Holt and Kohl on Reading

Some further thoughts on kids being labeled "learning disabled."

John Holt, the homeschooling/unschooling advocate, wrote that once a child really wants to learn to read for his own reasons, it takes about thirty hours of focused help from someone who knows how.

Holt argues in Instead of Education that we can't fathom this because "S-chools and T-eachers believe, and soon convince the children, that everything that is learned must be T-aught. So the T-eachers must spend hundreds of hours trying to cope with and outwit the kind of children's evasive tactics I wrote about in How Children Fail. They make children anxious and dependent and then say, rightly, how hard it is to deal with their anxiety and dependency. None of this need be."

Herbert Kohl makes a similar argument in Reading, How To. He writes in the preface,

There is no reading problem. There are problem teachers and problem schools. Most people who fail to learn to read in our society are victims of a fiercely competitive system of training that requires failure. If talking and walking were taught in most schools we might end up with as many mutes and cripples as we now have non-readers. However, learning to read is no more difficult than learning to walk or talk. The skill can be acquired in a natural and informal manner and in a variety of settings ranging from school to home to the streets.

Later, in Chapter 2, he writes, "If a youngster fails to acquire the skill or comply with the rules of learning, he or she is considered retarded or criminal, that is, in more polite school language, a learning or behavior problem."

Stop Pathologizing Children

Kids — in fact, everyone — develop according to their own timelines. Some are faster at learning some things than others. For example, my son learned to walk when he was 13 months old, but my daughter didn't walk until she was 20 months old. We knew that this was perfectly normal and didn't worry.

But in school, if you take more time to learn certain things, esp. how to read and write, then you are labeled as “developmentally delayed.” It’s important not to look at delays in development as signs that kids are broken and need to be fixed. If you look at people as though they are broken and need fixing, a profound disconnection emerges between you and them. This is disturbing in any context, but it’s especially disturbing in a school setting, much less the very first school setting that children have, i.e., pre-school (where the stage is often set for children who are not as fast as some of their peers.)

My wife and I found this out first-hand. We sent our daughter to our local neighborhood school for pre-K, a school considered "low income" because it receives federal Title 1 money. We were alarmed at how anti-child it was, esp. with regard to recess, free time, and testing. I met with the principal and with the classroom teacher and expressed my concerns about the overly-academic orientation of the curriculum. I noticed the effect the school was having on my daughter’s attitude towards school and learning. So we decided to look elsewhere, knowing that the Kindergarten curriculum at our neighborhood school was even more anti-child, overly-academic, high stakes, test-centric, and highly structured. As I wrote about here, my daughter’s experience with writing her name before she was able to or willing to do so had a profoundly negative effect on her, and I still harbor bad feelings towards the school for forcing kids to be at the same “grade level benchmarks” at the same time.

Her current school was a real life-saver for her because the school honors the fact that different kids develop at different paces. She is now thriving there and really likes it. And not only is she writing her name, but she’s actually copying text out of books on her own, writing stories (most of which she dictates to me), and writing words she sees on a daily basis.

Had she stayed at our neighborhood school, she would have been labeled “a slow learner.” She would have been put into a slow group. She would have known right away that there was something wrong with her (at least, from the school’s perspective.) Of course, I’ll never know what may have happened in the long run if she had stayed there. But it’s not too much of a stretch for me to imagine her hating school, hating the fact that she had to write anything, and generally feeling like she was a failure.

These are high stakes here. We are talking about paving the future for the lives of children. This is especially critical for low-income and low-income minority children, who are disproportionately labeled "learning disabled" and who typically do not have parents with enough social capital to fight the system on behalf of their children.

Over on another blog called PPS Equity, 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. The Kindergartners have 3 “specials”: drama, PE, and library. They are all 30 minutes each, and they are all offered back-to-back on Wednesdays. So for an hour and a half, the kids go from one to the other.

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.

5.9% (five point nine per cent) of the kids at Ainsworth are eligible for free and reduced lunch.

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.”

