(**please note: I'm posting this article for my own personal reference...this in no way indicates that I am against public/traditional schooling....homeschooling is a choice we make for our family, and I greatly respect everybody's rights to make the choices that are right for their families**) That said, it's an interesting read:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/02/06/a-really-scary-headline-about-kindergarteners/
(By Matt McClain / FOR THE WASHINGTON POST)
Rob Saxton is Oregon’s deputy
superintendent of public instruction. Jada Rupley is the early learning
system director within the state Department of Education. Together they wrote an op-ed in The Oregonian that was published online with this headline:
Kindergarten test results a ‘sobering snapshot’
What could possibly be sobering about test results from kindergarteners? What kind of tests are they giving to kindergarteners anyway?
It turns out that every public school kindergartener in Oregon was
given a kindergarten readiness test last September to see how many
numbers, letters and sounds they knew. The Oregonian reported that kids
on average entered kindergarten knowing 19 capital and lower-case
letters and seven letter sounds of at least 100 possible correct
answers.
Kindergarten readiness tests are nothing new. What is in the
ever-increasing focus on turning kindergarten, and now preschool, into
academic environments with the aim of ensuring that children can read by
the time they are in first grade. In fact, kindergarten is the new
first grade when it comes to academics.
Saxton and Rupley wrote in their piece that the results of the
testing of the kindergarteners in Oregon “provide a sobering snapshot of
the skills our children possess as they enter kindergarten.”
A working paper called “Is Kindergarten the New First Grade? The Changing Nature of Kindergarten in the Age of Accountability,”
by Daphna Bassok and Anna Rorem of the University of Virginia’s
EdPolicyWorks, a center on education policy and competitiveness, notes
that kindergarten has been transformed over the last decade, with
academic skill-being taking center stage.
For
some kids, learning to read in kindergarten is just fine. For many
others, it isn’t. They just aren’t ready. In years gone by, kids were
given time to develop and learn to read in the early grades without
being seen as failures. Even kids who took time learning how to read
were able to excel.
Today kids aren’t given time and space to learn at their own speed.
Writer Alfie Kohn wrote
in this post
about concerns he has about the new calls for universal early childhood
education. Why? Because when people talk about “high-quality programs,”
they often mean academic programs, meaning the academic focus is being
pushed down to younger and younger kids.
Very few people are talking
about the kind of education that would be offered — other than declaring
it should be “high quality.” And that phrase is often interpreted to
mean “high intensity”: an accelerated version of skills-based teaching
that most early-childhood experts regard as terrible. Poor children, as
usual, tend to get the worst of this….
… The top-down, test-driven regimen of Bush’s “No Child Left Behind”
and Obama’s “Race to the Top” initiatives in K-12 education is now in
the process of being nationalized with those Common Core standards
championed by the Times — an enterprise largely funded, and relentlessly
promoted, by corporate groups. That same version of school reform,
driven by an emphasis on global competitiveness and a determination to
teach future workers as much as possible as soon as possible, would now
be expanded to children who are barely out of diapers.
That doesn’t leave
much time for play.
But even to the extent we want to promote meaningful learning in young
children, the methods are likely to be counterproductive, featuring an
emphasis on the direct instruction of skills and rote rehearsal of
facts. This is the legacy of behaviorism: Children are treated as
passive receptacles of knowledge, with few opportunities to investigate
topics and pose questions that they find intriguing. In place of
discovery and exploration, tots are trained to sit still and listen, to
memorize lists of letters, numbers, and colors. Their success or failure
is relentlessly monitored and quantified, and they’re “reinforced” with
stickers or praise for producing right answers and being compliant.
This dreary version of early-childhood education isn’t just
disrespectful of children; decades of research show it simply doesn’t
work well — and may
even be damaging.
Bassok, one of the authors of the research paper mentioned above,
noted that while there are fun and engaging ways to teach young kids
academic material, she worries that so much emphasis will be put on
learning to read that other things, like play and social interactions,
will be lost.
It’s already been happening for
years, and it appears to be getting worse. The end result will be kids
who hate school even earlier than they do now.
Kids like to play. Kids learn from play. Why it doesn’t make sense to just let them play is beyond me.
–
Here’s a position paper on the testing of young children by Defending the Early Years, a
non – profit project of the Survival Education Fund, a 501(c)(3) tax –
exempt educational organization based in Watertown, Massachusetts. (Find
more information at deyproject.org or write to
geralynbywater@gmail.com.)
What is the problem?
Today, the majority of classrooms for preschool, kindergarten and primary age children are required to address
content standards that
prescribe what children are expected to learn. These standards are
intended to insure that worthwhile subject matter is taught.
Performance standards have been developed to find out if children have learned the prescribed content.
While standards are helpful for identifying valuable content, they
can also have a negative impact on children and programs. Some of the
problems with standards are that they are not always based on knowledge
of how children grow and learn, and often do not take into account
children’s needs, capacities, cultures, and unique characteristics.
Standards can lead to teaching of skills in ways that are not effective
or meaningful, to the narrowing of the curriculum, and to less time for
play and hands-on learning experiences that are important foundations
for later school success.
It is useful to find out if children have learned the prescribed
content, but the way this is most often done is through testing – which
also can have a negative impact on children and programs. One of the
major problems with the tests is that they are often not based on
knowledge of child development and are therefore not suited to the
developmental abilities of young children. Another problem is that tests
can only measure a narrow range of knowledge and skills, so they often
miss important objectives of early childhood education like creativity,
problem-solving, and social and emotional development. Teachers who want
children to do well on tests may eliminate worthwhile learning
experiences, introduce skills too early, or narrow the curriculum in
order to “teach to the test”.
Research shows that children learn best when they have hands-on
learning experiences, engage in structured play, experience facts within
meaningful contexts, invent their own problems to explore and solve,
and share their own solutions. The current emphasis on standards and
testing has led many schools to over-focus on assessment at the expense
of meeting children’s developmental needs and teaching meaningful
content. Play and activity-based learning have been disappearing from
many early childhood classrooms, and – along with them – children’s
natural motivation and love of learning.
What could be done to address this problem?
Program practices:
1. Promote programs that are based on current research on how young children learn best.
2. Promote meaningful, hands-on learning experiences in classrooms for young children.
3. Work to ensure that teachers provide well-thought out educational
experiences that demonstrate knowledge and respect for each child.
4. Work to ensure that children have literacy experiences that
include storytelling, quality children’s literature, and acting out
stories rather than activities that isolate and drill discrete skills.
5. Help teachers skillfully build curriculum from what children can
do and understand instead of direct teaching skills that are
disconnected from children’s understanding.
6. Encourage schools to respect the language and culture of children
and their families, to encourage families to take ownership and to make
sure that their history and experiences are included and valued.
7. Encourage schools to design schedules that provide ample time for families and school personnel to meet and work together.
8. Work to ensure that teachers who have specialized training in
early childhood education are placed in classrooms for young children.
Assessment practices:
1. Encourage policies that protect children from undue pressure and
stress and from judgments that will have a negative impact on their
lives in the present and in the future.
2. Promote the use of assessments that are based on observations of children, their development and learning.
3. Work to ensure that classroom assessments are used for the purpose of improving instruction.
4. Support efforts to eliminate testing of young children that is not intended to improve classroom practice.
5. Eliminate labeling and ranking of children based on standardized tests.
