In this short video, veteran kindergarten teacher Jim St. Clair explains why play-based learning is important for young children and illustrates with examples from exemplary practice.
The video was produced by DEY (Defending the Early Years), a consortium of early childhood education practitioners and academics.
Veteran teacher Nancy Bailey warns about the danger that technology poses to child development. In her post, she reviews the various efforts to “disrupt” learning and reviews NancyCarlsson-Paige’s newly released toolkit on technology and early childhood education.
She writes:
Public schools continuously change to keep up with progress. Technology has much to offer. But the idea that instruction should be disrupted using technology is putting students and the country at risk. It destroys the public school curriculum that has managed to educate the masses for decades.
Disruption is a troubling word when referring to public schooling.
Gradual change works better with students. Schools should be warm places where students can positively interact with other children and caring adults. Changes implemented gradually are more comfortable for teachers and students.
Technology is a helpful tool, but it won’t provide that sense of stability. It’s a cold machine. School districts push technology over teachers. They don’t stop to think about what it will mean to children and their development.
We don’t know what the future effects of technology will be. How will students learn what they need for college and career when they’ve experienced little but online instruction?
Most people recognize that continuous screen use is problematic. Transforming public schools to where students face even more online time all day makes little sense.
Early childhood teachers express concern that tech is invading preschool education. We know that free play is the heart of learning.
But programs, like Waterford Early Learning, advertise online instruction including assessment for K-2. Their Upstart program advertises, At-home, online kindergarten readiness program that gives 4- and 5-year-old children early reading, math, and science lessons.
Technology is directed towards babies too! What will it mean to a child’s development if they stare at screens instead of picture books?
Nancy Carlsson-Paige is a professor emerita of eTly childhood education at Lesley College in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
She has written an informative guide for parents of young children about how to help them during the digital age.
Her guide was posted by DEY, Defending the Early Years, the premier organization supporting the healthy development of young children.
Increasingly, children are surrounded by screens. How much is too much? What should parents do to make sure that their children don’t become addicted to screens?
Count on Nancy Carlsson-Paige for sound advice.
Audrey Watters, writing a guest post on Larry Cuban’s blog, demonstrates the insidious nature of Jeff Bezos’ plan to create his own chain of pre-schools, where “the child is the customer.”
She writes:
“The assurance that “the child will be the customer” underscores the belief – shared by many in and out of education reform and education technology – that education is simply a transaction: an individual’s decision-making in a “marketplace of ideas.” (There is no community, no public responsibility, no larger civic impulse for early childhood education here. It’s all about private schools offering private, individual benefits.)
“This idea that “the child will be the customer” is, of course, also a nod to “personalized learning” as well, as is the invocation of a “Montessori-inspired” model. As the customer, the child will be tracked and analyzed, her preferences noted so as to make better recommendations to up-sell her on the most suitable products. And if nothing else, Montessori education in the United States is full of product recommendations.
“There’s another piece to all this, not mentioned in Bezos’s note about building a chain of preschools that “use the same set of principles that have driven Amazon”: Amazon’s own labor practices. The online retail giant is a notoriously terrible place to work – the pay, particularly in the warehouses, is so low that many employees receive government assistance. The working conditions are dangerous and dehumanizing. “Amazon has patented a system that would put workers in a cage, on top of a robot,” read the headline in last week’s Seattle Times. And it’s not so great for the white collar workers either. “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk,” one employee in books marketing told The New York Times back in 2015.
“The majority of the early childhood educators in the US are already very poorly paid; many preschools have incredibly high turnover rates. As research has demonstrated that preschool has a lasting positive effect on children’s educational attainment, there have been efforts to “raise the standards,” demanding for example that preschools be staffed by more qualified teachers. But that demand for more training and certification hasn’t brought with it better pay or benefits. The median pay for preschool teachers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is less than $30,000 a year. Even those with Bachelor’s degrees earn only about $14.70 an hour, about half of the average wages for all those with the same level of education.
“This is a field in which a third of employees already qualify for government assistance. And now Jeff Bezos, a man whose own workers also rely on these same anti-poverty programs, wants to step in – not as a taxpayer, oh no, but as a philanthropist. Honestly, he could have a more positive impact here by just giving those workers a raise. (Or, you know, by paying taxes.)”
Sadly, there will be parents who will get in line to have their children treated like Amazon customers, as there are parents who sign their children up for harsh and punitive “no-excuses” charters.
Mira Debs, Executive Director of the Yale Education Studies Program, thinks Jeff Bezos should use his riches to help existing, top-quality Montessori programs instead of starting his own schools. He got off to a bad start by saying that “the child is the customer.” Ugh! Children are children, not customers!
She writes:
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and the owner of The Washington Post, surprised the education world when he announced this month that he was donating $2 billion to support homeless families and create a network of free Montessori-inspired preschools.
It’s a compelling demonstration of the power of quality early childhood education that Mr. Bezos may have been inspired by a Montessori program he attended for a year and a half in the 1960s.
At face value, the donation is a much needed investment in early childhood education that could potentially help fill the child-care gap for many low-income families. In his announcement, Mr. Bezos highlighted his desire to find and spread the “good in the world.” But his plan to create new organizations, however worthy, would duplicate the efforts of grass-roots programs in need of a serious cash infusion.
Mr. Bezos should be congratulated for moving beyond the small circle of urban charter schools favored by other philanthropists. Many of these charter schools have been criticized for their rigid discipline. In contrast, Montessori classrooms focus on developing children’s independence and self-control, delivering academic results along the way. Recent research by Angelene Lillard of the University of Virginia and colleagues found that children from lower-income families who won a lottery spot in a public Montessori program were more likely to catch up to their wealthier peers than children who did not get a spot and attended programs elsewhere.
Mr. Bezos could follow in the footsteps of Roslyn Williams, a Montessori educator who founded the Central Harlem Association of Montessori Parents in 1967 to create integrated Montessori preschools in New York. Ms. Williams argued that Montessori education should go from being the “the rich child’s right” to “the poor child’s opportunity.”
Yet Mr. Bezos’s aim of creating his own network to run these preschools puts him in danger of falling into the trap of the “charitable-industrial complex,” following tech colleagues like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates who have poured large sums of money into top-down educational strategies: saving Newark’s schools and improving teaching, gifts that have been shown to have a limited impact.
In this case, it’s not that families from underserved communities don’t want Montessori preschools, it’s that they have been creating them for a long time. Over the last four years, I’ve been doing research on public Montessori schools, and I helped start a public Montessori school in New Haven and a grass-roots network of Montessori educators. I learned that even though Montessori has a reputation for being a private, elite form of schooling, there is a long history of educators who have worked to make Montessori accessible to children from low-income backgrounds.
In Washington, Detroit, Dallas and other cities, there is a growing momentum to expand public Montessori programs. Today, 511 public Montessori programs have approximately 125,000 children ages 3 to 18 around the country, more than half of them students of color.
Instead of creating his own network, Mr. Bezos should consider funding schools that are already doing the work he admires. Consider the 50 public Montessori programs in Puerto Rico created by Ana María García Blanco beginning in 1990, programs that are now at risk of closing because of school reorganization efforts after Hurricane Maria. Public Montessori programs could use a fund to train teachers, buy materials and build buildings. Groups like Embracing Equity, City Garden Montessori and the Indigenous Montessori Institute are working to develop anti-bias, anti-racist curriculums and diversify the pool of Montessori teachers.
Rather than considering the children of these future schools his “customers,” albeit tuition-free customers, Mr. Bezos could orient himself toward viewing the underserved as his collaborators. Families have been organizing to create Montessori and other preschools for their children for a long time. A truly revolutionary philanthropic fund would not create a separate network, but seek out the schools, the community centers, the storefront start-ups and the other dreams in waiting.
Mira Debs (@mira_debs) is the executive director of the Yale Education Studies program, a lecturer in sociology and the author of the forthcoming book, “Diverse Families, Desirable Schools: Public Montessori in an Era of School Choice.”
Blogger Audrey Watters is not impressed by billionaire Jeff Bezos’ plan to establish preschools.
“It’s like Amazon, but for preschool.”
Ominously, “the child will be the customer.”
The assurance that “the child will be the customer” underscores the belief – shared by many in and out of education reform and education technology – that education is simply a transaction: an individual’s decision-making in a “marketplace of ideas.” (There is no community, no public responsibility, no larger civic impulse for early childhood education here. It’s all about private schools offering private, individual benefits.)
This idea that “the child will be the customer” is, of course, also a nod to “personalized learning” as well, as is the invocation of a “Montessori-inspired” model. As the customer, the child will be tracked and analyzed, her preferences noted so as to make better recommendations to up-sell her on the most suitable products. And if nothing else, Montessori education in the United States is full of product recommendations.
There’s another piece to all this, not mentioned in Bezos’s note about building a chain of preschools that “use the same set of principles that have driven Amazon”: Amazon’s own labor practices. The online retail giant is a notoriously terrible place to work – the pay, particularly in the warehouses, is so low that many employees receive government assistance. The working conditions are dangerous and dehumanizing. “Amazon has patented a system that would put workers in a cage, on top of a robot,” read the headline in last week’s Seattle Times. And it’s not so great for the white collar workers either. “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk,” one employee in books marketing told The New York Times back in 2015.
The majority of the early childhood educators in the US are already very poorly paid; many preschools have incredibly high turnover rates. As research has demonstrated that preschool has a lasting positive effect on children’s educational attainment, there have been efforts to “raise the standards,” demanding for example that preschools be staffed by more qualified teachers. But that demand for more training and certification hasn’t brought with it better pay or benefits. The median pay for preschool teachers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is less than $30,000 a year. Even those with Bachelor’s degrees earn only about $14.70 an hour, about half of the average wages for all those with the same level of education.
This is a field in which a third of employees already qualify for government assistance. And now Jeff Bezos, a man whose own workers also rely on these same anti-poverty programs, wants to step in – not as a taxpayer, oh no, but as a philanthropist. Honestly, he could have a more positive impact here by just giving those workers a raise. (Or, you know, by paying taxes.)
Bezos is not alone in eyeing the early education “market,” which has received quite a bit of attention from ed-tech investors in recent years. So far this year, three companies have raised venture capital to help people run preschools and childcare facilities in their homes: Wonderschool, WeeCare, and Procare Software. Last year, VCs poured millions into similar sorts of companies, including Tinkergarten, Sawyer, and Kinedu. Investors in these startups include some of the “big money” names in Silicon Valley: Omidyar Network, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and Andreessen Horowitz, among others. (One of these companies, WeeCare, says it’s also planning to train and license childcare providers, and it wouldn’t surprise me to see the micro-certificate, online education, nanodegree folks also jump on this bandwagon. “Uber for Education” or something.)
She wonders whether we really want to turn early childhood education over to private providers. “Can the gig economy and the algorithm ever provide high quality preschool?”
When Peter Greene learned that Jeff Bezos and his wife planned to allocate $2 Billion to creating their own preschools and helping the homeless, he was appalled.
Greene has a better idea for the billionaire class: They should pay their taxes. More taxes.
“Jeff Bezos (and his wife) starting pre-K schools is stupid. Let me count the ways (in no particular order).
“This damn guy
“It’s a stupid small pledge on his part. Yes, $2 billion is a chunk of money (aka more money than any teacher will ever make in their lifetime), but it’s chump change to Bezos. As this piece points out, it’s about 1% of his wealth. It’s considerably less than some of his fellow billionaire dabblers have donated. This is the exact opposite of a “we’ll spend whatever it takes to do this right” pledge.
“His concept is stupid, as witnessed by the oft-quoted “the child will be the customer.” This is, in its own way, as stupid as the many rich amateur education “experts” who insist that the child is the product. In our current hyper-commercial environment, as exemplified by the cutthroat capitalism of Amazon.com, the customer is a business’s adversary, the mark from whom pennies must be shaken loose by any means necessary, in return for which, the vendor will provide the absolute minimum they can get away with. How is this a good model for schools? A business has no relationship with a customer (though it may serve the business well to dupe the customer into thinking there’s a relationship there). The interactions are purely transactional– you give me some money, I give you whatever goods or services the money was supposed to pay for. The rest of the customer’s life and concerns are immaterial. How is this a good model for schools? Schools should help create educated citizens, help students become their best selves, create the public for a country; none of this is the same as creating customers. And customers, it should be noted, have to earn the right to be served by showing that they can plunk down the money.