Dumbing down the educational experience of low-income children does not help them in the long run. Pathologizing them as they're just beginning to take shape as learners virtually seals their fates.

Does KIPP Sanction Institutionalized Violence?

If you're a KIPP fan, I'd like to know if you're following the story at KIPP Fresno. If not, check out Jim Horn's posts on this.

The experience at KIPP Fresno raises the specter of institutionally sanctioned violence, both physical and emotional. It also suggests a new tag line for KIPP: "Work hard, be nice . . . or else."

Is Poverty Just an Excuse?

In the effort to fight the "poverty is no excuse" crowd, education researcher Dr. David Berliner reviews a half-dozen out-of-school factors that have been clearly linked to lower achievement among poor and minority-group students: birth weight and non-genetic parental influences; medical care; food insecurity; environmental pollution; family breakdown and stress; and neighborhood norms and conditions. Additionally, he notes a seventh factor: extended learning opportunities in the form of summer programs, after-school programs, and pre-school programs. Access to these resources by poor and minority students could help mitigate the effects of the other six factors.

Here's the link to the full policy brief. (712 KB PDF document)

Kindergarten Playtime Disappears, Raising Alarm About Children's Learning and Health

A press release from The Alliance for Childhood.

Time for play in most kindergartens has dwindled to the vanishing point, replaced by lengthy lessons and standardized testing, according to results of three new studies released today by the nonprofit Alliance for Childhood. Classic play materials like blocks, sand and water tables, and props for dramatic play have largely disappeared in the 268 kindergarten classrooms studied. The findings are documented in Crisis in the Kindergarten: Why Children Need to Play in School.

Researchers from U.C.L.A. and Long Island University found that, on a typical day, children in all-day kindergartens in Los Angeles and New York City spend four to six times as much time in literacy and math instruction and taking or preparing for tests (about two to three hours per day) as in free play or "choice time" (30 minutes or less). A third research team, at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, found that most of the activities available to children during choice time (a popular euphemism for playtime) are in fact teacher-directed and involve little or no free play, imagination, or creativity.

Child development experts have been raising alarms about the increasingly didactic, test-driven, and joyless course of early childhood education. "These practices, which are not well grounded in research, violate long-established principles of child development and good teaching," states the Alliance report. "It is increasingly clear that they are compromising both children's health and their long-term prospects for success in school."

The report summarizes recent studies and reports showing long-term gains from play and focused, playful learning in early education. It also critiques kindergarten standards, scripted teaching, and standardized testing and makes recommendations for change.

David Elkind, author of The Power of Play, calls the research findings "heartbreaking." In a foreword to the report, Elkind writes, "We have had a politically and commercially driven effort to make kindergarten a one-size-smaller first grade. Why in the world are we trying to teach the elementary curriculum at the early childhood level?"

The full text of Crisis in the Kindergarten: Why Children Need to Play in School is available at www.allianceforchildhood.org.

Assessment On Planet Zarg

I just came back from a visit to planet Zarg. We could learn a thing or two from these guys.

In the schools on Zarg, they measure kids, just like we do on Earth (well, in some places on Earth). The inhabitants of Zarg studied the views of former Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings. From her, the Zargians learned that "what gets tested gets taught." So, following her advice, they created assessments that measure all of these things:

curiosity
creativity
tenacity
honesty
compassion
ability to get along well with others

When parents meet with their kids' teachers on Zarg, they talk about test scores, just like we do here on Earth. But the tests aren't like the multiple-choice tests we use on Earth. Their tests ask students to work on projects, to create things of substance in collaboration with others, and then to report and reflect on the process they went through in creating them. The Zargians value curiosity, creativity, tenacity, honesty, compassion, and the ability to get along well with others. They believe that young people, endowed with these traits, stand a greater chance of being happy, successful, productive citizens. So they create measures to see how well students are acquiring these valued traits.

What do we on Earth value? No matter what we say we value, our tests speak louder than our words. So what values do our tests reveal? That learning can be reduced to a correct answer on a multiple-choice question.