SUSAN DUFRESNE: HUMANITY STRIPPED FROM A WHOLE-CHILD SYSTEM
Last summer, I reviewed Learning Together, a book that links Vygotsky’s theory of social constructivism with the vision of the Framers’ vision for American democracy. Here’s the thesis:
By developing habits of mind and heart that enable children to construct knowledge through meaningful relationships, [social constructivist early childhood education programs] help to..realize the Framers’ vision of a regime that depends for its survival on the capacity of individuals to advance and disseminate knowledge through their association…and build skills such as inter-subjectivity, cognitive integration, attachment, executive function, self-regulation, discipline, synthesis, creativity, respect, and ethics.
Susan DuFresne, a kindergarten teacher in Washington State, puts the untimely shredding of constructivism and early childhood development at the feet of Bill and Melinda Gates. Their failed experiments harm children, teachers, communities and democracy, she says. Here’s her lament:
It was July, 2009, when I graduated university to begin teaching. Little did I know that the first year I taught kindergarten, Melinda and Bill Gates – and their cabal of corporate colonizers – would ratchet up reforms, causing the untimely shredding of constructivism, early childhood development, and my philosophy of education.
Children with a history of poverty and trauma increasingly filled my classroom, while Gates pushed for more rigor, convincing the Department of Early Learning to test all preschoolers and kindergartners through an “assessment tool” called Teaching Strategies Gold. The first two months of school is now 1:1 testing versus building relationships and establishing routines. This fall, these tests took up six-and-a-half days of school. Two additional days were devoted to data entry.
My four-inch data binder at the end of October is full, whereas I typically filled a three-inch binder by the end of the year. Kindergartners are anything but independent at the beginning of the year. Drastically increased testing led to behavior problems that became well established in the first two months of school.
The Gates-funded Common Core immediately raised rigor, pushing first- and second-grade standards down onto kindergarteners. Rigor and grit for kindergarteners does not change the varying rates of normal childhood development. Where play-based programs help children develop necessary self-regulation and social skills, rigor and grit decrease these skills. Increasing poverty and grit is a toxic combination for young children.
School districts scrambled to bring teachers up to speed with Common Core. “No excuses” became the mantra at meetings as children, teachers, and schools were color-coded green, yellow, or red in a public display of shame.
Schools are required to develop School Improvement Plans that layer data meetings which serve to stack-rank children like Gates’s Microsoft employees, pitting teachers against one another, and threatening our livelihoods with school closures if our children of poverty and trauma do not perform to meet these rising standards.
Our school is now a “Focus School” because—shockingly—our children with special needs did not meet standard on the high-stakes state tests promoted by Gates. As a result, we have even more data meetings and an increased workload. Special education teachers feel like failures, while kids with special needs and their families feel this way, too.
We were set up by Gates to fail.
Gates positioned Ross Hunter [former Microsoft executive, now director Susan DuFresne: Humanity Stripped from a Whole-Child System | ECE PolicyWorks:
