A lengthy exploration of IQ testing for kindergarten placement from the New York magazine’s website adds to the growing chorus of those questioning of the role of tests in our kids lives. This article’s focus is on kindergarten placement tests but also touches on issues of class, equality, corporate influence, and, offers insights into better ways to approach assessments.

The Junior Meritocracy
Should a child’s fate be sealed by an exam he takes at the age of 4? Why kindergarten-admission tests are worthless, at best.

Let’s start with the most basic problem: School starts in kindergarten. No matter how a child is doing at that moment, no matter where that child is in the great swoop of his or her developmental arc, that’s when parents send their kids off to school.

~~~

There was a time, not that long ago, when few parents attempted to prep their 4-year-olds for kindergarten-admission exams. But then a few more began to do it, and then a few more after that, and then suddenly, normal-seeming people with normal-seeming values began doing it, too, and an arms-race mentality kicked in.

~~~

As it turns out, intelligence tests miss lots of things, not just creativity. And perhaps that explains why IQs alone are not especially good predictors of excellence. In the twenties, for instance, Lewis Terman, a psychologist and deep believer in intelligence testing—it was he who revised Alfred Binet’s original test and came up with the Stanford-Binet model—started a now-famous longitudinal study of nearly 1,500 California children with extremely high IQs. He grandiosely called it “Genetic Studies of Genius,” and his hope was to show that these children, whom he called “exceptionally superior,” would one day form the backbone of the nation’s intellectual and creative elite, making crucial advances in sciences and public policy and the arts.

~~~

One of the most compelling reasons to get rid of it, he [Nelson, head of Calhoun school] notes, isn’t because the test is intellectually pointless. It’s because it’s emotionally insidious. “When we resort to any kind of measure of kids that’s supposed to be qualitative at a young age,” he says, “no matter how cheerfully we do it, no matter how many lollipops we hand out to de-stress the process, young children are extraordinarily discerning. They absorb their parents’ anxiety about it, they absorb the kinds of judgments people are making about them. So there’s a process of organizing kids in a hierarchy of worth, and it’s beginning at an age that’s criminal.”

~~~

Given his druthers, Meisels, at Erikson Institute, says he’d try to get a more comprehensive picture of the child. “And that can only be found through watching children in classroom situations,” he says. “And looking at the products of their work. And getting to know them. And that can be done through observational assessments.”

I try to interrupt him, but he anticipates my objection. “It’s not very practical, I know,” he says. “It means teaching teachers how to do it. It’d be more expensive.

In reading through this piece I found myself muttering that it is about time this picture gets painted. The head of Calhoun school is quoted as saying, “I want kids who are cynical enough at age 4 to know that there’s really something wrong with someone asking them these things and think, ‘I’m going to screw with them in the process!”

My thought is that we would all be better off if more parents were skeptical of the process of schooling for their kids.

Read the whole piece here.

Why Kindergarten-Admission Tests Are Worthless

Quality Counts 2007: From Cradle to Career: Connecting American Education From Birth to Adulthood, the 11th installment of Education Week’s annual report on state education reform was posted this week at the Education Week’s website.

From the Press Conference announcing the report, author Lynn Olson stated:

Quality Counts 2007 begins to track state efforts to create seamless education systems from early childhood to the world of work by looking at performance across the various sectors, and at state efforts to define students’ readiness to succeed from one stage to the next. He continues on to explain that the new Chance-for-Success Index ” provides a state-focused perspective on the importance of education throughout a person’s lifetime. It dramatically illustrates why states need to pay attention to human capital development at every step along the way if they want to have a vibrant economy.

School-to-Work, Outcome Based Education, Goals 2000, and reports such as Cradle to Grave continue to insist that the federal government can demand more of parents and pile more and more adult like responsibilities on babies through teens. Each year they continue to pile standard upon standard upon the backs of young people in an attempt to raise the bar and produce better workers. Within school reform many have attempted to imitate home education via the new public cyber schools, but even they are public schools at home that still fall under the NCLB mandated cast iron cookie cutter standards. These standards continue to weigh heavily on the backs of older children and to now insist on state standards for each state for preschoolers as well seems to border on abuse in my estimation. Do they have proof positive that these actions will cause no harm?

Before adding yet more standards, shouldn’t we stop and evaluate the affects that the already heavy standards have had on young minds and bodies?

A September 11, 2006 NEWSWEEK article, The New First Grade: Too Much Too Soon, by Peg Tyre reports that, “Kids as young as 6 are tested, and tested again, to ensure they’re making sufficient progress. Then there’s homework, more workbooks and tutoring.”

