Several weeks ago, I explained some of the reasons I left teaching. At the end of that writing, I said that I had some ideas for how to fix education but that it was an essay for another day. Today is that day. I actually wrote this out and sent it to my congressperson in 2016 or 2017. I left teaching at the end of the 2019-2020 school year, so I don’t have first-hand knowledge of what education is like on the inside now, but I would bet most of this still rings true. This is what I wrote while I was still teaching, so I’ve preserved the present tense, and have made only minor editorial changes from what I sent to my congressperson. I will split this into five different posts because it’s a lot to read at one time.
So, here are the first two of the top ten things wrong with public education and how to fix them:
There are countless papers and articles full of studies and statistics about education and what is wrong and right with it. You’re not going to find any of that here. What you’ll find here are merely the observations of an elementary school teacher “in the trenches” so to speak. I am also a mom and a reasonably educated person. I don’t claim to have all the answers and I don’t have any empirical evidence or research to prove that any answers I provide would work, nor do I have any evidence or research to support my perceptions of the problems with education, these are merely the common sense observations of someone close to the issues at hand. So, let’s get started! Here are the top ten problems with education as observed by an educator, in no particular order:
Loss of Play in the Youngest Years
Anyone who has taken any kind of child psychology class knows the importance of play. It is how young children learn and form their ideas about the world. They learn how to get along with one another, they build social understandings and meanings, they find out how to effectively function in society. For children, play is work! And by kindergarten (age 5), you can do that on your own time, we’ve got serious business to attend to here!
When I think back to kindergarten in the 80s, I remember playing the color game with laminated circles on popsicle sticks. I remember banging nails into wood at the woodworking station. I remember putting too much glue on the paper and learning to cut back a little as the year went on. I remember coloring, lots and lots of coloring. I remember the scissors in the nice, neat black wire rack where I found the only pair of green-handled left-handed scissors. I remember playing house and restaurant, and sitting on the floor being read to. I remember snack time, and rest time and lots of running around outside (I liked to wear dresses, so my mom had to put shorts on under my dresses so I could hang upside down). I do not remember taking reading and spelling tests (as my daughter did when she was in kindergarten). Nor do I remember spending large amounts of time working on the nitty gritty of reading, things like phonics and character and setting (all things addressed in my daughter’s kindergarten class). But kindergarten was awesome!
Several years back, I was chatting with a coworker in her kindergarten classroom as she cleaned up at the end of the day. In the corner of the room, buried under some recently completed projects and covered with a layer of dust a few months old, was the kitchen set. She’d been teaching kindergarten a while and lamented that she just didn’t have time for the kids to use the kitchen anymore because it was so hard to fit in all the curriculum they had to get through to have them reading before first grade. She said the only time the kids really had a chance to use the kitchen was during indoor recess. She wanted to have the children playing more but was afraid that if an administrator walked in and found the children at the kitchen area, she’d be called out for not enforcing rigor in her classroom.
What a shame! In the state where I teach, children are required to have only 15 minutes of recess a day. Even five- and six-year-old kindergarteners! FIFTEEN MINUTES! In a six hour school day! We wonder why our children are losing muscle mass and are increasingly obese! But the other part of that is that they have no outlet for their energy. Of course, kindergarten teachers are excellent at providing brain breaks and incorporating movement into their instruction, but there is so little time devoted to free play both inside and outside that when the children come to me in second grade, they still can’t cross the monkey bars! They have to stop and rest during outdoor recess and they can’t get along with each other at indoor recess. Why? Because they have lost the opportunity to play in the youngest years! When I was a child, you learned to get along with other people and you learned how to effectively function in school in the preschool and kindergarten years (and even part of first grade was spent in play). The focus was not on work because the play WAS the work! The discoveries we made by hammering nails into wood and putting too much glue on our papers and making grocery lists of made up letters and scribbles in the housekeeping area were how we learned. We learned to negotiate, to take turns, to develop and follow rules.
