Hyper-Schooling is Killing My Kid! What Can be Done?

A study, released Nov. 30th in the Journal of Medicine and Sport, found that the more time kids in 1st Grade "spent sitting and the less time they spent being physically active, the fewer gains they made in reading in the two following years. In first grade, a lot of sedentary time and no running around also had a negative impact on their ability to do math." (Read about it in Time Magazine) The findings in this study are not a great surprise to anyone who has taken time to read up on the available human development science with affect upon early educational development, and yet, the U.S. school systems and political leadership have invented successive "school reform" initiatives over the past decades promising improved academic attainment and creating an increasingly destructive educational environment for America's youngest students.

Concerned parents, teachers and community leaders who follow education "reform" closely are beginning to ask questions about why local schools, state boards, and the Federal DOE consistently ignore the warnings from studies and experts, and instead demand more and more instructional time, seat work, and testing at younger ages. Brenda Vosik, the director of the Nebraska Family Policy Forum, a grass roots organization which works to promote family centered education policy on the local and state level in Nebraska, is perplexed by administrators and policy makers who ignore the behavioral science and continue to push education agendas that are destructive. She asks, "So if learning isn't the real agenda, what is?"

It's hard for parents and community advocates like Vosik to continue to have faith in the sincerity of educational leadership, to do so requires excusing the damage being done to young minds as the result of well intentioned ignorance rather than willful neglect or utter stupidity. Public school parent Gina Miller, is astonished that there has been no positive change after years of parents "screaming" about their children's suffering. She wonders whether we will have to wait for study results tracking children who are pushed through the "new 'Cradle to Career' education push" before education leadership will be willing to change directions. I don't think Miller is alone in her intolerance for sacrificing generations to these illogical social experiments, she says, "It makes me ill and VERY VERY SAD!"

It is an increasingly prudent skepticism that prompts questions about the true motivations of these education "reform" agendas. I have my theories but they aren't easy to swallow for the general American public so I try to focus on persuading the public that our education system needs serious corrections to protect the cognitive health and emotional development of American children. However, the consequences of failure are so dire and the numerous voices of warning so thoroughly ignored that even the prudence of persuasion is called into question.

A prominent public administration theory of organizational reform written by professor
Albert O. Hirschman, in his book "Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States," applies standard economic theory to the reform of state organizations such as school systems. Through his theory we can identify three basic ways that public school parents can exercise their influence to change the structural organization of public schools. One, they can be loyal and serve the organization from within in hopes that their influence can affect the organization, they can use their voice in internal protest and descent, or they can exit the organization.

Mothers like Brenda Vosik and Gina Miller are the kind of loyal reformers who have served their public schools, voiced their concerns, and exerted great effort to organizing other parents in hopes of promoting positive change. What parents like these dedicated moms are learning is that the school systems may be beyond internal reform. I also spent years of extraordinary effort attempting to effect positive change through loyal dissent, but what I saw this first hand when I worked in the public schools was enough to push me beyond loyal voice. In the end I concluded that the best way to change the institution was to exit it. I protested the failures of education with my feet and walked away. 

I now homeschool my children. The time I used to spend filling the holes and fighting the internal battles I now spend giving my children the kind of education I know is best. The rise in homeschool, online schools, and other alternatives has increased 61% in the last decade and if the trend continues across diverse demographics, as it is now, it may make a difference in education admins willingness to listen. Unfortunately, Hirschman theory applied to public school has its limits because there is a hard ceiling on the number of people who can exercise their reform power.

It isn't practical for a great many parents to devote significant time to loyal service or voiced opposition within their school systems, and exiting the public system is impossible for most parents, especially single and middle class working parents. It's one of the things that makes it so easy for the schools to continue to ignore the social and behavioral science, they have a captive student base.

As someone who was once a loyal participant in public schools, and who gave years of sincere effort to internal reform before walking away, I am often asked what changes would prompt my return. What are the structural changes needed to make classrooms healthy environments for proper educational development? Well the answer doesn't require more money, more technology, or more federal initiatives. It's simple. It takes true educational freedom and local control. Parents know what their kids need and what they want out of education. Every school doesn't need to offer the same product or method. If schools were a free market there would be a school for every need, every educational philosophy, for every family, and for every student. What is required is trust. Trust in parents to do what is best for their kids, trust in teachers, trust in innovation.