The article is five pages long and it is well worth the read. Here are just a few key points:

In the last decade, the earliest years of schooling have become less like a trip to “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” and more like SAT prep. Thirty years ago first grade was for learning how to read. Now, reading lessons start in kindergarten and kids who don’t crack the code by the middle of the first grade get extra help. Instead of story time, finger painting, tracing letters and snack, first graders are spending hours doing math work sheets and sounding out words in reading groups. In some places, recess, music, art and even social studies are being replaced by writing exercises and spelling quizzes. Kids as young as 6 are tested, and tested againsome every 10 days or soto ensure they’re making sufficient progress. After school, there’s homework, and for some, educational videos, more workbooks and tutoring, to help give them an edge.

Some scholars and policymakers see clear downsides to all this pressure. Around third grade, Hultgren says, some of the most highly pressured learners sometimes “burn out. They began to resist. They didn’t want to go along with the program anymore.” In Britain, which adopted high-stakes testing about six years before the United States did, parents and school boards are trying to dial back the pressure. In Wales, standardized testing of young children has been banned. Andrew Hargreaves, an expert on international education reform and professor at Boston College, says middle-class parents there saw that “too much testing too early was sucking the soul and spirit out of their children’s early school experiences.

In my opinion, there are many at our Federal and State Capitals who seem to believe that they have “the plan” that will best serve America’s children. It seems to me that it is our fundamental responsibility to make every effort to assure that no one, (not even those attempting to improve “human capital”) should, suck the soul and spirit from our children. Just as those objecting in Wales, many have been saying no as well in the U.S. via this petition calling for the dismantling of the No Child Left Behind Act.

Many times those in education reform refer to the successes they have seen in home education and some even attempt to duplicate them, but I’m afraid they keep missing WHY home education is so often successful. Home Education provides each individual child the opportunity to run, jump play and enjoy their childhood. They are not viewed as potential “human capital”, but as human beings with the fundamental right to live and learn in a way that best suits them. Home Education allows the child’s spirit and soul to soar and to grow. Home Education allows each family the freedom to nurture each individual child in a way that best meets their needs. The standard is what is best for the child, not a federally mandated one size fits all directive. The minute you try to legislate it something that replicates home education, you lose a basic fundamental freedom and begin to squash the joy that comes with following one’s heart, playing and learning when ready rather than when dictated how and when by the state.

Let’s just say no to any childhood experiments and say yes to what works – let’s just let them be little!

posted by Mary N.

Protecting the Spirit and Soul of our Children

In 2004, a lady in Saugatuck, Michigan wrote a letter to the editor about how she felt that homeschooling parents are on an ego trip. The letter caught the eyes of homeschoolers.

• About.com, “Homeschooling robs children”

So, now it’s 2006, and Ms. Boyce is again writing to the editor about homeschooling. Her viewpoint, as before, doesn’t reflect the experiences I’ve had with homeschooling, or schooling, for that matter, but maybe that only means we cancel out each other.

Holland Sentinel, Holland, Michigan, 18 September 2006, Missing out on back to school

One can feel the excitement. Why? Because it is back to school time!

I guess that explains all the cartoons of happy children waiting for the bus, and reports of school vandalization.

However, there is a group of children being robbed of this incredible experience.

My kids had that incredible experience for a few years. Once they were homeschooled, they used to lie in bed reveling in not getting up. They didn’t seem to miss it at all.

I have written in the past of a Harvard study that followed a flock of homeschooled children that found no significant difference in their academic achievements that the traditionally schooled children, with the exception of some gaps where the parents were just not knowledgeable.

Harvard study? Did I miss this?

• No, this one’s about home and school. Harvard Education Letter, July/August 1997, The Home-School Study of Language and Literacy Development
• No, this one’s about Harvard’s Extension School. Harvard Extension School Alumni Bulletin, Fall 2005, All the Worlds a Classroom

If anyone knows which study this refers to, please share. I even tried finding articles by Ms. Boyce that reference Harvard, but didn’t find any.

• Harvard + homeschool + Boyce
• Harvard + home-school + Boyce

However, the mothers do get a huge ego boost. Is that why we have children? To boost a mother’s ego?

A woman’s ego, not a mother’s. First comes the woman-ness, then comes the motherhood. Using this example, a woman would become a mother to boost her ego, not a mother would become a mother.

And no, to answer the allegation from one point of view, our family didn’t undertake homeschooling so I could get a rush. I’d gone through one child completing public school, and was seeing similar developments that weren’t ‘happy’ ones in my son’s younger brother and sisters. The homeschooling was to see if it helped the kids. It seems to have worked.

