<p>The whole thing is just pathetic and wrong. We’ll see the pendulum swing on this eventually, but at what cost?</p>
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<p>Hear, hear!!! I agree completely. But don’t expect it. One of my biggest disappointments with the new administration is the Sec. of Ed., Duncan. He’s a fan of drill and kill, long days, no summers, and compete, compete, compete. It’s all about test scores and jobs. He’s outdoing Bush’s folk with NCLBesque BS.</p>
<p>I have read that gifted kids often do things later (this was not my own opinion, but was in the NY Times I believe), and our own experience with one of our kids supported that. I will try to find the article. It also said that gifted kids often do things more slowly, because they go deeper. Again, we saw this with our son, who took a long time to do math. There may be a difference between “smart” and “gifted”, since the latter is considered a special need. I have no idea. The point is that a lot of parents are convinced that doing things earlier is better, and means that their child is intelligent. There is no point in learning letters until you can use them to read, either.</p>
<p>My reference to the Obamas was not at all implying that only public school parents read Elkind and Kohn. It was a reference to Obama’s misguided emphasis on accountability through testing, which is only going to continue the problems in our schools. In other words, maybe if his kids went to public schools, he would be persuaded to change some of his ideas about education. Even at the town level, none of our selectmen send their children to public schools.</p>
<p>both my kids attended private schools through at least 2nd grade.</p>
<p>The motivation for this, was not that we felt private schools were superior ( although I did smile when later I saw some of the wealthiest geeks in the country also send their kids to these - experiential & child based,- not obviously academic schools), but because our public schools were quite clear at “teaching to the middle” and since my kids had strengths/weaknesses on either side of the spectrum- but not so much in the middle, I had been advised by both public school teachers and authorities on early learning- to look outside our urban public school system.</p>
<p><a href=“http://depts.washington.edu/cscy/[/url]”>http://depts.washington.edu/cscy/</a></p>
<p>Gosh - when would my brother learn about color transfers? </p>
<p>He painted the inside of a fire hat and then wore it while racing around in the sand box on his first day of kindergarten. Remains one of my favorite images when he came home from school, hair covered in yellow paint with a little sand mixed in…</p>
<p>It is so sad and there is absolutely no data to show that it is working at all.</p>
<p>Just like Head Start (where the impact seems to wear off by 3rd grade), I expect that any advantages of such “rigor” in kindergarten are gone by a certain point.</p>
<p>I finished my BA this summer (22 years from start to finish!) and had planned on going on for my MA in teaching. But I’m taking a break from school for several reasons, one of the big ones is that I am not sure I can be a teacher with the way things are run.</p>
<p>My experience has been that the earlier the child is exposed to traditional, formal schooling, the more likely they are to associate school with stress. When I think that just a few years before that they were happily learning all day long in their toddler years, it breaks my heart.</p>
<p>I also loathe all the emphasis on the traditional academic subjects. My kid has done great in school because that’s his strength and his standardized testing reflects that. But what about the kids who have different strengths? We get rid of art, music and all the rest which is a virtual guarentee to make those kids feel like failures, to feel that they are not intelligent. </p>
<p>I have friends that have switched from teaching elementary to teaching pre-K because it’s the only place left where they are not expected to “teach to the test.” Not that they don’t have to do a ridiculous amount of paperwork, but at least they can keep the insanity away from the kids they teach.</p>
<p>I would like for just one school district to put normal child development first and let the learning stem from that.</p>
<p>It’s rather funny, because to pass the state-mandated K-early childhood tests, you have to answer the questions in the “child-centered” way - which is the way the schools should be run. But as soon as you have passed that test and are holding your teaching certificate in your hot and sweaty hand, you have to forget everything you have just learned in the teacher certification program and teach as if your kindergarteners were third-graders in military school! :(</p>
<p>For what it is worth - Mr. Yellow Hair now has a masters in computer science and is programming away to his hearts content… No sign of damage to his life being unable to read until (gasp) his first grade year…</p>
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<p>Here we go again! And not surprisingly, I could not disagree more. </p>
<p>It is with people like Arne Duncan that we might FINALLY be forced to recognize how flawed our education system truly is. A system where the longer children stay in public education … the least learned they become. When compared to other countries, the US is holding its own until middle-school, and then start declining in such a way that it becomes a cause of embarrassment, especially when adding the little tidbits that we are one of the biggest spenders and rarely meet reasonable graduation rates. </p>
<p>Fwiw, the fact that US children remain competitive before middle school can be traced to the ability of parents to “fill the gaps” by helping kids OUTSIDE the classroom, something that dimishes rapidly as a student reaches higher grades. </p>