What kind of school would I want for my young children?

I think the schools having the most success and doing the least damage in elementary ED are ones that limit direct instruction to no more than 45 minute increments and allow for frequent unstructured movement in between instructional periods. The school day should be shorter for young children, the way in which school districts have increased the length of the school day, especially at the elementary level, has been damaging and unproductive.

In addition to reducing instructional time, my school of choice would integrate more artistic and tactile activities into learning and allow kids to learn through discovery and play. To do this the education model mustn't be too focused on testing standards and must find more creative and less invasive ways of assessing progress. Teachers must be trusted to freely use their talents to teach without tight bureaucratic hand cuffs.

At the very least!

Since educational freedom and local control is a tall order these days, one change that should be made immediately throughout the country is to eliminate federal and state initiatives that promote standardization. The expectations upon teachers to teach developmentally inappropriate material in developmentally inappropriate instruction methods under the constant pressures of high-stakes standardized testing is a destructive institutional design that must change if we are to hope for positive change.

Teach Them to Trust Themselves and Others

The Atlantic printed an interesting piece highlighting the freedom and independence small children enjoy in Japanese society and how their social relationships are impacted by a fundamentally different view of a child's place in their communities. An understanding of this significant contrast between how Japenese society and American society have grown up in this modern world could provide some insight into what we are doing wrong.

Most parents in American know instinctively that there is something terribly wrong in a community where so many parents feel uncomfortable taking their eyes off our kids for fear that something bad may happen to them. Many parents are often frustrated by a cultural assumption that young children can't be alone and desire for their children to experience a more independent childhood. What is most perplexing is that this intense concern for our children's safety seems to be particularly unique to America.

When I was a young girl we lived in Munich, Germany for several years. I remember those years as being carefree and liberating in contrast to childhood in the U.S. While in Germany my brothers and sisters and I could run free without our parents. I remember at 8 years old walking to the market with my Scottish friend to shop for dinner carrying a list from her mom. In contrast, just a few years earlier I remember me and my 5 siblings being picked up by a Kentucky police officer less than a mile from our home because we were picking roadside apples without our parents nearby. I remember the terror I felt. One minute I was happily exploring with my older siblings (the oldest was 9) and the next I was in a police station trying to calm down my little brother who was crying in terror while we waited for my mom to come get us. For me and my siblings those years in Germany were some of our happiest. We felt the contrast between the independence we had there and the restrictions of our American childhood.

The Atlantic article reports a reality so foreign to American kids that it seems impossible to imagine that kids in America could ever enjoy that kind of freedom. Like the Germany I remember as a kid, "in big cities like Tokyo, small children take the subway and run errands by themselves" which begs the question, why are kids as young as three safe in the streets of Tokyo but not in America's biggest cities? Could we make our city streets safer by changing the way we view childhood? 

"Japanese kids learn early on that, ideally, any member of the community can be called on to serve or help others... This assumption is reinforced at school, where children take turns cleaning and serving lunch instead of relying on staff to perform such duties..." This kind of early work responsibility is seriously lacking in American society today, and in many American homes, but it hasn't always been this way. America used to excel at raising hard-working independent children. It is not to late to return to that kind of child rearing that requires that children take "responsibility for shared spaces." Being American used to embody taking "pride of ownership." In Japan these ethics "extends to public space more broadly" and children who grow up learning to trust themselves and others become adults who trust the capabilities of children and look out for their welfare. Teaching children to trust in itself is self-fulfilling in this aspect and by teaching our children today that they can't trust in others we have severed the community ties that in the past protected children. Every child "out in public knows he can rely on the group to help in an emergency."

Some might say that considering the current cultural rot we can't give our children this kind of independence because there's just too much violence to be weary of, but accepting the premise that when people grow up trusting their surroundings and learning self-reliance and responsibility for themselves and others the natural result is a less dangerous and less violent culture, requires that we we begin to shift the paradigm now before it gets worse.  I believe we can begin to make our communities safer by changing the way we parent and educate our children.