In an effort to be sure that we are rigorous enough, that these children will be prepared for the standardized testing three years in their future, we have taken away those opportunities to play. And it’s hurting our children. One of the greatest travesties of education is that we have replaced toys with reading tables in the kindergarten classrooms.
Our children are growing up with poor social and emotional skills and difficulty relating to one another. They have maladaptive behaviors when things don’t go their way… and even when they do! Older grades are spending ever greater amounts of time on interpersonal skills. We’re told to have the children collaborate to help them learn, but they don’t know how. Could it be that the loss of play has made the work of later years more difficult?
What can we do about it? First of all, standards and expectations need to be examined by people who actually know something about how children learn and what appropriate expectations are (that means, the teachers who are actually teaching). When I was in college, we called this Developmentally Appropriate Practice. You don’t hear that phrase in education a lot anymore… probably because very little in education is considered developmentally appropriate. Secondly, teachers in the lower grades need to be freed from the fear that if students are playing it will be considered “off task” behavior by an administrator that might walk in. We also need to allow more time for play and more opportunities to experience different kinds of play. Bring the kitchens and the housekeeping and the dress up back into the kindergarten classrooms! Bring joy back into kindergarten. It may very well be that giving up on rigor at a young age, will lead to a capacity for greater learning and rigor in later grades. The children may be better equipped to deal with one another and more practiced at solving problems, both social and academic, independently. Perhaps if we brought back play in the youngest years of school, we would see a dramatic shift in student satisfaction, student achievement, and student attention!
In the Quest for “Rigor” We Have Abandoned the Basics and the Classics
In the quest for rigor, we are actually dumbing down our kids; we are not helping them reach their fullest potential. Trying to do too much too fast is not rigor, it’s just bad practice. More than once in my career I have uttered, “have these people MET children?” when I have looked at what they were supposed to learn. Yet when I search the curriculum for the basics- grammar, for example- I can’t find it! And what of the classics? When I was in high school, our summer reading lists were long lists of classic books that it was considered essential to have read if you wanted to be considered a well-read and well-educated individual. When I looked at my high school cousins’ list of summer reading books, there was not one book more than ten years old on it! Most of them had to do with “teen issues” and many of the others had to do with “social issues.” I suppose this is considered rigorous, after all there are no Cliff’s Notes on these books so one does have to complete the reading on one’s own but they are missing out on so much! In a conversation with a middle school teacher, she lamented that she wasn’t teaching reading anymore, just vocabulary. It used to be that you learned vocabulary through reading! And what of the lessons learned in the classics? They are lost to this generation of students! But they’ll be able to use some really big words in their college entrance essays! That should impress the college boards!
I can’t speak to all places; I’ve only taught in one state and I am only an expert in the curriculum I teach. But my state is considered to be competitive so I can only imagine that the situation is similar in other states. We are pushing little robots through school who know big words but don’t know how to properly string them together into coherent sentences. They can recite the meaning of interdependence but can’t identify it in nature (or make the connection to other areas where interdependence exists, such as in business). They can identify the contributions of ancient cultures but can’t see how that relates to them or how those contributions led to the modern world. They can barely solve basic math problems because they have had so little time to practice things in an effort to “cram it all in” at a younger and younger age. They can read but they can’t use that skill to connect to the rest of the world through literature.
What can we do about it? We need to advocate for our children. Curriculum is revised regularly, it is important for people who know something about how students learn and who care about what students learn to be involved in the process. We cannot continue to allow government bureaucrats decide that curriculum should be rigorous when it doesn’t make sense! Of course, we want our curriculum to be rigorous; we want to push our kids to the next level but not if that next level doesn’t make sense! We need to write curriculum and standards that are developmentally appropriate and rigorous at the same time. And we need to bring back the basics and the classics! Why do we think throwing these things out or trying to teach them too young or too quickly means creating more rigorous education?! It’s not rigor, it’s bad practice!
Click here to read Part 2 where I address developmentally appropriate standards and differentiated assessment.