<p>The only conclusion that can be drawn is that throwing more money at a broken system is NOT the answer. The answer is simple … more money should be reallocated to COMPETENT teacher and the bad teachers who have protected for too long by administrations that sold their souls to the corrupt unions should be removed. In addition, it is also time to consider that our entire system that purports to educate our future educators is lacking, as the education is concentrated on form over substance. We need more teachers who UNDERSTAND the subject they teach and much fewer generalists who passed a modicum of pedagogy classes and other filler classes targeting the lower denominators of our undergraduates. </p>
<p>In the meantime, nobody should be surprised why great teachers --and there are many-- leave the system and few new great teachers join the forces. Our educational system is simply paying the price for having been extremely lax in imposing minimum standards for teacher’s preparation. Simply stated, an education degree --with very few exceptions-- is the easiest degree to obtain at the undergraduate level, while the master’s degrees attract the students with the lowest GRE among all careers. And then, we ought to consider the great number of truly horrendous and third-rate colleges that keep on graduating new “teachers” who should never have graduated from a reasonably competitive college. The only reason they can do that with impunity is that they know that the future professional “testing” will be as liberal and rigged as theirs. </p>
<p>If we want to step out of this mess, we ought to turn to other countries and check how they prepare AND reward their educators with higher wages and tons of respect, with the caveat that only the best and brightest are considered worthy of being educators. </p>
<p>In the United States, we swear by the opposite! It could be that Garland is correct about the NCLB being total BS. Perhaps, we should teach the educators how to pass the tests themselves! In the meantime, if there was ever a cabinet post Obama got “right” it was his choice of Duncan as Secretary of Education. Although his second choice would not have been bad … at all.</p>
<p>What impresses you most about Duncan–that he has never taught for even a day, that his “results” in Chicago were fudged, or that he basically got through Harvard on the strength of being a passably good basketball player?</p>
<p>worst. idea. ever.</p>
<p>Or that he keeps using the word “incent” and thinks all kids should be able to be the best–best as defined as better than everyone else…</p>
<p>I see more “ADD” on the horizon.</p>
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<p>Oh what a surprising rebuttal! </p>
<p>Of course, isn’t it also safe to assume that athletes cannot be decent students? Even when, just as Duncan did, they do graduate magna cum laude and actually write a thesis worth reading.</p>
<p>Of course athletes can be great students. Listening to anything Duncan says suggests to me that he wasn’t. I will confess I haven’t read his thesis. His inability to use English well, and the illogic of so much of what he say since then, might of course be misleading.</p>
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<p>I want to highlight this and respond to it, because it’s a total myth, and a very harmful one. There was one study about 20 years ago that purported to show that the beneficial effects of Head Start – very much in evidence throughout grade school – were no longer visible in children’s middle-school test scores. That study has entered the public consciousness as “Head Start doesn’t work; its benefits vanish.”</p>
<p>Since then, there has been a great deal more longitudinal research on the long-term effect of Head Start and related programs. The children who go through them are more liklely to graduate from high school, to attend college, to graduate from college, and to have no criminal record. On average they are happier, healthier, and hold better paying jobs than similarly situated children who did not have that kind of preschool program. Chicago Nobelist James Heckman has been going around for the last 5-6 years promoting the idea that Head Start-style preschool programs are perhaps a unique example of public investment that actually pays off financially over the long term, with a rate of return in the vicinity of 4-5%.</p>
<p>I suspect if we judged parents by the behavior of their 13-14 year-olds, there would be many more ineffective parents than if we looked at 21-22 year-olds. That seems to be the case with Head Start, too.</p>
<p>This would all stop if in one town large enough to make a difference a sizable number of parents decided that their children would not participate in standardized testing. We need one grassroots revolt on the national news and many will follow.</p>
<p>One day, one school, one parental group says, “sorry, our children won’t be at school today. We’re not taking the state required NCLB tests. Tough. We’ll see you tomorrow when it’s time to teach and learn.”</p>
<p>Any volunteers?</p>
<p>The latest research I’ve seen (well heard on NPR) is that Head Start is good, but it’s even better to start even earlier and educate the parents as well. I’m really encouraged by what I hear about the Harlem Children’s Initiative and “Baby College” and I’m thrilled that Obama is a supporter. [Public</a> Radio International’s This American Life](<a href=“http://www.hcz.org/press-a-publications/151-this-american-life]Public”>http://www.hcz.org/press-a-publications/151-this-american-life)</p>
<p>As for NCLB, I’ve got mixed feelings about it, I hate the teaching to the test, and I hate the fact that the kids at the top are getting a smaller share of the attention, but I do think we need some way to monitor children and make sure they are progressing and to judge whether particular teachers or schools or programs are effective. I think we need national standards without totally losing the ability for classroom teachers to have some flexibility.</p>
<p>speihei,</p>
<p>it’s been done.</p>
<p>[Scarsdale</a> Mothers Succeed in First Boycott of 8th-Grade Test](<a href=“The Learning Network - The New York Times”>The Learning Network - The New York Times)</p>