The Minion Movie: Is being funny and cute an antidote to being bad?

I watched the Minion Movie with my 6 year old today and frankly it left me disturbed. I hadn't realized going into it just how confusing it would be for a young child to discover what a "minion" really is. Until someone had the brilliant idea to write a prequel to explain how these brainless servants of evil ended up as Gru's henchmen, my six year old would have never imagined that his little friends were sycophants so dependent on being servile to an evil master that the absence of someone to slave to would cause them to fall into deep debilitating depression.

The Minion Movie will complicate your child's relationship with their little yellow friends and blur the lines between the innocence they love and a much darker reality. Minion Mania is everywhere and kids all out adore these funny little minions but until the Minion Movie they were just harmless sidekicks in Gru's journey of redemption from his evil ways, now they drop young movie goers into the backstage of "evil" and make evil out to be either a twisted kind of "good" or a ridiculous form of funny.

Before you dismiss my critique outright, hear me out. First, let me say that I liked Despicable Me and Despicable Me 2. Yes, I had to be lead to watch it by the pleadings of my children, the movie title had me making a twisted face of caution, but I thought the story did a very good job of showing children a genuine change of heart, and for all the right reasons which is rare these days. The minions were funny and while they became the breakout stars of the movie they were none the less harmless comic relief. Not anymore!

The idea of doing a prequel to explain more about the minions than any little kid needed to know was a bad idea from the start. I will admit that for the child viewer who has seen the original movie "Despicable Me" there is the redeemable foreknowledge of what lies in the future for these little minions who attach themselves to Dur, a villain on an inevitable crash course with his humanity, but this nuance may be too subtle to shed a great light on the flaws of the Minion Movie. 

The fact that the idolized yellow side kicks fall into a good path by some future accident didn't alleviate the present visual of them lobbing a bazooka blast at pursuing police officers, endearing themselves to a crime family and a evil female super villain, and stealing the crown jewels only to recover them in time for them to enthusiastically follow the final thief, their future master Dur. While I can work with the material in "Despicable Me" in teaching my child about having a true change of heart and the things that often lead one to a better path in life, the Minion Movie is just a squishy mess of confusing concepts that would take a much older child to dissect and even then I'm not sure it would lead to a positive learning experience.

The Minion Movie wasn't just the average annoying kids movie that threw too much crude humor in just to "lighten things up." I would have been disappointed enough if the only objections were the striptease musical number, a few cross dressing fans of the female evil villain, and several bare butt cracks and thong wearing scenes, but these weren't the only things that offended my sensibilities. The whole plot line was truly offensive to my spirit.

On the way home I started a careful talk with my son about the movie. I wanted to draw out his impressions of the story without him sensing my disapproval. The conversation was eye opening. I listened in astonishment as he explained the movie's portrayal of "evil" as good. It was especially hard for him to explain the quirky family of Robbers who take the Minions to the Super Villain convention and how the police men (the real good guys) in pursuit end up in a deadly crash as a result of the Minions actions.

When I asked him why he thinks the Minions want to follow "evil people," and whether that makes them good or bad, he made this defense of his silly minion friends. "They just think evil is good and good is evil." Those were my son's exact words and he thought it was a fair defense of their innocence. He is completely unfamiliar with the scriptural text he was innocently citing. ["Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil..." ~ Isaiah 5:20 (2 Nephi 15:20) "Wherefore, take heed... that ye do not judge that which is evil to be of God, or that which is good and of God to be of the devil." ~ Moroni 7:14]

The Minions are so cute and adorably clueless which endears them to every child who watches the movie. Unfortunately it is seriously confusing for young viewers that these adorable little friends are excited by evil doers. How is a 6 year old going to reconcile their adorable "innocence" with a plot that has these little yellow fellows setting out on a grand adventure to find and follow a true villain in order to save their tribe?

When I continued to ask gently probing questions to challenge the motivations of my son's little yellow friends he set out to defend them by the only logical means, discuss the various shades of grey in the "evil" character of those the minions attach themselves too. This predictably resulted in a rationalization that set apart the really "evil" guys and the just kinda bad guys. My son saying "they are bad but still have good parts inside."

