Alliance for Childhood’s Joint Statement of Early Childhood Health and Education Professionals
You know something is wrong when a kindergartner asks: “Mom, can I retire from school?”
Kindergarten has traditionally been a wonderful world of discovery and playful learning. It has been a place where young children grow in their independence, form relationships outside the family circle, and learn about the world around them in a thoughtful and inviting environment.
If you are a regular reader of Empowered by Play, if you have a child in kindergarten right now, or if you are an early childhood educator, you know about the current crisis in early childhood education. The pressures of our high-stakes testing world has encroached dramatically on early childhood classrooms, taking away playful learning and replacing it with incessant assessments and developmentally inappropriate expectations. I’ve heard from experienced teachers who are leaving the classroom because they can no longer, in good conscience, be a part of a system that is harmful to children. This weekend I heard about a mom whose son is struggling in public preschool. She isn’t sure what is going on, though he has been sent home from school a few times. When the mom asked the teacher what exactly is going on with her son, the teacher admitted that she just didn’t know since she doesn’t have time to talk to her students. The teacher is too busy trying to “get through” all the lessons and assessments she is mandated to keep up with, and revealed that she has a conversation with each child about once a week. Once a week!!!
It truly is time to stop the madness. Read below the recent statement signed by hundreds of early childhood health and education professionals. A deep thanks to the incredible folks at Alliance for Childhood, Ed Miller and Joan Almon, for making this happen. Please check out the Alliance for Childhood website, where a complete list of signers will be available soon. I urge you to help spread the word to parents, teachers, the press and politicians.
Joint Statement of Early Childhood Health and Education Professionals on the Common Core Standards Initiative
Issued by the Alliance for Childhood
March 2, 2010
We have grave concerns about the core standards for young children now being written by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. The draft standards made public in January conflict with compelling new research in cognitive science, neuroscience, child development, and early childhood education about how young children learn, what they need to learn, and how best to teach them in kindergarten and the early grades.
We have no doubt that promoting language and mathematics is crucial to closing the achievement gap. As written, however, the proposed standards raise the following concerns:
- Such standards will lead to long hours of instruction in literacy and math. Young children learn best in active, hands-on ways and in the context of meaningful real-life experiences. New research shows that didactic instruction of discrete reading and math skills has already pushed play-based learning out of many kindergartens. But the current proposal goes well beyond most existing state standards in requiring, for example, that every kindergartner be able to write “all upper- and lowercase letters” and “read with sufficient accuracy and fluency to support comprehension.”
- They will lead to inappropriate standardized testing. Current state standards for young children have led to the heavy use of standardized tests in kindergarten and the lower grades, despite their unreliability for assessing children under age eight. The proposed core standards will intensify inappropriate testing in place of broader observational assessments that better serve young children’s needs.
- Didactic instruction and testing will crowd out other important areas of learning. Young children’s learning must go beyond literacy and math. They need to learn about families and communities, to take on challenges, and to develop social, emotional, problem-solving, self-regulation, and perspective-taking skills. Overuse of didactic instruction and testing cuts off children’s initiative, curiosity, and imagination, limiting their later engagement in school and the workplace, not to mention responsible citizenship. And it interferes with the growth of healthy bodies and essential sensory and motor skills—all best developed through playful and active hands-on learning.
- There is little evidence that such standards for young children lead to later success. While an introduction to books in early childhood is vital, research on the links between the intensive teaching of discrete reading skills in kindergarten and later success is inconclusive at best. Many of the countries with top-performing high-school students do not begin formal schooling until age six or seven. We must test these ideas more thoroughly before establishing nationwide policies and practices.
We therefore call on the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers to suspend their current drafting of standards for children in kindergarten through grade three.
We further call for the creation of a consortium of early childhood researchers, developmental psychologists, pediatricians, cognitive scientists, master teachers, and school leaders to develop comprehensive guidelines for effective early care and teaching that recognize the right of every child to a healthy start in life and a developmentally appropriate education.
Defne Apul, Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering, University of Toledo, Toledo, OH
Cara Armstrong, Curator of Education, Fallingwater, Mill Run, PA
Ray Bacchetti, Vice President, Planning and Management, Emeritus, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA
Lyda Beardsley, Director, Child Development Programs, College of Marin, Kentfield, CA
Laura M. Bennett-Murphy, Associate Professor, Psychology, Westminster College, Salt Lake City, UTAlliance for Childhood’s Joint Statement of Early Childhood Health and Education Professionals « Empowered by Play: