I’m all about committed parenting, academic rigor and student achievement so why does it feel excessive to me that children as young as four are being tutored to get ahead in school? The Houston Chronicle reports some parents are hiring tutors, “because they’re feeling the pressure of looming high-stakes tests, which begins in Texas with the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills for third-grade children. Others are thinking about college.”
Houston-area tutors work with hundreds of young children on phonics, numbers, colors, study skills and fine motor skills. Some take children as young as 3 1/2 . But some caution that putting pressure on young children might give them a distaste for school. Rather than spending upward of $45 an hour on private tutors, they say parents should use outings to stores, libraries and museums as teaching moments.
“A child needs summer,” Kay Hall, director of the Early Learning Academy in the Spring school district tells the paper. ”There’s a lot of learning that can take place over the summer, but it doesn’t need to be in a classroom in a structured environment.”
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Jennifer Medina’s piece in this morning’s New York Times is a step up from the usual happy-talk cheerleading for small schools. Yes, small schools are better than faceless, anonymous megaschools, but Medina’s take on NYC’s Urban Assembly School for Law and Justice in Fort Greene, Brooklyn makes it clear that success, when it comes, is less a function of structure, but staff effort.
To hear the tales of the new graduates is to understand the enormous effort and amount of resources it takes to make a school succeed. Teachers and other staff members routinely work 60 hours a week. Millions of extra dollars have been collected in grants and private donations. Parents and students regularly attend workshops until 10 p.m.
Principal Elana Karopkin, 32, launched the school four years ago, and is leaving to work for Achievement First. She tells the Times she is nothing less than “exhausted,” both physically and emotionally.
“You are taking a bunch of hyper, type A perfectionist people and giving them a herculean task,” she said. “People have to work much too hard to do what we are doing. People cannot work at this level all their lives and nobody is prepared to do something at a level of mediocrity.”
Update: Over at Eduwonkette, Skoolboy weighs in smartly: “We need to disrupt this ridiculous myth that expects superhuman effort from educators in order to achieve success for kids….We don’t need cartoon-like superhero educators; we need a system that supports teachers to work hard and honestly at their craft, without the risk of burnout after a couple of years.”
Just so.
A Georgia law passed in 2001 was supposed to stop social promotion, but state school districts are promoting nearly everyone anyway, “even if they fail a second-chance retest, or blow it off altogether” according to an analysis of 2006 and 2007 state data by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
A state law aimed at stopping so-called “social promotion” says students in grades 3, 5 and 8 should repeat the year when they fail certain standardized tests. The findings show state and local educators are balking at enforcing the 2001 law — routinely resorting to an appeals process that allows schools to promote students who never pass the tests.
State School Superintendent Kathy Cox argues that retention “should be a last resort” and defends use of the appeal process, which allows promotion if the principal, parent and teacher agree. “They’ve used that as the rule rather than the exception,” former Gov. Roy Barnes, who championed the law, tells the AJC. “Did people think that I was not serious?”
Er, apparently so Governor.
Rarely discussed in social promotion debates is the effect of no-stakes testing and infinite second chances on the empty homily of “high expectations.” Kids aren’t dummies. First we narrow the curriculum to prep kids for state tests, then we teach them through our actions that the tests really don’t matter anyway. The perfect storm of mediocrity.
Update: Opinion on the AJC’s Get Schooled blog is strenuously in favor of enforcing the No Social Promotion rule.
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