Common Core As Child Abuse | PopularResistance.Org

Common Core As Child Abuse | PopularResistance.Org:

Common Core As Child Abuse

EDUCATE! EDUCATION, HEALTH, YOUTH 
By Stamford Advocate, www.stamfordadvocate.com
September 17th, 2014

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“It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”

Government and business leaders profess that today’s education policies will provide students with “21st-century skills.” If only these leaders had the 19th-century wisdom ofFrederick Douglass, they would see that the education “reform” they are imposing has created a school environment that is devastating to our children’s development and mental health.

Our most vulnerable children often suffer “toxic stress:” prolonged activation of the body’s stress response system brought on by chronic traumatic experiences. Toxic stress disrupts the development of the areas of the brain associated with learning and can have lifelong consequences.

The effects of toxic stress must be mitigated, according to the American Association of Pediatrics. To do so, adults must reduce children’s exposure to continuously stressful situations.

It is imperative, therefore, that we make school a supportive environment free of the extreme stress that can harm healthy development. Some stress is productive and promotes growth. However, especially for children living in poverty, creating an unnecessarily stressful environment has long-term damaging effects.

Unfortunately, many public schools are generating, rather than reducing, anxiety. The explosion of almost continuous high-stakes standardized testing is a major factor.

This year, Pittsburgh students will take 270 tests; 33 just for fourth graders. Bridgeport’s testing schedule calls for six weeks of standardized district tests, a week of CMT science tests; then the final 12 weeks of school are set aside for the new Common Core standardized tests.

For children under 8, standardized testing is unreliable. Moreover, requiring young children to meet specific reading and mathematics goals ignores the fact that there is an acceptable range of ages for developing these skills. Child-development experts have decried the age-inappropriateness of the Common Core. In 2010, more than 500 people signed a statement stating that the “standards 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.”

Dr. Samuel Meisels, director of the University of Nebraska‘s Buffett Early Childhood Institute, agrees that a school culture focused on high-stakes tests is exactly the type of environment that we should avoid for children who experience toxic stress. Dr. Marcy Guddemi, head of the Gesell Institute of Child Development maintains that for children under 8, current policies combining an age-inappropriate curriculum with standardized testing are nothing short of child abuse.

For older children, the overuse of high-stakes testing is just as useless and damaging. Common Core As Child Abuse | PopularResistance.Org: