What would you rather have in America’s schools; high test scores or students who are empathetic and have strong critical thinking skills? What good is it for an individual, or for American society, if students test well but also think that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election? What good is it if they have no interest in providing a strong safety net so that no Americans need to live in poverty?

Today, a full three-quarters of Trump voters falsely believe the election was “rigged and stolen, according to a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll – more than ever before. Just 9 percent, meanwhile, think Biden “won fair and square” – down from 13 percent a year ago. This is clearly stinkin’ thinkin.’ High school graduates have spent more than ten thousand hours in class, and they still cannot recognize the obvious. They are so jaded that they fall for the most unlikely of conspiracy theories.

It’s been a dozen years since we first heard of the Tea Party. They were the predecessor to MAGA. One of their strategies was to expand right-wing influence over what is taught in schools by fielding more candidates to run for school boards. Pandering to voters through fear, Tea Partiers and their allies won a number of elections and began the process of censoring more of what was being taught in schools. In the wake of the January 6, 2021 insurrection, the right has greatly increased its efforts to win school board seats and further suppress free and open thinking in our schools. New books are being added to the “banned list” such as To Kill a Mockingbird and The Hate U Give.

New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg recently wrote:

There is a quote from Ralph Reed that I often return to when trying to understand how the right builds political power. “I would rather have a thousand school board members than one president and no school board members,” the former leader of the Christian Coalition said in 1996. School board elections are a great training ground for national activism. They can pull parents, particularly mothers, into politics around intensely emotional issues, building a thriving grass roots and keeping it mobilized.

Recently the right has created a straw horse in demanding that “Critical Race Theory” not be taught in our schools. First, there are hardly any schools teaching it. That does not stop people on the right from winning school board and other legislative seats because they convince many voters that white people are being denigrated. Second, what precipitated the modern opposition to teaching CRT was the 1619 Project published by the New York Times and the Pulitzer Center. The project is not about theory; it is about history. Specifically, it addresses the origins of slavery in the United States and the impact that slavery has had for over 400 years on the lives of African-Americans, and other Americans. Our history has always been heavily weighted towards teaching about white people. If we are going to become better equipped to live in the multi-cultural society that we have, it is essential for all students to learn the history of African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Asian- Americans, Native Americans and other minorities are included. Let us not forget that by 2045, we will be a minority-majority nation.

So, what can non-MAGA people do to support more open learning in our schools? The first thing is to recognize that our schools are in crisis, and have been for some time. The evidence is clear; more than seventy million adults voted for Donald Trump in 2020. Plainly their education was short on important values like critical thinking and empathy.

Part of the problem with our schools is that they suffer from a major problem in our body politic. I’m talking about “fake news,” which almost entirely comes from the right. Our schools unwittingly teach fake news. They do a poor job of helping students recognize fake news when they hear or see it.

Similar to our political system and our society in general, our schools are very competitive with one another. The conflicts are basically fought on two levels, substance and image. This is a central reason why so many students, and adults, have skewed views of the world.

Examples of substance being taught in schools would include teaching children how to read, providing students with opportunities to take science labs, encouraging students in social studies class to play a role in a model UN or a mock legislature, or providing students with real opportunities to be involved in school decision-making.

Unfortunately, much of school is about image and bragging rights. A big part of that is the obsession with standardized tests. Like sport contests, standardized tests are measured with numbers. Those numbers can be compared, and that means they provide platforms on which schools can compete, just like football or basketball. Students are under enormous pressure to do well on standardized tests in order to make their teachers look good, their school look good, their district look good, and their state look good.

This means that many teachers are teaching to the test. Much of that involves memorization. So, students are presumably learning how to do well on tests, both those that are standardized and those that are part of their regular classroom studies.

Teachers are also under enormous pressure to teach the state-mandated curriculum. It gets to the point where many teachers become robotic in what they present to students. Spontaneity, which is another way of saying “being tuned into the moment,” becomes more and more rare. If teachers are not questioning what they are “supposed” to do, how can students learn to peacefully question teachers, and others who are in positions of authority?

