REMINDER: George W. Bush’s 2002 No Child Left Behind (NCLB) claimed it “has raised expectations and improved results.”
REMINDER: NCLB’s follow-up, the Barack Obama/secretary of Education Arne Duncan ’s July 24, 2009, $4.35 billion Race to the Top and June 2, 2010 Common Core Standards claimed that its “innovative strategies were likely to improve results for students, long-term gains in school and school system capacity, and increased productivity and effectiveness.”
Together, these “reforms” turned test scores and rankings into an obsession and kindergarten into the new first grade.
THE RESULT: The “children’s garden” got itself turned upside down, filling up with desks and chairs, plus an official curriculum, with kids, especially boys, paying the price.
THE RESULT: On the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), aka “the Nation’s Report Card:”
- Reading scores are down nationally in both 4th and 8th grades. No state saw reading gains in either grade, compared to 2022. “A third (33%) of 8th graders are not even reading at the NAEP Basic level—a greater percentage than ever before.”
- Math scores in 4th grade, math scores are up nationally by 2 points, but flat for lower performing students, as well as 8th grader after their 8-point drop in 20.
Meanwhile, as University of Virginia researcher Daphna Basson explains, “Academic skill-building has really taken center stage in today’s kindergarten classrooms in a way that wasn’t the case in the 1990s… We know that early social skills are important predictors of students’ learning trajectories. So, our worry is that, if done inappropriately, the focus on academics may have really pushed those other kinds of learning opportunities aside.
I saw that first-hand as a student teacher supervisor. Over the course of the semester, my student teacher was tasked with teaching his kindergartners the following:
- Draw a flower and write the word beneath it. Several couldn’t.
- Listen to a story, then write a sentence with commas in a series. Most couldn’t.
- Listen to a story and attend to examples written on bulletin board paper where elbow macaroni stood in for quotation marks, then write a few sentences containing dialogue. Not one child could.
Case in point:
- In 1998, 67% of teachers taught students how to write sentences every week.
- In 2010, 94% did.
- Between 1998 and 2010, daily music dropped to 16%, and
- Daily art instruction dropped to 11%
Case in point:
- In 1998, 31% of teachers thought kids should learn to read in kindergarten.
- In 2010, that figure jumped to 80%.
Observing that kindergarten classrooms are “repressive in a way that’s going to be harder for boys than it is for girls, Susan Engel, founding director of Williams College’s Program in Teaching, explains, “If you aren’t’ given a chance to think the way you think best, which is with your body and with your voice in play, you’re not going to think well.”
Rigid scheduling and too little time for playing and jumping around isn’t healthy for anyone.
In fact, in an October EdWeek Research Center survey of 611 K-12 teachers, respondents said that, overall, boys…
- Are having more trouble sitting still.
- Are less focused.
- Are less engaged in class.
- Are less willing to take leadership roles.
- Are generally less motivated.
Score that…
~ And you say?
~ With thanks, Carol
