars of academe largely left those of us who choose to stay in classrooms without aid or cause while they continued their academic exercises in self-promotion, profiteering, and self-aggrandizement. Diane has proven to be a great exception and I have great respect and trust in her. I’m afraid that I don’t automatically grant that respect and trust to those who list their credentials (I have credentials too — NBCT, BA in English, MA in English, MA in Teaching and Learning, two time recipient of district Teacher of the Year Award, member of IRA, NCTE, NCTM, etc., etc.) and then defend the indefensible while telling me that my experiences and interpretations are faulty and unwarranted while defending the status quo or claiming that teachers will be able to turn the sow’s ear of CCCS into silk purses.

Also, full disclosure: you did not highlight your involvement with the NAEYC in your bio or defense.

Categories Common Core, Education Reform

Is Common Core “Developmentally Appropriate”?

By dianeravitch
August 25, 2012 //
11

A reader comments on the discussion of Common Core’s effect on pre-K and K:

Thanks, Diane, for making room on your blog for this critical topic.

Karen states that the “overacademization of kindergarten and preschool classrooms” is not a new trend. That may be true, though without a doubt the problem has intensified. The Alliance for Childhood report The Crisis in Early Education A Research-Based Case for More Play and Less Pressure (Miller and Almond, November 2011) states that “the pushing down of the elementary school early childhood has reached a new peak with the adoption by almost every state of the so called common core standards.” That report also looks at the high rate of preschool expulsions of late. Preschoolers and kindergarteners are now being expelled at three times the rate of K-12 children. How can that be okay? Peter Gray has documented the decline of play and the increase of childhood problems over recent decades in his article “The Decline of Play and the Rise of Psychopathology in Children and Adolescence” (The American Journal of Play, volume 3, number 4; Spring 2011). The increase in the number of young children attending overly-academic preschools and kindergartens is most assuredly part of the problem. An increase in childhood depression and anxiety are some of the results. When our mission should be, at the very least, to do no harm, clearly the children are being harmed. We cannot toss them in the trash like a cake with too much salt or a recipe gone awry (to further Karen’s analogy above). They are human beings, for goodness sake.

Finding ways to stay developmentally appropriate, when many of the tests and assessments are not, is becoming increasingly difficult. And looking critically at the how, what, when and why of testing and assessments which have increased with RTTT, is important work for the early childhood community. If ever there was a time in the USA for early childhood educators to be looking closely at policy and debating the direction of early childhood education, now is the time. As the leading organization of early childhood educators, NAEYC should be at the forefront of advocating for young children – and speaking out against policies that aren’t grounded in what decades of research has proven: that children develop best — socially, emotionally and cognitively — when they have educational experiences that promote creativity, thinking and problem solving skills, and engage in meaningful activities geared to their developmental levels and needs.

Nancy Carlsson-Paige is not alone in her assessment of the situation. A national coalition of early childhood educators met earlier this year regarding their concerns about the current education policy trends and their negative effects. You can read more about that in an op-ed piece titled “How ed policy is hurting early childhood education” published in Valerie Strauss’ The Answer Sheet at The Washington Post. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/how-ed-policy-is-hurting-early-childhood-education/2012/05/24/gJQAm0jZoU_blog.html)

Geralyn Bywarter McLaughlin
Director, Defending the Early Years
deyproject.org

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Common Core

Finding the Genius in Every Child

By dianeravitch
August 25, 2012 //
6

Robert D. Shepherd previously wrote a post about why standardization fails. Now he asks whether we want to standardize for a certain outcome or whether we want an education that discovers the genius in every child:

Every child born today is the product of 3.8 billions years of evolution. Between his or her ears, is the most complex system known to us, and that system, the brain consists of highly interconnected subsystems of neural mechanisms for carrying out particular tasks. Years ago, some Japanese researchers won the Nobel Prize for mapping the neural system in fruit flies that functions ONLY to detect movement from left to right in the visual field. Marvin Minsky calls this complex of interconnected systems a “society of mind.”Early in the twentieth century, a psychologist named Charles Spearman posited a single intelligence factor, “G.” A couple decades ago, Howard Gardner made a name for himself by positing seven (later eight) “multiple intelligences.” But that’s all hocus pocus. The truth is that there are, quite literally, billions of intelligences in the brain–mechanisms that carry out very particular tasks more or less well, many of them sharing parts of the same machinery to carry out subroutines.Over that 3.8 billion years of evolution, these many intelligences were refined to a high degree. Creatures, like us, who reproduce sexually and mix up our genes, are born with different unique sets of mechanisms, and these are pruned and refined based on our experiences, for the neural machinery is extraordinarily plastic. In other words,

1. People are extraordinarily variable, and
2. All have propensities to become very good at some things and not at others

In EVERY child some of these subsystems are extraordinary and some are merely adequate.