This fits right in with the right-wing agenda. Follow-orders; rarely question; and always remember that you are competing against others, particularly those from “elsewhere.”

So, how can we change schools so that students develop much more in the way of critical thinking skills and empathy? Ultimately, we need teachers who are more human, or who already are human and are not afraid to show their humanity. We need teachers who are willing to be like quarterbacks, or coaches. They need to call the right plays, and often that means calling an audible (making a last-second change). What makes teaching much more difficult than running an offense or a defense in football is that what might be a good play for one student may not be a good one for another student. Teachers need to do the best that they can at making sure that they are providing the best information and techniques for each student in their classes.

So how do we do this? Here are several suggestions:

1. Reallocate resources so that technology can do more, freeing teachers to have more time. Anyone who has taught knows that teaching is far more than a full-time job. Most teachers have several hours of work to do each evening. We need to cut back on the “make-work” that consumes many teachers, and also give teachers shorter working hours. The stress that teachers experience “trickles down” to students, sometimes like a shower. We need to reduce the amount of stress and tension in our schools.
2. If we want students to become better critical thinkers and to develop more empathy, these are two of the most important qualities that we need in our teachers. But this begs several important questions:
   1. What percentage of today’s teachers are good critical thinkers?
   2. What percentage of today’s teachers feel and express empathy to their students?
   3. If these percentages are lower than what we would want, then does it have anything to do with the ways in which we teach teachers?

So much of what teachers learn in education school is so prescribed and top-down. Over time, this squeezes some of the humanity out of students who will become teachers.

Additionally, it takes a certain type of person to decide to major in education and take classes with rigid curricula. This person is often someone who is comfortable with top-down decisions and may not value autonomy and creativity as much as others.

When they finally become teachers, combine the rigidity of their training with the pressure that parents, administrators, teachers and students all feel to achieve to the max, and you have a very oppressive environment.

We need to find ways for the nation’s best and brightest, and also most empathetic to become teachers. This means looking for individuals who will bring a maximum amount of empathy and critical thinking to the classroom, regardless of what training they have had.

This is not easy. But now is an excellent time to ramp up this movement. We have a tremendous shortage of teachers and districts are now loosening their certification requirements. If you are a person who thinks that you can humanize learning for students, and make them less likely to wind up as Tea Party or MAGA members, then it is a good time to step forward. We need teachers who are civil and civic-minded to help avoid civil war.

The post Changing Our Schools is Vital to Our National Healing appeared first on Occasional Planet.

The “more is always better” approach to instructional time is a  popular and destructive fetish among educational policy makers (and one that goes hand-in-hand with standardized testing, about which I have previously written on this site.)  First, right off the bat, can we debunk the myth that the rest of the world educates its children better because it spends much more time in the classroom?  Proponents of extended school days and longer school years love to point to other countries with more rigorous time requirements.  Do Japanese students go to school for more hours than their American counterparts?  Indeed they do.

But proponents of a more sane school calendar have their own international exemplars to point to.  Finland, for example, consistently scores near the top of the international PISA exams but students there only attend school between twenty and thirty hours a week (depending on the students’ age), have very little homework, and do not have a longer school year (they also take almost no standardized tests). The point is, all such comparisons between American students and their foreign counterparts are inherently tricky—you can cherry pick results enough to support almost any idea for school reform, and often, the testing populations are different enough that such comparisons aren’t valid to start with.

Tried, but not true

Yet, just as politicians and bureacrats have embraced the maxim of “more tests=better schools” (after all, if you weigh the cow more often, she’ll get bigger, right?) so too have they embraced the notion that American students have far too much free time and should be spending more time in school each day and more days in school each year.  In fact, in a political landscape polarized like never before, this is one idea that has true bi-partisan enthusiasm.  Currently, Mayor Rahm Emmanuel is in the process of introducing extended school days in Chicago’s public schools.  But he might do well to look at what happened when the same type of “reform” was implemented in Miami’s schools, which spent $100 million to add an hour onto the school day and 10 extra days onto the school calendar.  Studies concluded that there were no significant benefits in student learning.