“The stupid keeps getting deeper because we already know about Bezos’s treatment of people with whom he has a transactional relationship– he screws them mercilessly. Amazon workers are notoriously poorly treated so that Bezos can make more money. Bezos has made cities dance and scrape and bow for the privilege of having him gift them with another amazon hq. A school should take care of the students it serves. When has Jeff Bezos ever taken care of anybody?
“It’s stupid because of the blinding hypocrisy. I know this has been said, but it deserves endless repetition– Bezos wants to give money to the homeless, even as his corporation helped kill a tax bill in Seattle designed to help the homeless. But this isn’t just hypocrisy– it’s a blatant example of modern fauxlanthropic privatization. It’s about doing an end run around democratic-style government and insisting on commandeering the project yourself, in the same way that avoiding taxes is not just greedy, but is the Bezos way of saying that he will spend his money on his own terms, and if he’s going to spend money on something, then he will by God own it himself.
“It’s stupid because of the sheer oligarchical privatizing balls displayed. If Bezos wants some of his money to go to improving schools, there’s a mechanism in place for that; it’s called “paying your taxes.” If Bezos wants a say in how schools are operated, there’s a mechanism in place for that; it’s called “running for school board.” The country is not served by having vital institutions dependent on the largesse of the wealthy. We are not served by falling back into a system in which cities get their schools or water supplies by convincing some rich patron to take care of them.
“It’s stupid because the poor Montessori people are once again having their “brand” co-opted by somebody who doesn’t even get it. Bezos’s schools will apparently be sort of Montessori-flavored, whatever the hell that is supposed to mean.
“It’s stupid because it is soaked in tech-giant arrogance. Note that Bezos says nothing along the lines of, “I will bring in the top education experts to don this right.” Experts, shmexperts. Bezos will just “use the same set of principles that have driven Amazon. Most important among those will be genuine, intense customer obsession.” In other words, running a school or a giant internet-based mail order business is pretty much the same thing, so I already know everything I need to know. Even if Amazon weren’t built on a mountain of worker abuse aimed at working the customers over, this would still be an arrogant, stupid thing to say.”
Read it all.
Peter Greene’s crap detector is better than anyone else’s. Jeff Bezos should listen to him.
Jeff Bezos, who may now be the richest man in the world, has pledged to spend $2 billion to aid the homeless and to establish preschools for low-income children.
“Amazon founder Jeff Bezos announced Thursday that he will give $2 billion to help homeless families and create a new network of nonprofit preschools in low-income communities.
“The pledge, announced in a tweet, fulfills the promise he made last year when he tweeted that he planned to give money to charities that help people facing the most desperate, immediate need. Bezos asked for feedback from nonprofit leaders working on the front lines to help the planet’s neediest people….
“The $2 billion gift establishes the Bezos Day One Fund, which will support two missions. The Day One Families Fund will steer money to existing charities that help the homeless. The Day One Academies Fund will create the preschools.
“When he first asked for suggestions on how to jump-start his philanthropy, Bezos got an earful. The feedback was swift and high-volume with nonprofits bombarding Bezos with requests. He responded to at least one request for a gift early this year with a $33 million donation to TheDream.US, a charity that provides college scholarships to undocumented students, but no other large donations were publicly announced.
“Bezos also entered the political arena. Earlier this month, he and his wife, MacKenzie, gave $10 million to With Honor, a veterans-focused political-action committee.
“Until now, Bezos and his family have given a total of about $160 million to nonprofits over the past decade, according to the Chronicle’s analysis of the gifts he has announced publicly. Critics have complained that wasn’t a lot for a guy whose net worth Forbes recently pegged at nearly $163 billion.“
I know that many of us are skeptical, if not downright hostile, to billionaire gifts, which typically seem to be about telling people what to do, and privatizing the public sector, leaving people dependent on them.