In other words, there are no standardized children. Almost every new parent is surprised, even shocked, to learn that kids come into the world extraordinarily unique. They bring a lot of highly particular potential to the ball game. And every one of those children is capable, highly capable, in some ways and not in others.

What if, instead of schools having as their purpose turning out identically machined parts, they, instead, existed to find out what a given child is going to be good at doing? What if children were carefully, systematically, given opportunities to try out the enormous range of purposeful human activity until we identified each child’s GENIUS? What if we said to ourselves, presented with a particular child, “I know that this little person is the product of 3.8 billion years of evolution, that he or she has gifts conferred by that history of fitness trials, and it is my responsibility to discover what those are?”

I heard an Indian elder, whose name, unfortunately, I forget, speak about this once. He said, “Look at the kids. Really look at them. You can see who the leaders are and who the followers.” This insight can and should be generalized.

Now, before you dismiss this as a preposterous idea, consider this fact: A child can be born with, say, perfect pitch and go through our entire K-12 education system without anyone ever discovering this about that child.

A society, to be a society, needs SOME shared common culture, and it’s valuable, for that reason, to have some common, shared set of knowledge and skills transmitted from one generation to the next. But a pluralistic society also needs the astonishing variety of attributes that people are born with or are capable of developing.

No list, however well vetted, will represent the natural variety of ability and potential that exists in children. Nor will it represent the variety of abilities that the society actually needs in order to function well. It’s bad for kids and it’s bad for society as a whole when someone has the hubris to come up with THE LIST of what everyone needs to know.

Let me be clear about what I am NOT saying: I am NOT saying that school should be a place where kids “do their own thing.” What I am saying is that it should be a place that enables kids and their teachers to discover what kids, given their particular endowments, can do. I believe, strongly, that every child has some genius among those TRULY multiple intelligences.

It would take a lot of re-envisioning to come up with a workable model of schooling that would do that properly and rigorously. And it wouldn’t look anything like what we are now doing.

Finally, to get to the specific question. The revolutionaries who founded the United States recognized that any system that awards people based upon the accidents of their birth rather than based upon their talents, whatever their birth, wastes a lot of human potential. They were committed to the idea that everyone deserved a chance to follow his or her genius, whatever the conditions of his or her birth. That’s why many of them were also committed to the idea universal education and why it is in the interest of all of us to end disparity of educational opportunity. The founders had this crazy idea that no one was disposable, that everyone had gifts to bestow on his or her fellows that would flower in the right circumstances. Any rigidly enforced system of standards treated as a curriculum is not going to enable the achievement of the founders’ vision because while everyone else’s children are toiling through the checklist of standardized skills attainment, the children of the elite will be having extraordinarily varied experiences enabling them to find and follow their bliss (what they care about and have the potential to do well).

If that’s the society that we want, the Morlochs and the Eloi, then uniform national standards treated as curricula, the same in every school, for every student, is the way to go.

That works for folks who think that there are the few gifted who are destined to rule and the great mass of interchangeable worker bees who need to be as identical and predictable as possible. It doesn’t work for people who believe in pluralistic democracy.
Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Common Core, Curriculum, Education Reform, Students, US Education

The Best Interest of Young Children?

By dianeravitch
August 25, 2012 //
2

A reader writes in response to Deborah Meier’s post:

It is easy to say that standards are just standards but when the staff developers for the NYC DOE have mandated PD for pre-k teachers and make us sit through an entire day of a scripted power point and remind us that our students are failing and we must embrace the common core and provide performance assessments for each child in both math and ELA twice a year, it is difficult to believe that the Common Core is just a set of standards for teachers to use as guidelines.
I am not opposed to rote learning for some things. I still remember to run the little song about how many days of the month are in each month. I still recite the alphabet in my head when I’m trying to file middle letters in my files. I still remember the parts of the grasshopper’s leg because my high school science teacher had us sing it. There is no way to get a good handle on the alphabet or numbers in sequence without memorizing. This should not be confused with actual learning. Memorizing number facts and the letters of the alphabet in sequence is just a tool to enhance actual learning.
Children and adults learn by doing. A medical student can memorize many facts. But in the end, she must practice on a person. She must learn how deep to make an incision and what pneumonia sounds like when you listen to someone’s lungs.
No one can learn to play tennis just reading about it and memorizing the rules and steps in playing. You have to play and notice the work “play” We play tennis to improve our game. Again, notice the word “game”
Adults spent untold amounts of money in play for enjoyment, to learn a new skill, and to release stress but we deny play to children.
I don’t know if it’s our Puritan foundations that prevent people from understanding the importance of play or various hidden agendas.
What I know for myself is that after the first half hour of those 6 hours of power point PD’s I am no longer listening. Based on conversations after these sessions I know that I am not alone.
I think some people think if learning is enjoyable it can’t possibility learning.. I also believe that some people who secretly have low expectations of some populations believe that they are capable only of low level, rote learning.
If those in charge believe that rote learning and absence of play (art, music, dance, etc.) must be removed from schools in order to have 120 minute blocks of literacy and math, why do their own children not attend the same schools that they want for other people’s children?
There is a serious disconnect between what those in power profess to be the best education and the education they provide for their own children.

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Common Core

Deborah Meier on Pre-K, K, and the Common Core Standards

By dianeravitch
August 25, 2012 //
8

Watching the discussion on this blog about how the Common Core Standards might affect the pre-school years (pre-K and K), veteran educator Deborah Meier sent the following comment to me:

If counting to a hundred by ones and tens are appropriate skills for all 5 year olds, and children should read by sounding out words before they enter kindergarten, then Karen Nemeth might be right.  

But to say that such standards do not prevent teachers from responding creatively is…nonsense.  The most efficient way to do it is by repeated forms of rote learning, which interferes with both a solid mathematical education rather than furthering it and consumes the time otherwise spent in more appropriate activities–art, music, dance, science, block building, water play, planting, caring for animals, story telling,  learning about one’s surrounding neighborhood, and on and on.

Furthermore we know that children learn to read in many ways (some by “mere” extensive exposure). We’d be wise to pay attention to one of the best studies of reading I know of–Inquiry Into Meaning: An Investigation of Learning to Read by Edward Chittenden et al.  (Teachers College Press.)  The authors (researchers at ETS)  document the range of ways in which children learned to read–regardless of how they were taught.  We don’t have to settle on one way, but can provide opportunities to best match each child’s approach–which can be done easily under the right circumstances.   Apparently delaying any form of direct reading instruction until children are 7 hasn’t hurt the schools and nations who follow such a course.   But the Common Core prescribes a different developmental path.  

Yes, centuries of wisdom about the role of  imaginative and imitative play strongly suggest what is best for all young children–rich and poor.  Whether at home or at school, young children (perhaps all humans!) need a surrounding in which they can observe and imitate playfully the wondrous things they see peers and adults engaged in, where they are safe, watched over, guided, encouraged, and enjoyed.  Where the ratio of adults to children is more like natural human communities
 
It’s good that NAEYC paved the way–but I have concluded that they have not noticed what has happened to PreK and Kindergarten of late.  Not only are children spending many more hours in institutional care, with student/adult ratios that make it harder and harder to observe and respond to each child’s strengths and weaknesses but classrooms for 4 year olds look more and more like old-fashioned lst grades–in the name of innovation.  All to prepare them for 12 more years of test-driven schooling.   It is one of many things that is causing great distress in quite young children, above all, young boys.  The teachers that I meet are giving in because, in the name of “realism”,  they do not have NAEYC et al covering their backs!
Deborah Meier
Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Common Core

Will Common Core Change Pre-K and K? No.

By dianeravitch
August 25, 2012 //
3

This letter from Karen Nemeth came in response to a post by Nancy Carlsson-Paige about the detrimental impact of the Common Core Standards on the early years.

As an early childhood educator for more than 25 years and author of 5 books, including Many Languages, One Classroom and Basics of Supporting Dual Language Learners, and numerous articles on the subject, I would like to clear up some inaccuracies that have been posted here and contribute some accurate information that is called for by your topic.