While it is true that there are bad guys with some good parts inside, these are not the people I want my son to set up as his heroes. They aren't the ones to emulate! Yet these are the ones the Minions long to associate with, the truly despicable. To lighten up the villain scene the writers introduce the Minions to a ridiculously goofy crime family who adopt the minions when they bond over their shared getaway scene in which they eliminate the pursuing police cars. Try to explain that one to your 4 year old.

Until they made the Minion movie we could all act like the Minions were basically good little fellas. Now? Sure they are clueless and adorable but what of their character? Funny? Sure, but do you want your child to fall in love with characters who mindlessly engage in evil plots because they are incapable of discerning good from evil and are aloof from the pain and destruction that is caused by their complicity. Is being funny and cute an antidote to being bad?

Professors Calling Out Common Core

http://whatiscommoncore.wordpress.com/2013/09/07/top-ten-professors-calling-out-common-cores-so-called-college-readiness/

Dr. Terrence Moore, Hillsdale College professor and author, has penned a book he hopes will serve as a user’s guide for parents, citizens, and state lawmakers to help them fully grasp what will actually happen in classrooms where the Common Core standards are being implemented—and how this initiative will only hasten the full decline of our schools.

First, Dr. Anthony Esolen of Providence College in Rhode Island:

“What appalls me most about the standards … is the cavalier contempt for great works of human art and thought, in literary form. It is a sheer ignorance of the life of the imagination. We are not programming machines. We are teaching children. We are not producing functionaries, factory-like. We are to be forming the minds and hearts of men and women… to be human beings, honoring what is good and right and cherishing what is beautiful.”

Second, Dr. Thomas Newkirk of University of New Hampshire:

The standards are portrayed as so consensual, so universally endorsed, so thoroughly researched and vetted, so self-evidently necessary to economic progress, so broadly representative of beliefs in the educational community—that they cease to be even debatable… The principle of opportunity costs prompts us to ask: “What conversations won’t we be having?” Since the CCSS virtually ignore poetry, will we cease to speak about it? What about character education, service learning? What about fiction writing in the upper high school grades? What about the arts that are not amenable to standardized testing? … We lose opportunities when we cease to discuss these issues and allow the CCSS to completely set the agenda, when the only map is the one it creates.”

Third, Dr. Daniel Coupland of Hillsdale College:

“Yes, man is made for work, but he’s also made for so much more… Education should be about the highest things. We should study these things of the stars, plant cells, Mozart’s Requiem… not simply because they’ll get us into the right college or into the right line of work. Rather, we should study these noble things because they can tell us who we are, why we’re here… If education has become –as Common Core openly declares– preparation for work in a global economy, then this situation is far worse than Common Core critics ever anticipated. And the concerns about cost, and quality, and yes, even the constitutionality of Common Core, pale in comparison to the concerns for the hearts, minds, and souls of American children.”

Fourth, Dr. Christopher Tienken of Seton Hall University:

“Education reform in the United States is being driven largely by ideology, rhetoric, and dogma instead of evidence…. Where is the evidence of the efficacy of the standards? … Let us be very frank: The CCSS are no improvement over the current set of state standards. The CCSS are simply another set of lists of performance objectives.”

Fifth and Sixth, Dr. James Milgram (Stanford University) and Dr. Sandra Stotsky (University of Arkansas): BOTH SAT ON THE VALIDATION COMMITTEE FOR COMMON CORE STANDARDS BUT REJECTED THE STANDARDS

“We hear no proponents or endorsers of Common Core’s standards warning this country about the effects of the college-readiness level in Common Core’s mathematics standards on post-secondary and post-baccalaureate academic and professional programs. We hear no proponents or

endorsers of Common Core’s standards advising district superintendents and state education policy makers on the kind of mathematics curriculum and courses they need to make available in our secondary schools if our undergraduate engineering colleges are to enroll American students.

