Stop Pathologizing Children

[Hannah Bell]

I wrote about a school in Portland, OR called Rosa Parks Elementary. 91% of the kids at Rosa Parks are eligible for free or reduced price lunch...Then, on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, they do nothing but the academic curriculum. No art, no music, no PE, no library, no nuthin’ for 4 out of 5 days.

They have a single lunch/recess period that lasts about 40 minutes. The kids eat lunch first and then go to recess. A Kindergarten teacher at Rosa Parks that I talked to estimated that recess was about 20 to 25 minutes long, depending on when the kids finish lunch. School starts at 8:30 and goes until 2:45. So that means for those 4 out of 5 days, they have 25 minutes to be goofy and run around and be little kids in a span of 6 hours. The rest is all business.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the tracks, students in the affluent neighborhood school of Ainsworth get not one, not two, but three recesses per day. At Ainsworth, Kindergarten kids get PE, music, art and singing once a week each. They get 30 minutes for PE and music and an hour for art. Singing happens every Friday...

The upshot? Low-income students and low-income minority students are being given a qualitatively inferior education because they are said to be “behind” in reading and math. We have to stop pathologizing children for being where they are in their development, stop robbing them of a broad-based educational experience in the name of raising their test scores, and stop punishing low-income kids for being at the effect of the ravages of poverty in the name of closing the so-called “achievement gap...”

http://transformeducation.blogspot.com/2009/03/stop-pathologizing-children.html

[n2doc]

1. Nothing but 3r's 4 days a week sounds like an excellent recipe

If your intention is to get kids to hate learning and school. Amazing how what worked for us and our parents, educationally, is swept aside so easily by the testing obsession.

[eilen]

2. What do they do on Wednesday? nt

[MissB]

24. That may be the day that the PE, Art and Music teacher show up.

One of the in-between (not rich, not poor) elementary schools in Portland that we looked at had a situation like this - they shared the music, art and PE teacher along with a librarian. The library was only open one.day.a.week.

Maybe Wednesday is the day that the visiting teachers come and do the "extras".

Wrong on so many levels. Those "extras" are what helps so many kids learn better, or stay in school, or find their passion. Math and music = needed for each other.

The PPS district is trying to even out the course offerings amongst the high schools. You can bet that the more affluent neighborhood schools are squirming on that one.

(Our school has dedicated PE, art and music teachers as well as a full time librarian. Our kids also get three recesses a day. Not surprisingly, we're a high-achieving school.)

[Igel]

3. That's pathologizing them?

Hardly.

BTW, my kindergartner's in school from 8:30 to 3:30, with a 30 minute lunch and 30 minutes of recess.

The reason is simple: The community I live in, broadly speaking, is academically underachieving. They score below grade level by around 7th grade--and that's *with* preschool and all the academic stuff in kindergarten. The local high school was proud that it just nipped in as "acceptable" by 0.1%; that it was because the Latino population had increased by a few percent, with the subpopulations scoring exactly as they had for the previous 3 years but with Latinos doing better than blacks was apparently lost on the innumerate administrators.

These kids are behind in reading in 7th grade. And 9th grade. And 12th grade. They're pathologized because they have lower graduation rates and lower college acceptance rates because they can't read or write as well, because their GPA is lower, because they struggle with general math. They go into AP classes and most fail the AP test. Once in college they have lower graduation rates, by far, than whites or Asians.

They're pathologized because their lower education and training levels mean they don't get the kinds of jobs that their white and Asian peers get. It means that they will earn less; it means that they accumulate less, and their families, on average, turn out less wealthy.

They're pathologized because it means that they impart less information to their kids. That means their kids will be pathologized because they'll not value education and will fall behind their white and Asian peers in school. Meaning their kids will graduate high school at a lower rate, be accepted to college at a lower rate, and wind up with poorer paying jobs with less wealthy families.

They're pathologized because they don't meet the standards that people like us expect of them. Because their parents don't equip them properly, because we don't dare blame the parents so we assume responsibility, Grand-Inquisitor style. Then we, apparently, are to blame for pointing out that they need help to meet standards.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

4. But the "drill baby drill" approach will have the opposite effect

It will make them think of learning as drudgery, not as joy.

Furthermore, elementary school children NEED recess. The teachers in the one-room schoolhouses knew that. Kids that age, like all young creatures, are naturally full of energy, and if they can't let off steam, they either tune out or become disruptive.

Two fifteen-minute periods, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, running around outside is NOT going to prevent kids from learning. In fact, it will HELP.

You want kids to learn?

Get them interested in something. Anything. Use a multimodal approach.

For example, you want them to learn about the American Revolution? You have them read facts, you have them historical fiction, you show age-appropriate movies, you have them draw their favorite historical figure, you teach them songs from the era. You GET THEM INTERESTED.

If they are INTERESTED, they will learn to read.

You seem to despise inner city children, to think that they are incapable of learning without a boot camp environment. Back when I was in graduate school, one of my roommates was a docent at the university art gallery. She enjoyed the inner city kids, especially the elementary school kids, because they actually got excited about the art and gave very imaginative answers when she asked them to guess what the painting was about or why the artist had painted it that way.

That's the secret. Get them excited. Introduce them to ideas outside their everyday world.

If you haven't seen the documentary The Hobart Shakespearians, do so.

[proud2BlibKansan]

5. And forcing them into an all academic schedule

with no PE, Art or Music 4 days a week is going to help?

When did we stop paying attention to child development when we design programs in our schools?

[LeftyMom]

6. Developmentally inappropriate expectations won't close an acheivement gap.

Back when I was in kindy and dinosaurs roamed the Earth, kids weren't expected to show up knowing how to read, and almost none of them did (I was one who did, and I was frequently bored during lessons on letters.) Kindergarten was a half day long, which included recess, singing, crafts, a snack and a short nap. It was, in short, a developmentally appropriate transition from nursery school to the first grade, with an emphasis on learning school routines and familiarizing kids with letters and numbers, with a little sight reading toward the end of the year.

These days kindergarten is a whole day, frequently entirely academic, and results are, if not worse, certainly no better. Why? Because five year olds haven't changed in the 24 years since I've been one. Nobody who has spent any time around five year olds thinks that they can successfully handle long stretches without physical activity, or concentrate for hours at a time. It's just not developmentally appropriate, at all, no matter what the social class of the kids involved.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

7. My mother was a kindergarten teacher in the olden days, and she always said

that the purpose of kindergarten was NOT to teach children to read. It was to make them READY and EAGER to read. The toys and games all had a purpose: developing eye and hand coordination, arranging sequences of events in order, developing memory, developing awareness of shapes and sounds. It wasn't unstructured play.

The kindergarten academics advocates may not know that the UK tried teaching five-year-olds to read in some pilot programs bout forty years ago.

They dropped the programs after a few years because they found that any advantage the early readers had disappeared completely. By age ten, there was no difference between the average scores of the classes that had started reading at six and the classes that had started reading at five.

Some European countries (including RUSSIA, for heaven's sake) don't teach reading until age seven.

[LeftyMom]

8. That seems to be true of ECE efforts generally.

By the third grade, preschool attendees are indistinguishable academically and behaviorally from kids who never set foot in a classroom until their first day of kindergarten.

Teaching kids faster than they're ready to learn doesn't work. Teaching them when they're interested and ready is almost impossible to screw up.

[Posteritatis]

9. Seven? Yow!

I understand the reasoning behind not dropping five-year-olds into a wholly academic program from day one - that's just crazy talk - but I took it for granted that by hitting something in the 5-7 range the kids would have at least some basic reading skills.

I'm clueless on the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of starting that late, but it's alien and surprising to me in equal measure. Wow.

Tangent time!

I don't remember much along those lines from kindergarten, which in my own experience was a lot of that unstructured-or-is-it? play, but we had quite a few reading assignments and exercises and the like in Primary and grade one. They were a set of boxes and filing-folder type things off at the back of the classroom, and when time came to work on reading we were allowed to basically pick the ones we wanted to work with based on difficulty levels and broad topics, with comprehension, reading-out-loud, etc exercises attached. I and a few of my classmates were reading way ahead of grade level and basically devoured the most advanced ones from each box before doing our own things, but out of curiosity I looked through most of them to see what the rest were like. Even at the time I was fascinated by them; it looked like they did a pretty good job of running the full gamut from "barely able to recognize what letters are" to what certainly were for six-year-olds pretty complex, multiple-paragraph sorts of things.

A lot of us at the time loved the things; it wasn't necessarily that they were fun/interesting or the like as much as the fact that even then we could recognize that we were given a little bit of choice in what we were going to do there. Someone could work on the sheets they were comfortable working on, if they started working on the next level up in difficulty they could see Tangible Accomplishment right in front of their eyes, and people who blew through the top-level ones were allowed to do more independent reading by the teachers.

I dunno; those boxes of color-coded cards and sheets stuck with me more than pretty much anything else academic from that whole time in school. This thread just reminded me of them.

[Mariana]

11. The SRA Reading Laboratories set?

That sounds like what you're describing. Those were great. I liked them so much that I bought an old set from the '70's on ebay for my daughter when she was learning to read. I even remembered a few of the stories and essays.

[Posteritatis]

12. I think those are the ones, yeah

Looked them up and they look different from the ones I was using, but twenty-five years will do that to something obviously. I was probably using a set of similar vintage to the one you picked up; definitely glad to see that they're still around.

(Also, going by the age ranges they put on them, I'm glad to see my teachers put all the boxes in one classroom; that was certainly a boon for quite a few of us.)

[alarimer]

27. That sounds like my kindergarten too.

My teacher, though, was the dinosaur. I already knew how to read also and was bored and frequently in trouble because of it. But my teacher (or the school maybe?) was adamantly opposed to my reading. She was kind of a battle-axe frankly and I am not sure why she was a kindergarten teacher.

[Hannah Bell]

10. "Low-income students and low-income minority students are being given a qualitatively inferior

education because they are said to be “behind” in reading and math."


Because doing more of what doesn't work is a sure path to "success," isn't it?

As is removing resources; I find that works so well with kids.

[Greyhound]

26. Seems to be Obama's belief. n/t

[alphafemale]

13. well then...