The Core Curriculum State Standards were written for K-12. http://www.corestandards.org/about-the-standards/myths-vs-facts Several states have chosen to adopt them and some have added their own guidance for preschool. The federal government has in no way established requirements for what must be taught in preschool. Standards do not equate to a curriculum. As I often tell my audiences, standards are like ingredients, but each classroom still needs its own recipe for how to use those ingredients. A curriculum is more like a recipe. Ten people might buy the same ingredients and make ten very different cakes. If you burn your cake or put more salt than sugar into it, it will not be successful – but you can’t blame the grocery store that sold you those ingredients. Anyone who has concerns about how the core curriculum standards are affecting preschool programs is going to have to look state by state by state, and program by program, and classroom by classroom to see how they are described, recommended and then implemented. I appreciate that Sheila and Anne took that approach here.

Aligning with the standards gives states, programs and teachers something to work toward without dictating how they have to get there. New Jersey is one state that put their own developmentally appropriate spin on the standards and has provided developmentally appropriate guidance for both preschool and kindergarten http://www.state.nj.us/education/ece/guide/

For another approach to establishing learning goals for preschool, I suggest that readers visit this site to learn more about the Office of Head Start’s School Readiness initiatives and supports: http://eclkc.ohs.acf.hhs.gov/hslc/sr/approach/cdelf

While I agree with Nancy that early childhood educators need to be concerned about the overacademization of kindergarten and preschool classrooms, this concern has plagued us for many years and is not a new trend that appeared with the standards or RTTT. 25 years ago my first daughter started kindergarten, and when I saw the door directly onto the playground during my classroom visit, I asked how much time the children spent outdoors. The teacher told us they NEVER would go outside because their academic reading curriculum took up too much time. My mom, who was the most DAP preschool teacher I’ve ever known, also encountered pressure from parents to give her students more ‘homework’ in the 1970s.

I agree with Nancy that testing and assessment are issues of major concern in our field right now. That is a separate, and important, topic to discuss. I do believe it is possible to address the preschool skills and knowledge that lead up to what is expected in K and 1st in a hands-on, creative, project-based, child centered way. We just need to make sure we do what needs to be done to prepare preschool teachers AND the administrators who supervise and support them.

I do take exception to the odd addition of complaints about the National Association for the Education of Young Children included here by Nancy. As a member of the largest professional association for preschool educators in the country for more than 25 years, and as the daughter and mother of a member, and as a NAEYC author, speaker and volunteer, I want to make it clear that nearly 90,000 educators pay a membership fee to support this organization every year. A small handful of people who are not happy with the organization do not represent anything close to “much of that membership.” NAEYC did not write, promote, or implement the Core Curriculum State Standards and there really does not seem to be any value in complaining about one’s personal grievances in this context or of promoting an unrelated facebook page of a small local chapter. The fact is that NAEYC literally ‘wrote the book’ on developmentally appropriate practice for early childhood education and more information about that leadership can be found here: http://www.naeyc.org/DAP

Karen Nemeth

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Common Core

Can You Answer Her Question re CCSS?

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2012 //
19

Kipp Dawson invites others to answer her question:

A question for each of you, and anyone else. In its Winter 2011 issue, the American Federation of Teachers magazine, “American Educator” carried several articles and an editorial touting the benefits of Common Core. One argument in particular grabbed my attention and made sense, at least on the surface. The point was, if we are concerned about children in underfunded schools and in isolated (rural) settings, should we not embrace Common Core national standards and curriculum (by whatever name) to ensure that these children’s education gets taken as seriously as those in more well endowed schools? Without Common Core, won’t some children necessarily be faced with lower expectations from teachers and communities? How would you answer this? (although I think you’ve already shed some light on the implementation side of things)

The “American Educator” editorial in this issue (http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/winter1011/Editors.pdf) is so glowing re Common Core. Would any of you be willing to take it on in its specifics?

Categories Common Core

What We Can Learn from the New PDK/Gallup Poll

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2012 //
2

The annual Phi Delta Kappa-Gallup poll on education was released today.

The sponsors characterize public opinion as split, which is true for many issues.

We must see this poll in the context of an unprecedented, well-funded campaign to demonize public schools and their teachers over at least the past two years, and by some reckoning, even longer.