At this time we can only conclude that a gigantic fraud has been perpetrated on this country, in particular on parents in this country, by those developing, promoting, or endorsing Common Core’s standards. We have no illusion that the college-readiness level in ELA will be any more demanding than Common Core’s college-readiness level in mathematics.” – Sept. 2013 paper: Can This Country Survive Common Core’s College

Readiness Level? by R. James Milgram and Sandra Stotsky

Dr. James Milgram, Professor of Mathematics at Stanford University, has extensive experience developing mathematics standards throughout the nation and served on the Validation Committee for the Common Core Standards. Regarding the math standards, Dr. James Milgram (the only person with an advanced degree in mathematics on the Validation Committee) refused to sign off on the standards because he concluded that they would place American students at least two years behind those of high-achieving countries by 8th grade.(http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/07/30/do-math-common-core-massive-risky-experiment-on-your-kids/)(http://www.al.com/opinion/index.ssf/2013/10/common_core_myths_debunked_you.html)

Seventh, Dr. Alan Manning of Brigham Young University:

“The Core standards just set in concrete approaches to reading/writing that we already know don’t work very well. Having the Core standards set in concrete means that any attempts to innovate and improve reading/writing instruction will certainly be crushed. Actual learning outcomes will stagnate at best. An argument can be made that any improvement in reading/writing instruction should include more rather than less attention the reading/analysis of stories known to effective in terms of structure (i.e. “classic” time-tested stories). An argument can be made that any improvement in reading/writing instruction should include more rather than fewer exercises where students write stories themselves that are modeled on the classics. This creates a more stable foundation on which students can build skills for other kinds of writing. The Core standards would prevent public schools from testing these kinds of approaches.”

Eighth, Dr. Bill Evers of Hoover Institute at Stanford University:

“The Common Core — effectively national math and English curriculum standards coming soon to a school near you — is supposed to be a new, higher bar that will take the United States from the academic doldrums to international dominance.

So why is there so much unhappiness about it? There didn’t seem to be much just three years ago. Back then, state school boards and governors were sprinting to adopt the Core. In practically the blink of an eye, 45 states had signed on.

But states weren’t leaping because they couldn’t resist the Core’s academic magnetism. They were leaping because it was the Great Recession — and the Obama administration was dangling a $4.35 billion Race to the Top carrot in front of them. Big points in that federal program were awarded for adopting the Core, so, with little public debate, most did.”

Ninth: Dr. Terrence Moore of Hillsdale College:

“Literature is the study of human nature. If we dissect it in this meaningless way, kids not only do not become college and career ready, they don’t even have a love of learning; they don’t even have an understanding of their fellow men… The thing that bothers me more than anything else is found on page number one of the introduction. That says that Common Core is a living work. That means that the thing that you vote on today could be something different tomorrow, and five years from now it is completely unrecognizable.”

Tenth: Dr. William Mathis, of the University of Colorado

“The adoption of a set of standards and assessments, by themselves, is unlikely to improve learning, increase test scores, or close the achievement gap.

• For schools and districts with weak or non-existent curriculum articulation, the CCSS may adequately serve as a basic curriculum.

• The assessment consortia are currently focused on mathematics and English/language arts. Schools, districts, and states must take proactive steps to protect other vital purposes of education such as citizenship, the arts, and maximizing individual talents – as well as the sciences and social sciences. As testbased penalties have increased, the instructional attention given to non-tested areas has decreased.

• Educators and policymakers need to be aware of the significant costs in instructional materials, training and computerized testing platforms the CCSS requires. It is unlikely the federal or state governments will adequately cover these costs.

• The nation’s “international economic competitiveness” is unlikely to be affected by the presence or absence of national standards.”