What if they had that Montessori - learning is fun approach like the rich kids down the block?

[lostnfound]

14. Will success be when a different group is "below average" instead?

The magician waves a scarf, look over here. "People like us expect of them.." Pushed into developmentally inappropriate schoolwork and it is ALL important not that they finish the marathon but that they finish in the top 50%. Not that they learn to read, but that they learn to read at least 2 weeks earlier than "the average". The focus is absurd. EXACTLY HALF of all students WILL BE below average. So let's make their childhood miserable for them, shall we? God knows we don't need any artists or musicians in the new order.
Disgusting authoritarians. Grand theft childhood. If you want to do something real to make kids smarter, abolish the Cartoon Network in homes with humans under 18.

[northofdenali]

15. I'll probably get slammed hard for this -

but I think elementary school SHOULD be based entirely on academics, with some emphasis on arts/music as it fits in with the academic teaching and learning.

We are turning out way, way too many children from middle and high schools who cannot read, cannot spell, cannot perform basic math functions, do not know any of the rules of basic (chemical, biological) science - because so much time is spent on "social" activities.

Schools that once boasted academic achievement now boast athletic achievement. We have freshmen in college who cannot read a textbook.

School is for learning, not socializing.

[cornermouse]

17. Children (and adults) need a break from hard stuff

at times. Whether it's physical exercise like P.E. and recess or whether its a break away from routine (ex. art and music) children need to step away from the books and rest their brain so they can learn more efficiently. If you make them stare at books all day without a break, you get a child that isn't going to learn much.

I would point most adults typically get at least two 15 minute breaks a day in addition to a lunch period. Why would we treat our children worse than we treat other adults?

[northofdenali]

18. I agree 100% about outdoor time/play time.

It's the indoor non-teaching/learning time I'm griping about.

I had an eye-opener a couple of months ago. I was at a local middle school, helping set up for a local election. There was a cirriculum posted. Classes included anger management, how to get along with people, how to host/hostess a party!, why you shouldn't tweet/text in class......

No. Just no. I agree that time out and away from classroom and learning is absolutely necessary. But classroom time should be spent learning to reason, think, read, explore - not on social issues. I don't care how poor the school is, or how disadvantaged the students. If they are taught to LEARN, they are going to be winners in all walks of life. I've seen it happen over and over and over.

[Hannah Bell]

19. "If they are taught to LEARN, they are going to be winners"

"winners" are defined by the presence of "losers". no losers = no winners.

someone *must* lose, it's the capitalist way.

ps: kids don't need to be *taught* to learn, they're hard-wired to learn. if they weren't able to learn, your reaching them would have zip effect.

[northofdenali]

23. I did not, and would not, imply "winner vs. loser".

I will, and always have, imply learners = MUCH happier people, much more satisfied with life, much better at contenment, satisfaction and much more able to "get along" with others.

[Hannah Bell]

25. "winner" is meaningless without a loser, whether that's what you intended or not.

similarly "rich" is meaningless without "poor".

they're co-occurring phenomena, & not just semantically.

[LWolf]

28. Excellent point.

The goal of public education is to offer equal opportunity for all, not to create winners and losers.

[cornermouse]

29. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that given today's

atmosphere, anger management is a good thing to teach children whose parents may not be teaching them how to be angry without being physically aggressive or abusive.

[rucky]

16. I taught in an environment like that.

no recess. silent lunch, then back to class. PE/Music/Art/Library 40 minutes a week each.

By about 2pm, there was no education going on. Just squirmy kids and exhausted teachers trying their best. It's an environment that sets up failure for both kids and teachers.

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

20. Funding for schools is in no way equitible and until school funding is done at a state level and

not locally, there will be these inequities. I wanted to say Federal, but after NCLB I don't trust education in their hands at all.

I live in a mostly very prosperous suburb of NYC, yet the towns that are the most expensive have more money going to the students than the lower income areas. Then there is a definite correlation between how many students matriculate to college and have higher SAT scores in the more affluent areas of the county than the less prosperous ones. This is just plain wrong.

[AnArmyVeteran]

21. ALL LEARNING helps a person learn in other areas too...

The people who believe art and music are useless subjects are ignorant. EVERYTHING a person learns helps that person learn in other areas. Art and music are integral to math and science. When a person can express creativity in one subject they can use that same creativity in every other subject. Without a creative, inquisitive mind advances in math and science would be impossible.

I worked for an employer once which only paid for courses directly linked to their business, but I told them how shortsighted that was. I told them EVERYTHING we learn accents and supports all other things we learn.

Being exposed to music and art open up creative doors that allow people to learn easier in every other subject. When I hear mostly conservatives attacking art and music it reminds me of how ignorant they are. I suppose the reason most of the best teachers are liberal is because they have open minds, and people with open minds are usually able to open the minds of those they are teaching.

[LWolf]

22. We are pushed hard

to take kids OUT of recesses, art, etc. for remediation and tutoring when they aren't meeting benchmarks. It's all about meeting AYP.

There is a finite number of minutes in a school day, and the only way to give students MORE is to take away from something else.

Remove the high-stakes testing, and this would not be necessary.