But why not?  Why doesn’t more time equal more learning?  The answer is so simple that it might easily be overlooked:  the quality of the instruction is far more important than the quantity.  If students actually spent their time in school involved in interactive lessons that introduced and reinforced academic concepts in interesting, creative ways, then student learning would increase.  Simply toiling away another hour on a mind-numbing worksheet will not magically raise student achievement.  But it may well make them hate school.

What should we do about summer?

After all, another question to ask regarding whether or not to increase the hours students spend in school is: at what cost?  I’m not talking about dollars and cents here, but about the importance of children having time free to spend with their families and just be kids.  I’m not the only one asking this question. “Save Our Summers” organizations have sprouted up in many states, with the mission to “preserve the summer months for outside-the-classroom childhood and family learning experiences.”  Not all education should happen inside the walls of a traditional classroom, and summer vacation allows students, with their parents, to explore individual interests in-depth.   Time off also allows students to (gasp) relax and make their own fun.

Of course, the reality is that many parents don’t have the time to shuttle their kids to a drama workshop or science camp in the summer.  They’re too busy working two part-time jobs to take them on a hike in the woods or to go see a free jazz concert in the park.  And many of these parents live in neighborhoods that are unsafe—sending their children out to ride their bikes and wander the streets is not an option.  For this very reason, many parents support the idea of keeping their kids in school for longer and more days.  At least they’re safe and “doing something.”

This is a real dilemma for parents, but the answer is not to force kids back to the classroom for more and more instructional time.  It’s to offer free, thoughtful, and optional enrichment opportunities for these students that get children active, out into their community, and exploring things in a way they wouldn’t be able to during the regular school year.  Such summer enrichment opportunities would require money, energy, and creativity to develop, and they wouldn’t easily be measured by a tidy little standardized test at the end.

No easy answers

And therein lies the problem.  The appeal of “more days in school, more hours in the school day” is that it’s easy to understand and can be implemented in a straightforward way.  It’s a great applause line in a political speech about what’s wrong with education today.  But a great applause line is not sound educational policy, and American students shouldn’t have to give up part of their childhood because politicians are unwilling to engage in the difficult work of real education reform.

[Editor’s note: This post is  the second in City Mom’s three-part series on education. Other topics in the series are: “Evaluating teachers based on students’ scores is harmful,” and “What reasonable school reform would look like.” ]

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There is a widespread misperception that, unless it’s a Catholic school or very expensive private school, to send your children to school in the city of St. Louis is to commit them to a fate of under-resourced classrooms, poorly behaved (even dangerous) classmates, incompetent teachers, and academic underachievement.  But that perception is not reality.  Or at least it’s not the entire reality of the educational options for parents in St. Louis City.

My husband and I both grew up in the county but have been city dwellers now for more than ten years.  Having three children hasn’t lessened our commitment to living here—we still love living close to beautiful parks and gardens and wonderful (free!) museums.  We enjoy our friendly neighbors, unique ethnic restaurants, and racially diverse neighborhood.  Having our children did not make us want to flee to Webster Groves (though census numbers do indicate that many young parents do just that), but it did bring us face to face with the realities of education in St. Louis City.

What we found was surprising.  One of the very best elementary schools in the entire state (outscoring every single other school in the St. Louis area, if test scores happen to be your yardstick for what constitutes a “good school”) was a five minute drive from our house.  It was Kennard Classical Junior Academy, part of St. Louis Public School System’s magnet school program.  It was socioeconomically and racially diverse, had a good curriculum, and (most importantly for us) had a community of parents and teachers who were fiercely committed to its success.  The waitlist is so impossibly long that SLPS, under Superintendent Kelvin Adams, is finally replicating Kennard’s academic program at a second site, Mallinckrodt School.

Charter school options have also grown.  Citygarden Montessori has a committed group of parents and community supporters and is expanding to a new building, Gateway Science Academy has had such a tremendous number of students trying to attend that they also now have a significant waitlist.  The Language Immersion Schools continue to add students (and languages).