English professor Mary Grabar from Clayton State University Morrow, GA opposes the ELA standards under Common Core. "As a college English instructor, I am dismayed by how much we have already lost of our literary heritage." http://www.rollcall.com/issues/57_120/mary-grabar-gradgrinds-of-common-core-213672-1.html

Ze’ev Wurman, a prominent software architect, electrical engineer and longtime math advisory expert in California and Washington, D.C., points out that Common Core delays proficiency with addition and subtraction until 4th grade and proficiency with basic multiplication until 5th grade, and skimps on logarithms, mathematical induction, parametric equations and trigonometry at the high school level. (http://www.math.jhu.edu/~wsw/ED/ednext_20123_Forum.pdf) -- (http://pioneerinstitute.org/news/why-common-cores-math-standards-dont-measure-up-by-guest-blogger-zeev-wurman/)

Professor Jonathan Goodman of New York University found that the Common Core math standards imposed “significantly lower expectations with respect to algebra and geometry than the published standards of other countries.” (http://www.educationnews.org/ed_reports/94979.html)

Prof. Andrew Porter, the dean of the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, wrote in a research paper after studying them: "Those who hope that the Common Core standards represent greater focus for U.S. education will be disappointed by our answers. Only one of our criteria for measuring focus found that the Common Core standards are more focused than current state standards … some state standards are much more focused and some much less focused than is the Common Core, and this is true for both subjects. …

"We also used international bench-marking to judge the quality of the Common Core standards, and the results are surprising both for mathematics and for ELAR. … High-performing countries’ emphasis on “perform procedures” runs counter to the widespread call in the United States for a greater emphasis on higher order cognitive demand." (http://iowaascd.org/files/8813/2543/8288/CommonCoreResearch010112.pdf)(http://pioneerinstitute.org/education/myths-about-national-standards-myth-1/)

Mary Kay Bacallao, 25-year math teacher, professor of science and math education at Mercer University and Fayette County Board of Education member, analyzes the math standards specifically and comes to some disturbing conclusions about their quality, concluding that the Common Core “will set our children back one to two years.” (http://www.ajc.com/weblogs/get-schooled/2013/aug/21/math-prof-common-core-will-set-our-children-back-o/)

A Year in High School US History

After a year of following my son's public school US History curriculum I am thoroughly convinced that the "study of history" in schools today is nothing more than progressive indoctrination. 

His school curriculum has called into question the integrity and motives of our founding fathers and the sincerity of their commitment to liberty. It has demonized our nation as a purely imperialistic colonial power with the blood of millions on our hands. It has characterized American foreign policy as parasitical, teaching students that American influence in the world has exploited the resources of other nations to enrich ourselves. 

The curriculum admitted that Capitalism has worked to create great economic growth and technical advancements but also taught students that it did so at a very heavy price. They were taught that Capitalism causes greed, social injustice, manipulation of the government, social divisions, and corrupts society through materialism.

The curriculum managed to accentuate every detail of the World Wars that would lead students to believe that we were ultimately responsible for the rise of dictators throughout the world, that we were responsible for sparking the Cold War, and that we fueled a nuclear arms race.

The final culmination of this curriculum is to undermine the morality, prosperity, and general happiness of the 50's by drawing parallels between fascist movements in Europe and the "conformity" of 1950 America. The cohesive culture, intact families, and rising prosperity of that time are represented as an outgrowth fanciful panic caused by the great "red scare" and a national patriotic need to inculcate conformity to oppressive social norms.

I have tried hard to find the good in this curriculum, and while at times there is some lip service paid to a stray virtue of our Republic, Capitalism, and Christian culture, these instances are immediately undermined by the constantly present filters of moral relativism and multi-culturalism.

The good news -- my son is seeing the duplicity and fallacies in the world view that governs this curriculum. Today he schooled me on exactly how his classmates are able to draw parallels between fascism and traditional cultural values. He then pointed out the crafty deception that exists in a curriculum that delegitimizes the best contract for individual freedom ever created, the constitution; topples the cultural pillars that sustain this individual liberty, namely adherence to moral law; and tears apart the fabric of our culture, which is fidelity to traditional family life; only to replace the values of freedom and morality with counterfeits that will lead to cultural destruction and tyranny of collectivism.

While I am greatful to have a mature 15 year old capable of sorting out this mess (aided by a constant vigilance at home to education in the principles of freedom and morality), I greatly doubt there are very many American youth who will escape this thorough secular progressive indoctrination. This should be a serious concern for every American who believes in the greatness of our constitutional republic, free market, and traditional family culture. Abraham Lincoln's words that, "The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next," should be a sobering warning in our generation.