City School Stories

Reflections of an Author

Submitted by Frank Murphy, November 16, 2010

Wasn’t it only a few years ago that it was all the rage at business and education seminars to share the poem Everything I Needed to Know I learned in Kindergarten?  Today as I consider the direction of school reform efforts in our nation, I wonder if this poem has been read by any of the prominent drivers of the national educational agenda identified by Dianne Ravitch, in her recent book.  The perspective offered by the principal of Smedley Elementary School in a recent Notebook Post concerning the needs of his students, brought this question clearly in focus for me. At an assembly for Kindergarten and first graders, he told his students:

“We don’t have a minute to waste,” …“The clock is ticking.”

This principal is referring to the need for his primary grade students to learn basic literacy skills as quickly as possible.   This sentiment is in line with the nouveau reformers’ view that a sense of urgency is needed in school communities in order to close achievement gaps among various sub groups of students.   According to their reasoning, this must be done if America is to keep its competitive edge in the global economy.  It is a popular rationale for explaining the need to reform America’s public school systems.

So now it is the academic performance of our five and six year olds which is a threat to the dominance of our country as the powerhouse leader of the world.   This is quite a burden to place on the tiny shoulders of our youngest citizens.

What this perspective ignores is the natural developmental needs of young children.  They are human beings, not objects that can be tooled and formed into a product. Children are shaped by and in turn, shape the environment in which they live.  The learning environments that best serve young children are friendly, nurturing and responsive to their developmental needs. They are warm communities that protect children from inappropriate punishments and disapproval. In order to be truly successful in school, young children need to have many opportunities that allow them to explore the world, to play and to learn how to communicate effectively with others. This takes time.

There are significant differences in how young children relate to the school experience but this has more to do with biological embedding than with a so called academic achievement gap.   Biological embedding is the process of early experiences shaping brain and biological development in ways that influence the development of people over the course their lives.

Adults who are successful in the workplace and productive members of their community can attribute much of their success to the social skills and cognitive-linguistic capacities that they developed early in life.  These abilities are best developed in children through learning environments that value children’s emotional well being and encourage the development of social competence.  This requires educators to implement instructional programs and create learning environments that give equal attention to providing young children a variety of meaningful social, emotional and cognitive experiences that expand their understanding of the world, as well as teaching them basic skills.

The current emphasis placed on highly scripted instructional programs by school leaders who advocate managed instruction as the preferred reform strategy in schools with low test scores, ignores the need to educate the whole child.   The Philadelphia schools that have been targeted for turn around are drawn from the lowest resourced communities of the city.  The students who populate these school communities are most in need of a learning environment that provides a balanced instructional approach in addressing their development needs.

Constructing meaning and developing understanding of how the world operates is a challenging and demanding task.  It isn’t a process that can be hurried.  People learn and master tasks at their own speed.  Wise educators understands this fact.  Instead of attempting to force children to learn at a uniform rate, they acknowledge the well-researched realities of child development.  Good teachers and principals create positive school environments.  They attend to the social-emotional as well as academic needs of their students.  The curriculum they design to guide their students’ learning is relevant, enriching and supportive of their students’ developmental needs.

The  “hurry up, not a moment to be wasted” model of school reform emphasizes skill and drill/ test prep instructional approaches over more holistic, in-depth instructional practices.   How this limited instructional approach will help children to develop proficiency as flexible thinkers and solvers of complex problems, is not clear.  Even more muddled is how a return to the factory model of education of the mid-twentieth century will prepare children to compete in the world of work of the twenty-first century.