Accessing these schools is not always easy.  Some (like Kennard and Mallinkrodt) require students to go through an arduous testing process before your child can “qualify” to go.  And then there’s the nightmare of the SLPS lottery and wait list.  The charter schools all have their own procedures to follow, their own deadlines and procedural intricacies.  But with a lot of persistence (and a little luck), St. Louis City residents may find their child in a school that is not just as good, but often better, than many of the schools in the surrounding public school districts.

This issue of accessibility should not be minimized though.  Investing the time to compare schooling options and figure out which best fit my child’s needs was only the beginning.  Getting my children into the school they now attend took a lot of time and energy—there’s an “inside ballgame” to be played.  You have to know who to call, how to phrase emails, who to complain to when the process starts slipping away.  My situation might not be entirely typical, but I’m not exaggerating when I say that this was the equivalent of a part-time job for me for a number of months.

And therein lies the problem.  The vast majority of parents in St. Louis City do not have the time or resources to spend investigating all these schools and then “working the system” to get their children into the one they prefer.  And they shouldn’t have to.  Maybe they’re working three part-time minimum wage jobs, maybe they are intimidated by cold-calling school bureaucrats, maybe they don’t have the writing skills to email school officials to ask about things like testing or deadlines.  Maybe their life is so chaotic from day to day that deadlines for admission fall through the cracks because they’re too worried about their electricity being shut off.  Or maybe they can even pull it together enough to fill in the application, but the energy it takes to follow-up, and follow-up, and then follow up again is just too much.

Where does the system leave those people?  It leaves them in a terrible lurch.  The sad fact is the amount of educational resources available for the children of the city of St. Louis is not getting any bigger.  In fact, with the advent of charter schools draining money away from the public schools, the economic pie is actually shrinking.  Parents in St. Louis City are chasing after those resources harder than ever.

We are fighting for the crumbs.  As a result, there is more inequality than ever within St. Louis City’s schools.  It may take a lot of time and effort, but your child could end up in an amazing, academically strong school surrounded by teachers who care.  A few of us enjoy this reality.  Or maybe you’ll land in a school where the students are woefully unprepared for academic success and the teachers are inadequate, ground down by the day to day demands of teaching in a place where they don’t feel valued or successful.  That is the reality for all too many St. Louis parents.

It shouldn’t be.  And although I can’t pretend to know exactly what it would take to solve these inequalities, I do have three humble suggestions.  First and most obviously, the pie needs to get bigger.  We need more revenue, more money poured into education in St. Louis City, not less.  Second, we need a more transparent bureaucracy.  Dealing with St. Louis Public School System is an incredibly frustrating experience where it is often difficult to get a straight answer or know what is going on.  Many of the charter schools operate under that same cloak of ambiguity.  It doesn’t seem like too much to ask all the schools that receive tax money, whether public or charter, to be more transparent in how they are run.  Finally, we need more parent advocacy.  Parents in St. Louis need to flex their political muscle, show up for meetings, and talk to each other (and the teachers) about how to make schools better.  And they need to make them better for ALL of St. Louis children, not just their own.

The post Best and worst of times for St. Louis City parents of school kids appeared first on Occasional Planet.

“Playtime is over”, says David Elkind in his March 26 New York Times Op-ed. In a previous post, I wished for the return of grade-school recess, which has become an endangered, if not extinct, activity in the world of No Child Left Behind. Elkind’s article advocates for recess as well, but with altered rules that include recess “coaches.” His argument brings me back from my fantasy of the world as it was in my own childhood. Apparently, while I wasn’t paying attention, the world moved on from my rose-colored remembrance of Lomond School in Shaker Heights, Ohio: Kids who play freely during recess in 2010 experience a level of bullying and violence that I knew nothing about. He makes his case well, so I’m reprinting his entire article:

Recess is no longer child’s play. Schools around the country, concerned about bullying and arguments over the use of the equipment, are increasingly hiring “recess coaches” to oversee students’ free time. Playworks, a nonprofit training company that has placed coaches at 170 schools from Boston to Los Angeles, is now expanding thanks to an $18 million grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Critics have suggested that such coaching is yet another example of the over-scheduling and over-programming of our children. And, as someone whose scholarly work has consistently reinforced the idea that young people need unstructured imagination time, I’d probably have been opposed to recess coaches in the past. But childhood has changed so radically in recent years that I think the trend makes sense, at least at some schools and with some students.