As an experienced mom as well as a former teacher, I believe that this intense parenting can usually have two outcomes.

And, as an experienced mom who attended parent-teacher conferences, I’m just glad I didn’t have to have one with a person who felt that anything I tried doing to help my children was for my own gratification. I can see that conversation going nowhere fast.

One, the child becomes very stifled, unable to function independently at all, or what often happens, the moment the child reaches 18 (or sometimes younger) they are gone. If they go to college, it will be very far away. As adults they will remain far away. I have spoken with many grown children who would say, “I could never live near my parents” and enumerate the controls put upon them as children.

Yes, there are lots of children who go far away to college. Not all of them are homeschooled. The same goes for where adult children live. This is a human situation, not a homeschooling situation. History is rife with the kids going off to seek their fortunes. If it wasn’t, we’d all be shopping at the WalMart in the Olduvai Gorge.

And as for being able to function independently, homeschooled kids manage just fine.

Mark your calendars, and be on the lookout next year for homeschooling’s Five o’clock Charlie.

Maybe this will be an annual event?

What is it that people don’t get about homeschooling?  If the parents (or perhaps other family members) aren’t the ones working with their kids, then it isn’t ‘homeschooling.’  Yes, any number of hybrid structures can develop that are closer to homeschooling than not, to include occasional classes here and there, but any system where the kids ‘go to school’ is not homeschooling. 

 If a baby is fed breastmilk in a bottle, especially if the person doing the feeding is unrelated to the baby, that baby is not breastfed.  Using a curriculum supplied to homeschooling parents to be used by a teacher, is not homeschooling.  Just because homeschooling broke the mold of institutional dayschooling, doesn’t mean that every little educational wrinkle gets to wriggle in under the homeschooling blanket and cuddle up.  If a teacher is teaching kids at a school, then it’s either private schooling or tutoring.  If it works, it works, no big deal.  But to try to shoehorn any educational alternative into the homeschooling mold is just looking for novelty where none exists.

• The Truth, Elkhart, Indiana, 19 February 2006, Latest twist in education: Home schooling — in school

  Hybrid home schools, an idea catching on around the country, are meant for those parents who would like to home school but have to work or students who want a smaller, Christian-based setting.

  It’s basically a home-school curriculum taught within a school building, supervised by a teacher.

  …

  The home-school curriculum Christian Redeemer will use is called Christian Liberty Academy, widely used across the country. Students will get a diploma from Redeemer as well as Christian Liberty.

 Perhaps the writer should have paid closer attention to the families she interviewed when she was writing her other article, a nice enough general interest article with the usual mentions of rules, regulations and socialization. 

• The Truth, Elkhart, Indiana, 19 February 2006, Home Work

  Home-school laws in Indiana are not as strict as some states, especially in the eastern part of the country. Home-schoolers don’t have a required curriculum to teach and don’t participate in state testing. They are only required to keep attendance records, and parents do not have to have a college degree or a teacher’s license to home school.

I wonder if Indiana has more lenient child-feeding rules than other states, too?

Hat tip to Tammy.

Newsflash: it’s private schooling

Last month, an education columnist in Mississippi responded to a letter from the mother of a first grade student who wasn’t happy with a classroom event. The columnist told the mother that she would just have to, in the parlance of the long-ago Edwardians, ‘close her eyes and think of England.’

• Jackson Clarion Ledger, Jackson, Mississippi, 19 December 2005, Teachers making up storm days after school (Google cache, and headline concerns columns’ main report)

  Q: I am not happy with something that happened in my first-grader’s classroom. I would really like my daughter moved out of there. I’ve talked to the principal, who said he talked to the teacher. I also talked to the superintendent. But they refuse to move my daughter. What is my recourse?

  A: There really isn’t a lot you can do after talking to the principal and the superintendent. The next step is to talk to local school board members. See what you have to do to get on the agenda for the next board meeting.

This week, a Clarion Ledger reader asked why the columnist didn’t recommend that the mother either sue the school, or remove her daughter from school and homeschool her. The reply?

• Jackson Clarion Ledger, Jackson, Mississippi, 2 January 2006, Lawsuit, home school options for irate parent

  A: I was trying to give her options within the system. But, yes, these are other options, albeit a little more drastic.

Drastic. Homeschooling is a drastic option. That reminds me of a grad-school thesis I recently came across in a Google search ‘for something else’ (I find so much stuff that way): Home-schooling as an extreme form of parental involvement. In skimming the thesis, neither I, nor another member of the list where I posted the link, could find any "extremism" in the findings of the paper, yet the author still chose that title.

It seems that the general opinion concerning the center point of parental involvement in the lives of their children has moved from the responsible center of the parenting continuum, between the true extremes of abandonment and smothering. For some in today’s world, even the idea of a parent taking natural adult responsibility concerning his or her children, and nurturing and guiding those children, is "drastic" and "extreme." What a shame.

I like the conclusion of another list-member who took the "extreme" conclusion, and spun it so that homeschooling is X-treme schooling. That fits with my experience of homeschooling as a Grand Adventure.

Parents, start your engines.

X-treme schooling

• Stateline.org, Pew Charitable Trusts, 16 November 2005, Preschool gets record boost in ’05

  At least 180,000 more children have access to preschool this year after lawmakers in 26 states boosted pre-K funding by $600 million during 2005 legislative sessions, the largest single-year increase for preschools in five years, according to a report issued Nov. 16 by Pre-K Now, a national advocacy group that supports universal access to preschool.

The ‘religious’ cast to education (meaning education-as-a-religion, not the focus of one religion on education) continues its downward march toward birth* (and beyond?). The recognition that it is better for parents to actively live with their children and guide the development of their life skills from an early age, as contrasted perhaps with tying them to a tree so they can’t wander off, achieved formal recognition through the work of people such as Maria Montessori, Johann Pestalozzi, and Friedrich Froebel. Since then schooling of young children had turned into a long rite-of-passage akin to the long-slog schooling of older children, teens and young adults. Catechism classes never lasted this long.

As for education being a religion in an of itself, a quick internet search for "education-as-religion" (Results 1 – 10 of about 63) brought up a link to the book, The Case Against College, written in 1975. The author is credited with writing, ""The liberal arts are a religion, the established religion of the ruling class. The exalted language, the universalistic setting, the ultimate value, the inability to define, the appeal to personal witness … these are all familiar modes of religious discourse."

It’s not just me.

But, that was 30 years ago when college was the focus. Now the ‘age of first communion’ for more and more small children has dropped to three.

• Cato Institute, Casey J. Lartigue, Jr., 17 May 2002 Does More Schooling Equal Better Results?

  Is compulsory education really necessary for D.C. preschool children? Raising that point can get you labeled "anti-education." But now is the time to ask such a question because D.C. city councilman Kevin Chavous wants the District to lower the compulsory school attendance age from 5 to 3.

The belief in preschool isn’t limited to ‘the educational priesthood’ and the econocrats in government, but it is also embraced by the laity in general, and homeschooling laity as well. Another online search for "homeschooling preschool" brought up the first page of, "Results 1 – 10 of about 1,200,000," and that leaves me cold. Granted, I think that ‘preschool-at-home’ is preferable to ‘preschool somewhere else’ but the weight of the concept bows my shoulders. Now the ‘school process’ will take another two to three years off the lower end of the halcyon days of childhood. Imagine, two years of preschool, thirteen years of K-12, four years undergrad, and perhaps two for masters. 2 + 13 + 4 + 2 = 21 Twenty-one years of ‘being schooled.’ I don’t even want to add on time for a PhD.

I don’t have a specific point, here, only an amorphous sense of unease that we’re losing more than we’re gaining. I look in the 1950s-era Childcraft and Book Trails volumes in my bookshelves and I wonder what the early childhood inspiration for future artists and writers will be, given that our dominant social religion, education, has taken long periods of reflective time away from children. I think about who will write the next classics for children along the lines of The Wind in the Willows, stories about Winnie the Pooh, Mary Poppins, The Borrowers, Pippi Longstocking, the Edward Eager books, Beverly Cleary’s Ramona series, and my favorite Beverly Cleary book, Ellen Tebbits. I look in the bookstores for books for my grandchildren, and sigh. The old books are great, and I’m happy that they’re mostly still in print, but, Potter aside (a series that takes place in a school), where are the new classics? Has the education-religion (in tandem with our instant electronic gratification) made gentle imaginative literary adventures as foreign-to-the-faithful as homeschooling?

* Article seen on email list after posting this entry:

• BBC News, 9 November 2005, Mixed response to toddler plans

  Under the Childcare Bill, childminders would teach the curriculum to children "from birth" – with some worrying that it might be too prescriptive.

  The National Confederation of Parent Teacher Associations called the proposals "bizarre".

  But the children’s charity I Can said there was clear evidence youngsters’ communication needs were not being met.

  Parents’ associations spokeswoman Margaret Morrissey said: "We are now in danger of taking away children’s childhood when they leave the maternity ward.

Preschool-at-home