The media has parroted endlessly the assertion that our public schools are failures, they are (as Bill Gates memorably said to the nation’s governors in 2005) “obsolete,” and “the system is broken.” How many times have you heard those phrases? How many television specials have you seen claiming that our education system is disastrous? And along comes “Waiting for ‘Superman'” with its propagandistic attack on public education in cities and suburbs alike and its appeal for privatization. Add to that Arne Duncan’s faithful parroting of the claims of the critics.

That is the context, and it is remarkable that Americans continue to believe in the schools they know best and to understand what their most critical need is.

Here are the salient findings:

1. Americans have a low opinion of American education (how could they not, given the bombardment of criticism?): only 18% give it an A or B. And here is the real accomplishment of the corporate reformers: Those who judge American education as a D or F have increased from 22% to 30% in the past 20 years. Actually, their success in smearing U.S. education is even greater, because in 2002, before the implementation of NCLB, only 16% judged the nation’s schools so harshly. So the reform campaign has doubled the proportion of Americans who think the nation’s schools deserve a D or F.

2. When asked to evaluate the schools in their own community, 48% give them an A or B, which is the highest rating in 20 years.

3. When asked to evaluate the school their oldest child attends, an astonishing 77% give it an A or B. This is the highest rating in 20 years. Only 6% give it a D or F. This question elicits the views of informed consumers, the people who refer to a real school, not the hypothetical school system that is lambasted every other day in the national press or condemned as “obsolete” by Bill Gates.

4. When asked whether they have trust and confidence in teachers, 71% said yes. Americans continue to respect and admire teachers, despite the nonstop public bashing of them in the media.

5. When asked whether standardized test scores should be used to evaluate teachers, opinion split 52-47 in favor. Considering that the public has heard nonstop endorsements of this bad idea from President Obama, Secretary Duncan, and most other political figures–and very limited dissent–it is surprising that opinion is almost equally divided. How did so many Americans manage to figure out that this idea is problematic at best?

6. When people were asked to describe the teachers who had the greatest influence in their lives, they used words like caring, compassionate, motivating, and inspiring. Interesting that few remembered the teachers who raised their test scores.

7. There has been a big change in what the public sees as the biggest problems facing the schools today. Ten years ago, the biggest concerns were about discipline (fighting, gangs, drugs, lack of discipline, overcrowding). Today, the biggest problem that the public sees, by far, is lack of financial support. 35% chose that option. Among public school parents, it was 43%. Concerns about discipline almost faded away in comparison to concerns about the lack of financial support for the schools.

8. On the subject of vouchers, there was a surprising increase in the proportion who would support “allowing students to choose a private school at public expense.” It increased from 34% to 44%, which is a big jump. I recommend that future questioning ask about support to allow students “to choose a private or religious school at public expense.” That would be closer to the reality of voucher programs in Milwaukee, Cleveland, D.C., Louisiana, Ohio, and Indiana.

9. On the subject of charters, public opinion dipped, from an approval rating of 70% in 2011 to 66% in 2012. It will be interesting to see where this number goes as the public begins to understand more about charters in their own communities.

10. A question about the parent trigger was so vacuous as to be misleading. The question was “Some states are considering laws that allow parents to petition to remove the leadership and staff at failing schools. Do you favor or oppose such laws?” 70% favor, 76% of public school parents favor. This is a misleading question, however, as the parent trigger is not a matter of simply allowing parents to sign a petition, but of allowing parents to take control of a public school and hand it over to private management. My guess is that the public doesn’t know much about the parent trigger concept and hasn’t heard a discussion about the pros and cons. So, I don’t put much stock in the response–after all, why shouldn’t parents have the right to sign a petition to change the staff at their school? It does show how clever the corporate reformers are in framing issues that advance privatization and doing it in ways that are deceptive and alluring.

11. In a series of questions about the Common Core standards, most people believe they are a good thing and that they will make the nation more competitive globally; about half think they will improve the quality of education while 40% think they will have no effect. These answers exemplify why polls of this kind must be viewed with caution. I am willing to bet that the majority of respondents has no idea what the Common Core standards are; and willing to bet that 98% have never read them.

In future versions of the poll, I hope that questions will be asked about for-profit schools, privatization, and vouchers for religious schools. These are big issues today, and the poll should ask about them.

