What’s wrong with boys? Last week we learned that parents of nearly one of every five U.S. boys have sought professional help about their sons’ emotional or behavioral problems. Newsweek’s Peg Tyre thinks it has a lot to do with changing child rearing and education practices over the last ten years–overscheduling, instead of structured play. Learning Mandarin in preschool instead of playing Duck, Duck, Goose. Schools, says Tyre, have become increasingly terra incognita for boys
In many communities, elementary schools have become test-prep factories—where standardized testing begins in kindergarten and “teaching to the test” is considered a virtue. At the same time, recess is being pushed aside in order to provide extra time for reading and math drills. So is history and opportunities for hands-on activities—like science labs and art. Active play is increasingly frowned on—some schools have even banned recess and tag. In the wake of school shootings like the tragedy at Virginia Tech, kids who stretch out a pointer finger, bend their thumb and shout “pow!” are regarded with suspicion and not a little fear.
In short, the bar of our expectations for kids has been set higher, but the psychological and physical development of our children hasn’t changed. “Some kids are thriving in the changing world,” notes Tyre. “But many aren’t. What parents and teachers see is that the ones who can’t handle it are disproportionately boys.”
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Mom, apple pie and universal PreK? Not so fast argue Shikha Dalmia and Lisa Snell of the libertarian Reason Foundation in today’s Wall Street Journal. With the exception of “very intense interventions targeted toward severely disadvantaged kids, “there’s little statistical evidence that strapping a backpack on all 4-year-olds and sending them to preschool is good for them.” While U.S. preschool attendance has gone up to nearly 70% from 16% in the last half century, they note, fourth-grade reading, science, and math scores on the NAEP have stayed flat since the early 1970s.
Preschool activists at the Pew Charitable Trust and Pre-K Now — two major organizations pushing universal preschool — refuse to take this evidence seriously. The private preschool market, they insist, is just glorified day care. Not so with quality, government-funded preschools with credentialed teachers and standardized curriculum. But the results from Oklahoma and Georgia — both of which implemented universal preschool a decade or more ago — paint an equally dismal picture.
Dalmia and Snell maintain that preschool gains don’t stick because the K-12 system “is too dysfunctional to maintain them.”
“Our understanding of the effects of preschool is still very much in its infancy. But one inescapable conclusion from the existing research is that it is not for everyone. Kids with loving and attentive parents — the vast majority — might well be better off spending more time at home than away in their formative years. The last thing that public policy should do is spend vast new sums of taxpayer dollars to incentivize a premature separation between toddlers and parents.”
Update: Richard Whitmire, guesting over at eduwonk, is having none of this.
Poor Mexican children who participate in a government program with extensive family services are further ahead in kindergarten than the average Canadian kid, according to new research.
Mexican authorities in 1990 implemented a system of programs called CENDI (the Spanish acronym for Centres for Early Childhood Development) in Monterrey, an industrial city roughly the size of Greater Toronto, that provides community supports to low-income households from the time of pregnancy through to preschool. The programs are similar to what Canadian early childhood researcher Dr. Fraser Mustard has long been advocating in Canada, the Toronto Star reports.
“You can’t dump the whole responsibility (for childhood development) on families,” says Mustard, who advocates creating community “hubs” – ideally in local schools – where they can obtain nutrition and health advice from professionals, take part in parenting programs and involve their tots in programs. “Mustard says that way, parents get the support they need to do a better job, and problems can be caught and treated early on,” notes the paper.
The research will undoubtedly be used to bolster the argument of those who favor a broader social services role for schools. It’s hard to imagine broad comments about dumping the whole responsibility for raising children on families, however, playing well in the U.S.
EF is the new IQ, Newsweek reports. “Executive function” is the ability to resist distraction and focus. Experiments conducted psychologist Adele Diamond of the University of British Columbia suggest EF may be more important to academic success than traditional measures of intelligence.
Diamond convinced a large low-income urban school district to let her experiment with its preschoolers. Half the classrooms, involving hundreds of children, adopted a new curriculum specifically designed to boost EF, while the other half used a more traditional academic curriculum aimed at basic literacy.
The EF curriculum has many strands, but here are a few just to give a flavor. Instead of keeping the classroom quiet, kids are actually taught and encouraged to talk to themselves, privately but aloud, as a way of helping them exert mental control. In one exercise, for example, the kids have to match their movements to symbols. When the teacher holds up a circle they clap, with a triangle they hop, and so forth. The kids are taught to talk themselves through the mental exercise: “OK, now clap.” “Twirl now.” This has been shown to flex and enhance the brain’s ability to switch gears, to suppress one piece of information and sub in a new one. It takes discipline; it’s the elementary school equivalent of saying “I really need stop thinking about next week’s vacation and focus on this report.”
Preschoolers with sharper executive capability reportedly outperform their more traditional peers in basic skills, especially mathematics, when they hit kindergarten. “In other words, as counterintuitive as it seems, early exposure to dramatic play and cognitive games better prepares kids for mastery of traditional academics,” Newsweek reports.
I wonder what Dan Willingham will have to say about this.
Update: Willingham posts in the comments for this thread.
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