I say, let’s wait and see how the Bezos philanthropy plays out. What will he do to help the homeless? A handout or a fresh start? What kind of preschools will he create? Developmentally appropriate models that allow children to play and learn at their own pace or test-prep centers?
Let’s watch and see.
Raise Your Hand for Public Education-Illinois has some excellent ideas about what should happen next in Chicago.
As you may know, we have been critical of many of the mayor’s education policies over the years, as they haven’t often aligned with our vision of an education system that is based on high-quality, researched-backed policies, centers on children’s curiosity and creativity, emphasizes collaborative learning environments instead of competition, and provides crucial social-emotional and health supports alongside academics.
We’ve also been critical of how those policies have been decided and rolled out; rather than encouraging debate, engaging families, students, teachers, and communities in a robust process to provide input, and seeking consensus beforehand, the mayor’s office has frequently sought only a post-hoc rubber stamp from the Board for decisions about CPS.
So these are some of the things we’ll be looking out for:
Funding: Budgets are a set of priorities. What are the essentials that have been cut over the years, or were never funded, and how will the next mayor fund these things? Will a candidate end the damaging student-based budgeting (SBB) system? SBB contributes to an accelerated death cycle for schools with decreasing enrollment, distorts hiring practices to favor the least-experienced teachers, and forces schools to eliminate librarians, art, and music to cut costs. And how will the next mayor work to get increased revenue to the schools?
School ratings: Test scores and attendance are the primary factors used to rate elementary schools. These ratings drive a lot of bad practice inside schools. How will the next mayor change this?
Overemphasis on test scores: Linked to above issue. Skill-drill test prep must be replaced with authentic learning environments. This requires time for serious professional development and planning! PD and planning time have been cut dramatically under this mayor to make room for the longer unfunded day. When teachers can’t collaborate, schools can’t improve. Test prep is not a good practice to improve learning.
Privatization: Charter schools have proliferated in areas of declining enrollment, and the mayor accelerated outsourcing of critical positions in the school building. CPS has also engaged in a new partnership with Mark Zuckerberg where private student data will likely be handed over to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative LLC. How will the negative impacts of this be addressed and outsourcing reversed? Is a candidate willing to fight the continuation of IL’s tax credit scholarship program when it is up for renewal in 5 years?
Community: Schools should be community anchors. A number of schools with lottery-based or test-score based admissions have been added to the CPS “portfolio” over the past eight years. How can schools function as community hubs when there are so many barriers to access? How will facilities decisions be made to decrease race and class segregation rather than further entrench it in our divided city?
Wrap-around supports: CPS ratio of clinicians to students is grossly inadequate. The recommended ratio for students to social workers is 1:250 in districts without high poverty. In CPS the ratio is 1:1250. Will increasing clinician positions be a priority for the next mayor?
Early childhood ed: Rahm announced a new plan recently, but we are hearing from parents that there is a lot of chaos in the current system. We plan to do some listening tours with parents this year to find out what’s going on. Candidates should explain how new preschool programs will be funded and whether expanding services for one age group will mean reduction in services for another.
Special ed: CPS’s deliberate diversion of resources away from special education resulted in the state taking over special ed. How will the next mayor instruct CPS to systemically correct this debacle and to work with the ISBE monitor?
Elected school board: We believe that checks and balances, transparency and accountability are crucial in moving the school system to a better place. We need a Board of Education that’s directly accountable to the public at the ballot box and one whose deliberation of issues doesn’t take place behind closed doors. Where do the candidates stand on a fully elected, representative school board for Chicago?
So there’s a lot of research for everyone to do, and obviously education is only one area to focus on when determining who to vote for. Stay informed, stay involved, go to candidate forums, do your homework!
And attend our annual fundraiser, Raise a Glass for RYH, on October 2 to talk with us about all the important education issues facing our schools!
Happy school year, all.
This paper was recently presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. While it gets technical fast, the conclusions should be of great interest to early childhood educators. While there is much that cannot be reliably measured, what is clear is the importance of the first five years of a child’s life.
You can download the paper here.
Diane Ravitch's blog 