My takeaway from the 2012 poll is that the corporate reform movement has succeeded in increasing support for vouchers, but that the American public continues to have a remarkably high opinion of the schools and teachers they know best despite the concerted efforts of the reformers to undermine those beliefs. This is an instance where evidence trumps ideology. The reformers have not yet been able to destroy the bonds between the American people and their community’s schools.

 

 

Categories Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Opinion Polling, Parent trigger, Parents, Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching, US Education, Vouchers

Does Common Core Affect Pre-K?

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2012 //
15

There has been discussion on the blog about whether the Common Core Standards include pre-K, and if not, whether they  are nonetheless influencing them. A reader posed that question to me and I referred it to Nancy Carlsson-Paige, an early childhood education specialist who recently retired after teaching at Lesley University for many years.

Hi Diane,

 

It’s hard to put your finger on the pulse of what is really going on in early childhood right now, and for good reason.  There are big differences among states, school systems, and individual programs.  But there are also trends that are affecting the early childhood field as a whole, and they are most strongly felt in programs that are State and Federallyfunded.

 

There is an increasing pushdown of academic skills into Kindergartens and Pre-K’s.  The Alliance for Childhood first identified the disappearance of play in Kindergartens a few years ago.  Wrongly, the erosion of play-based learning in Kindergartens has now become the norm and is currently filtering into Pre-K’s around the country. Thisacademic focus for young kids is driven by RTTT priorities and the Common Core Standards.  The Common Core extends to kindergarten and requires children to learn specific facts and skills in literacy and numeracy at specified ages.  For RTTT early childhood money, states have to agree to “align with the Common Core”.  These mandates are not based on the knowledge base of the early childhood field, on what is known about how young children learn best.  Those who wrote them are out of touch with young children and what quality programs should offer.

 

For many years, NAEYC (the National Association for the Education of Young Children) led the field in promoting “developmentally appropriate practice.”  But in recent years, to the dismay of much of the membership, NAEYC has become more of a corporate and institutional culture, drifting away from its advocacy of practices rooted in child development understandings.  

 

Testing and assessing young kids, also part of the policy mandates, has become an increasing focus of early childhood programs.  Attention and resources go to assessment instead of meeting the needs of the whole child.  Getting the scores up has led to more and more drill-based instruction and rote learning, less play-based and hands-on learning. All of this has brought considerable misery and harm to lots of young children.

 

I can imagine standards for early childhood education that would be based in the theory and research of our field that could actually support good practice. But these would look nothing like the current standards that reduce learning to mechanized bits of informationdisconnected from children, their needs and development, and the meaningful contexts in which they learn.

Nancy Carlsson-Paige

Dr. Carlsson-Paige recommended this link for readers seeking more information:

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Common Core, Education Reform

From Inputs to Outputs

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2012 //
3

Diana Senechal reacted to an earlier post about standardization:

When I first read Robert D. Shepherd’s comment, I asked myself, “who is this wise, knowledgeable person?” I returned to his comment and reread it several times.

He explains the core madness in all of this: that the starndards are not curricula but will be (and are being) treated as curricula.

He makes important points about autonomy and pluralism too.

I only question his assertion that the current reform movement can be traced back to the business “revolution” inspired by the 1992 article he mentions. It was afoot well before then.

I’m not just talking about the old antecedents, such as Taylorism. Much closer to the present, around 1990, people were excited about the idea that we had been focusing too much on inputs and should now focus on outputs. Checker Finn discussed this rapturously in his 1990 article “The Biggest Reform of All” (Phi Delta Kappan 71, no. 8). From his article:

“Under the old conception (dare I say paradigm?), education was thought of as process and system, effort and intention, investment and hope. To improve education meant to try harder, to engage in more activity, to magnify one’s plans, to give people more services, and to become more efficient in delivering them.

“Under the new definition, now struggling to be born, education is the result achieved, the learning that takes root when the process has been effective. Only if the process succeeds and learning occurs will we say that education happened. Absent evidence of such a result, there is no education—however many attempts have been made, resources deployed, or energies expended.”

(To get the full flavor of this quote, read the original, since certain words are italicized. I quote it with formatting here:http://open.salon.com/blog/dianasenechal/2012/03/31/the_problem_with_outcomes).

The great error of this “outputs” movement was its dismissal of anything that didn’t translate directly into results. It cripples itself because of its lack of perspective. Some of the best results require bearing with lack of results for a while–and of course results come in many forms.

Categories Common Core, Education Reform
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