Children today are growing up in a world vastly different from the one their parents knew. As the writer Richard Louv has persuasively chronicled, our young people are more aware of threats to the global environment than they are of the natural world in their own backyards.

A Nielsen study last year found that children aged 6 to 11 spent more than 28 hours a week using computers, cellphones, televisions and other electronic devices. A University of Michigan study found that from 1979 to 1999, children on the whole lost 12 hours of free time a week, including eight hours of unstructured play and outdoor activities. One can only assume that the figure has increased over the last decade, as many schools have eliminated recess in favor of more time for academics.

One consequence of these changes is the disappearance of what child-development experts call “the culture of childhood.” This culture, which is to be found all over the world, was best documented in its English-language form by the British folklorists Peter and Iona Opie in the 1950s. They cataloged the songs, riddles, jibes and incantations (“step on a crack, break your mother’s back”) that were passed on by oral tradition. Games like marbles, hopscotch and hide and seek date back hundreds of years. The children of each generation adapted these games to their own circumstances.

Yet this culture has disappeared almost overnight, and not just in America. For example, in the 1970s a Japanese photographer, Keiki Haginoya, undertook what was to be a lifelong project to compile a photo documentary of children’s play on the streets of Tokyo. He gave up the project in 1996, noting that the spontaneous play and laughter that once filled the city’s streets, alleys and vacant lots had utterly vanished.

For children in past eras, participating in the culture of childhood was a socializing process. They learned to settle their own quarrels, to make and break their own rules, and to respect the rights of others. They learned that friends could be mean as well as kind, and that life was not always fair.

Now that most children no longer participate in this free-form experience — play dates arranged by parents are no substitute — their peer socialization has suffered. One tangible result of this lack of socialization is the increase in bullying, teasing and discrimination that we see in all too many of our schools.

Bullying has always been with us, but it did not become prevalent enough to catch the attention of researchers until the 1970s, just as TV and then computers were moving childhood indoors. It is now recognized as a serious problem in all the advanced countries. The National Education Association estimates that in the United States, 160,000 children miss school every day because they fear attacks or intimidation by other students. Massachusetts is considering anti-bullying legislation.

While correlation is not necessarily causation, it seems clear that there is a link among the rise of television and computer games, the decline in peer-to-peer socialization and the increase of bullying in our schools. I am not a Luddite — I think that the way in which computers have made our students much more aware of the everyday lives of children in other countries is wonderful, and that they will revolutionize education as the new, tech-savvy generation of teachers moves into the schools. But we should also recognize what is being lost.

We have to adapt to childhood as it is today, not as we knew it or would like it to be. The question isn’t whether recess coaches are good or bad — they seem to be with us to stay — but whether they help students form the age-old bonds of childhood. To the extent that the coaches focus on play, give children freedom of choice about what they want to do, and stay out of the way as much as possible, they are likely a good influence.

In any case, recess coaching is a vastly better solution than eliminating recess in favor of more academics. Not only does recess aid personal development, but studies have found that children who are most physically fit tend to score highest on tests of reading, math and science.

Friedrich Fröbel, the inventor of kindergarten, said that children need to “learn the language of things” before they learn the language of words. Today we might paraphrase that axiom to say that children need to learn the real social world before they learn the virtual one.

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Babies are organic learning machines. I’m seeing that more clearly now, from the perspective of a grandmother.  Each Wednesday, when my granddaughter arrives at my house, I see the developmental changes that have occurred in that short, seven-day interval.

