My thoughts on this idea -

A child who can read at three years old is brilliant?

Ten year olds who carry on conversations about politics are geniuses?

We all know that Einstein was considered learning disabled. Thomas Edison did not speak until he was four years old. Over and over we can find examples of the GREATEST THINKERS of our time being weaker students. What does this say about our expectations of children? In the almost twenty years that I have been intimately acquainted with elementary curriculum and child development, I have been agitated constantly by the people who want to see children hurry up and learn.

Dee Coulter finally put my thoughts into clear words when she stated (paraphrased) our habit of pushing children to mature cognitively, socially and emotionally is cutting their brain development short. Apparently when we become mature, our brain growth pretty much stops. And that "mature" seems to be pretty closely connected to sexual awareness and activity.

Why do we want to dress our little girls like women and our little boys like men? Why do we want them to learn to read and write and add and subtract younger and younger and younger? Why do we expect children to sit still and be silent for ridiculous lengths of time? Why do we let them watch movies and TV shows and cartoons that address adult themes and violence and sex?

Children should be moving, they should be talking, they should be dressed in play clothes so they can climb and run and jump and dig in the dirt. The longer they are allowed to be children, the more their brains will grow and develop and allow DEEP thinking - GREAT thinking.

I believe Dr. Maria Montessori and Steiner (Waldorf) really figured out the BEST ways to help children learn. Both of them insisted on allowing children to be empowered and in control of their own education. If we let them learn what interests them, eventually they will learn everything they need to know, but we insist on cramming our curriculum into their heads READY OR NOT! And we wonder why students are disenfranchised by the end of Elementary school.

THe wise words of Simon & Garfunkel come to mind..

Slow down, you move too fast.

You've got to make the morning last!

Childhood should be savored...

Try reading Art Costa's (and co-author) HABITS OF MIND. He will teach anyone - young or old - how to learn more effectively. In fact, some research done recently identified four of the sixteen habits that he identified as the strongest indicators of success in college.

One example - persistence. We tell children to persist - do not give up - you can do it if you decide to - but we don't teach them HOW to persist! And we can. And we should. It would be a much more worthwhile lesson than how to square a binomial. 

I often hear stories of students who were struggling and would generally skip classes every day, but would NEVER miss the one class in which the teacher CARED.

I work in an elementary school and I am starting to train new teachers, and have several ideas about the lack of motivation in students by the time they reach middle and high school. But I am curious to know what others think is most important.

What was it about that teacher whose class you never missed (or who simply motivated you to go the extra mile)? Even students who love school and never missed any classes surely had certain teachers or other adults they remember who somehow inspired them or piqued their interest. 

Please share your inspirations - student teachers are DYING for this information! 

I think the idea was honorable and worthwhile, but the implementation has sucked out all the possible good that NCLB could have achieved. Testing, testing and more testing is a waste of valuable teaching time.

Last year I was so incensed by all of the testing, that I kept my 4th grade son home! I was outraged when I realized that the 4th graders in our school had to take THREE different high stakes assessments within five weeks. My son, an enthusiastic and self-motivated learner, was STRESSED out to the point of tears because he was worried he would not do well on the writing assessment. Never mind that he'd made HUGE gains in his writing skills that year! All that would matter to the state of Florida in the end was whether or not he excelled on one 45 minute writing prompt in February. 

How is this helping our children?

How is this helping our nation?

NCLB? How about more like NCLT - "No Child Left Untested" ENOUGH ALREADY

 Maya Angelou

Education is not a finite process. It is not initiated at the morning bell and terminated at dismissal. It does not begin after Labor Day and end in June. And it most definitely does not start on the first day of Kindergarten and end on graduation day. Perhaps most importantly, it does not begin in 3rd grade (or whenever your state begins state assessments) and it should not end after testing is completed in March.

Unfortunately, our current education system focuses on a goal being achieved, a test being passed and getting the "right" answer. 

How do we improve the education system?

There are several foundational blocks necessary to build lifelong learning. These are not new ideas - there are MULTITUDES of research to support these. 

1. Learning must be relevant. If we learn skills because we NEED them to do something that matters to us, then we remember them. For example, students working on measuring and calculating the area of a plot of land in which they will be growing a garden to provide vegetables for class snacks are going to care about the formula for calculating area. In fact, they will probably be able to derive the formula. Textbooks, while an "easy fix" are very ineffective, especially if the textbook is the primary (or exclusive) source of information and work provided to the students.

2.  Extrinsic rewards that are offered for activities that people enjoy doing tend to decrease motivation. In other words, if children love to read and we start giving them stickers or stars or "A's" for reading 30 minutes each day, they will be likely to eventually read less often and derive less pleasure from reading. Rewards should be reserved for use when they are needed - to motivate people to do things they don't enjoy. In addition, learning associated with grades becomes learning for the grade, not for the knowledge. There are MANY students who graduate college with honors but cannot remember the content they learned once the test is completed or access their learning in practical applications on the job.

3. We are more brilliant and can achieve greater success when we learn to work together with others. Collaborative learning environments encourage students to listen to others, to think for themselves and to explain their thinking processes. Once they leave school, it will be much more important that students can work collaboratively and yet our education system insists upon testing them individually and encourages them to compete rather than collaborate. To add insult to injury, states are now being required to build competition among teachers. Now more than ever they need to be working together as a team to help all students, but their meager income depends upon them beating their colleagues. This contradicts everything that schools should be about.

4. Incorporating movement and thinking makes learning easier and more permanent. Simple gestures associated with concepts help us to access information even if we have not used it for years. Concepts as simple as "long" and "short" can be shown on paper - but holding an object that is longer than a child's arms can reach and comparing it to a similar object that the child can hold between finger and thumb allows them to experience long and short. Allowing students to experience higher level concepts such as quantities in the billions, squaring a binomial, or the length of a light year will provide a deeper level of understanding and a lasting impression.

5 .Students will thrive when they have some choices about their work and when they feel some control over their learning. Most teachers lecture, assign work, and label student work (turned in on time) as acceptable or unacceptable. Unfortunately those teachers will get a very different level of effort and success from their students than teachers who ask questions, encourage research and discussion, prefer students to create their own original project ideas, require the students to identify their own strengths & weaknesses, and will accept nothing less than the student's best work (no matter how long it takes). In a system as huge as our public schools, there is need for a curriculum. Allowing students some choice and control in deciding how to demonstrate their learning while encouraging an awareness of their own thinking processes will develop self-discipline and motivation.  

6. Students who feel connected to classmates and teachers are much more likely to persevere. If there is one quality that is most associated with student success, it would have to be perseverance. There are countless examples of high school students who skip most classes, but come every day for the one class in which they feel the teacher cares about them. Teachers who take the time to get to know students can communicate with them even in times of distress and end up teaching valuable lessons in self-respect and persistence. The lack of this necessary connection is painfully evident in the fact that schools across the country have resorted to paying students for good attendance and good grades (refer to number 2).

7. If we believe they can or we believe they can't we are probably right. Teacher expectations will usually be fulfilled by their students. If teachers KNOW that their students are capable of achieving far above and beyond the state learning objectives, their students will learn the skills, but will also develop motivation to learn and will begin to expect more from themselves. If there is one way that NCLB has benefitted public schools, it is in the refusal to accept the attitude that some students are not worth our time, money and effort. This long-held belief allowed teachers and administrators the choice to give up on students because they had learning differences, physical difficulties, racial or ethnic differences, or simply were square pegs who did not learn in our assembly-line school systems. If we believe they can all succeed, we will find a way to help each and every child to learn, even if it means looking outside of the textbooks, even if it means bending over backward to get their attention. 

So, how do we improve our education system?

It will require a shift in our educational philosophy. We can begin by going back to the reasons why NCLB was originated. The intention was to create basic expectations for learning at each grade level.

First we need to establish a FEW basic necessities for students to know in each subject area at each grade level. In some states the number of specific learning goals is greater than there are days in school.

Next we must create a culture of high expectations and value COLLABORATION over competition. The place for competition is on athletic fields, not in classrooms. Students who collaborate will learn more, enjoy learning and welcome new challenges.  

Finally we must make learning RELEVANT. Projects and performance assessments provide real learning - students remember the concepts because the context matters to them. Multiple choice tests encourage temporary memorization, not mastery. 

My children deserve better. If parents knew the educational possibilities, they would not tolerate the antiquated systems and strategies to which their children are subjected in public schools.

Should we have high standards? Certainly.

Should we hold teachers accountable? Absolutely. 

BUT we must also hold students and parents accountable.

We must have realistic expectations for ALL students to learn.

We must refuse to allow any child to fail.  

We must focus on thinking and learning, not memorizing and regurgitating.

We must VALUE education over high scores. Anyone can produce high scores.  

However, somewhere along the way, we decided that American students were not learning enough stuff in school. Apparently we were not keeping up with several other countries - and we will NOT be beaten by OTHER countries. Something had to be done to regain our prominence. It was simply unacceptable that American students were scoring below foreign students in any subject area. Never mind the fact that our public schools actually educate ALL children in our country in every subject area.

So, a plan had to be developed to re-establish our dominance in the world. We thought that by clearly defining specific learning goals, we could ensure that all students ascertain basic knowledge in order to be promoted, to graduate, etc. Of course, we held each individual state responsible for determining the "clearly defined learning goals" and our federal government held money over our heads as a carrot to make sure we acquiesced. We certainly cannot hope to provide any kind of education for our children without that necessary federal funding.

Next, the federal government told us that we had to test our children to prove that they are actually learning the "clearly defined learning goals" of our state. They did not provide a test, instead they told us to generate our own tests for our own unique sets of goals. So, billions of dollars of education funding that is supposed to be helping our students learn, is being used to develop tests, administer tests, score tests and publish test results. 

 Of course, we had to hold teachers accountable for whether or not their students were mastering the clearly defined learning goals. So we now needed to use MORE of the education funding to provide bonuses for the teachers whose students score the highest on the assessments. Now, not only are the students spending more time on testing than on learning, but the teachers must essentially force-feed content to the students, rather than igniting curiosity or striking the imagination of our 7, 8 , 9 and 10 year-old children. 

We all know that students were, in fact, learning prior to NCLB. What they were NOT doing was spending more time on testing than on learning.  They were not doing homework for 2 - 3 hours a night in elementary school. They were reading because they loved reading, not because they were required to read at least 30 minutes every night. They were spending their elementary years as children and playing OUTSIDE after school instead of sitting to do homework. Perhaps we should consider NCLB to blame partially for our childhood obesity epidemic. Children need to be allowed to be little, have fun, and trust that teachers will help them learn all that they need to know. But how can they trust their teachers when the government does not?

We all also know that teachers did their job because they loved to help children. Now teachers are leaving the profession at an alarming rate. They feel that their hands are tied and they can no longer make learning a joyous experience for children. On top of that pressure, they face the humiliation of being "graded" against each other and held accountable for every child's learning, no matter how much support they receive from parents, no matter if children are handed to them prepared, no matter whether children actually come to school every day. 

Teachers are miracle workers. I have heard many stories of amazing efforts and dedication beyond belief. But most importantly, they are professionals. They are continuously trying to improve their craft and feel the weight of the world on their shoulders when they cannot make a difference for one child in their class - nevermind that they have succeeded with the other 21 students. They are devastated over the lack of success of the one they could not manage to reach. Give them a break. Trust them. Set high standards and give them the money to spend on the students' learning. No Child Left Untested needs a serious overhaul.