At one month old, the child-rearing books tell me, she could see objects and faces only within an 18-inch range from her face.  A few weeks later, she was tracking movements with her eyes, responding to sounds by turning her head, and beginning to react to familiar faces with a hint of a smile. By six months, she was reaching for the transparent beach ball dangling over her head on her playmat. Last week, she was grasping toys and jangling them. This week, she was using her thumb and forefinger to pick at small threads on a knitted toy.  I’m literally watching a human mind evolve, one week at a time.

My granddaughter is not remarkably different from anyone else’s. Anyone who has spent time observing infants knows that they develop incrementally, from newborn “blobs” into curious, exploring babies and toddlers who absorb information osmotically, using all of their senses.

Unfortunately, our schools don’t seem to view children this way. In many classrooms, children are treated as vessels, into which the all-knowing teacher must pour information according to a recipe and a timetable. Worse yet is testing—in all its incarnations and levels—which is often information-heavy but knowledge-averse and, in some cases, a child-hating activity, pitting the teacher against the student.

Here are a few basic principles that I’ve observed, that schools could learn from babies:

1. Babies like to be talked to and played with one-to-one with someone they trust.
2. Babies learn by seeing, touching, smelling, tasting and hearing.
3. Not all babies gain the same skills or learn the same information at the same point in their chronological development.
4. Babies experiment. They learn through trial and error. Sometimes they fail in their early attempts, but they keep trying, and they learn from their own mistakes.
5. Babies and toddlers intuitively seem to know when they’ve been successful.

I’m certain that there are more. My granddaughter just isn’t old enough, yet, to have shown me what they are.

Connect the dots: Schools need to vastly reduce the ratio of kids to adults. And I’m not talking about the conventional idea of “teacher/student ratio.” We need to reinvent our idea of “teacher,” and encourage coaching, mentoring, inspiration and trust. We need to free our children from the shackles of textbooks, and teachers from endless rounds of curriculum development. We need to rediscover play, and make learning joyful again, through experience and experimentation. We also need to stop trying to measure everything, and even to allow our children to fail now and then.

How can these concepts be turned into reality? Here are a few ideas, some, admittedly, easier to accomplish than others:

1. Bring back recess. In the era of No Test Left Behind, free play has become an endangered species after kindergarten.
2. Open the classroom to more learning helpers, such as parents, older children, college students, retired people, and community volunteers. Don’t wait for certification, let people work one-to-one, or in small groups, with children, reading to them, listening to them read, playing educational games with them, being their learning partners, sharing and modeling their own love of learning, and developing relationships based on trusting, not testing.
3. Rethink the concept of “school.” Aggregating large numbers of children together in a box with smaller boxes inside isn’t working. School buildings are part of our crumbling infrastructure: But before we commit billions of dollars to repairing and rebuilding them, let’s examine whether there’s a better way—perhaps “micro-schools.”
4. Allow for spontaneity in the school day and in the schedule. As things are today, curriculum is so tight and programmed that there’s virtually no room when new opportunities come along. We need our schools to be open to ad hoc learning opportunities.
5. Rework the notion of “gifted education.” “Gifted” programs often have smaller classes, offer more experiential learning activities and encourage individualized learning. That makes no sense. If schools have determined that these special arrangements create better learning environments, then this is the environment that should be available to all children.
6. Encourage experimentation. Anyone who has tried to start an “alternative” school in recent years will tell you that it’s a herculean task, not only because of rigid bureaucratic processes, but also because anything that is perceived as different or unmeasurable by standardized testing is generally unwelcome. At least, let’s let innovative people give it a try. How about starting a “News School,” where the curriculum evolves daily, based on developing events in the world around us?

As has been said, and will be said many times on Occasional Planet, these changes will not happen instantly, and the results will not be reportable on a quarterly basis. But if schools could learn from babies, we might actually get culture change and move from teacher/administrator-centric bureaucracies to organizations that celebrate children, honor their natural curiosity, nurture their creativity, and start them on a path toward real learning.

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