Doing Away with Recess

A recent column appearing in The American Spectator by Perry Glanzer suggests President Obama should "act like a good politician and tell children exactly what they want to hear" in his upcoming speech to the nation's schoolchildren. He should tell them, suggests Glanzer, that they need more recess. http://spectator.org/archives/2010/09/14/what-obama-should-tell-the-kid

Sadly, recess is dying by strangulation from other supposedly good things. Recently, I met my son's teacher and received a copy of my son's schedule. I saw lots of good things he needs to and should learn, but I also looked for what I always loved -- those precious times of recess.

Glanzer is right. In many schools, recess has all but been squeezed out. What remains is like a tiny patch of rainforest surrounded by pasture. One example is the East Providence School District, which recently announced its plans to scrape recess entirely - all 10 minutes of it. I wrote about it here: http://linestoabrasspot.blogspot.com/2010/09/enhanced-recess.html

There was an uproar, followed by the district's clarification that it was merely "enhancing" recess by, among other things, lengthening it from 10 to 15 minutes. On its website, the district boasted that recess, "would no longer be an afterthought squeezed in after a rushed lunch." At this point any parent who was paying attention would have been doubly upset and demanded to know, "Since when did you whittle recess down to a 10 minute afterthought?"

Glanzer remembers his recess breaks in school:

When I was in school, I had three of them. Fifteen minutes in the morning,thirty minutes after lunch and fifteen minutes in the afternoon. During those times I learned to create games with others, choose my own activities, get along, argue, and negotiate.

My own memory of recess is much the same. I wonder about those who would eliminate recess. I wonder how they remember their own recess breaks when they were in school. Have they forgotten, or did they just hate recess?

Far Out

How far out can you go? The folks at the Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP) at the University of Wisconsin at Madison go pretty far in their May 2010 article, "Promising antipoverty strategies for families."

"Difficult issues include determining how much child support can be expected from nonresident parents who are not working, and whether (and how) child support orders should change when nonresident parents suffer earnings losses or unemployment." http://www.irp.wisc.edu/publications/fastfocus/pdfs/FF6-2010.pdf

You probably thought it would be easy to know how much child support you can expect from a nonresident parent who isn't working. Unless you're far out too.

Waiting for Superman

Director Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth) has made a new documentary about public schools. "Waiting for Superman" opens soon and is expected to generate alot of attention. In a recent article in New York Magazine entitled, Schools: The Disaster Movie, John Heileman discusses the movie and its director, whom he refers to as, "an unrepentant liberal." http://nymag.com/news/features/67966/ That's a strange term. What liberal school policies is Guggenheim unrepentant about? Racial desegration? The free school lunch program? Special education services for the disabled? If so, more power to him. But if he's unrepentant about busing, open classrooms, full inclusion, whole language, values clarification, or other variously liberal policies I could mention, then I'm not so sure. Heileman is probably using the term loosely, though it is still very weird. But I am getting way off track. What I really wanted to comment on is the thrust of Heileman's movie review: that terrific teachers are THE KEY to student success.

According to Heileman, Guggenheim's position is that "no variable is more critical to the success of students than terrific teachers." That may be true to an extent. Within the school, teachers probably are the variable most important to student success. Most people would agree with that. But what is wrong with Heileman's and Guggenheim's assertion is what it leaves out, the parents.

In a larger sense, it is not terrific teachers but rather terrific parents that are of paramount importance to children's success in school and in life. Waiting for Superman might acknowledge this reality, but nothing in Heileman's review suggests that it does. Instead, it offers the modest proposal that we bring in a new breed of teacher, a teacher who graduated from the top third, doesn't mind working nights and weekends or expect summers off. Perhaps that is what is meant by the movie title, Waiting for Superman, which I'll remind you Heilemen called a disaster movie. So here's the scenario: our poor helpless schoolchildren are trapped in failing schools. And they're going to fail unless terrific teachers rescue them. There are teachers currently on the scene trying to help, but they can't because they're weak and ineffective (or crappy, as Heileman put it). So the children must wait for Superman, or super teachers, to arrive. But what can we do to make super teachers come to the rescue?

Heilemen has the answser. He cites a study that says super teachers could be attracted to the field for a starting salary of $65,000 and a top salary of $150,000. Will the new breed of super teachers arrive in time to save the trapped children from failing?

Don't touch that dial, movie fans.

Unmentionable

Robert Samuelson, a contributing editor at Newsweek, recently wrote that the biggest reason school reform routinely fails "is almost unmentionable: shrunken student motivation." I'm guessing what Mr. Samuelson really finds almost unmentionable is not the lack of student motivation, because everybody talks about lack of student motivation, but rather it's cause. Here Mr. Samuelson bucks the standard line, which is that lack of student motivation is either the school's or the teacher's fault. Mr. Samuelson asserts that the reality is otherwise. According to Samuelson, as schools are including more and more students who formerly would have dropped out and as the adolescent culture has strengthened, school and teacher authority has eroded. "Motivation is weak," writes Mr. Samuelson, "because more students (of all races and economic classes, let it be added) don't like school, don't work hard and don't do well." http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/09/06/why_school_reform_fails_107033.html

Bracing, as is Mr. Samuelson's next assertion: "The goal of expanding 'access' -- giving more students more years of schooling -- tends to lower educational standards." I am reminded of a quip I once heard from a college professor friend of mine, "The only way we're going to not leave any child behind is if we don't go anywhere."

Could it be we are coming back to the realization that many students fail because they don't like school, don't work hard, and in some cases, don't belong in school in the first place?

Unmentionable indeed.

Enhanced Recess?

The latest assault on recess (and common sense) comes from the East Providence School District in Rhode Island. Tony Carcieri, spokesman for the district, gave a radio interview with Dan Yorke of WPRO in Providence. Seeking to allay fears that the district was doing away with recess, Mr. Carcieri may have simply added fuel to the fire when he explained that the district, "got rid of recess as we knew it and replaced it with something better." Carcieri asserted much of the criticism of the new policy was politically motivated. He also said of its critics, "They would like it to be like the old days." http://www.630wpro.com/Article.asp?id=1917874&spid=18040

A story on the Providence Journal's website sums up many parents' feelings of the new policy: "Developmentally inappropriate. Inhumane. Ridiculous. Too structured. Another popular opinion shared was recess, as most remember it, is gone and shame on the school officials for eliminating it."

Nothing doing, says Mario Cirillo, the superintendent, who refers to the new and improved recess as "enhanced recess." According to the district, enhanced means: 1) five extra minutes (whoop tee doo); 2) recess held at the teacher's discretion (whenever that is); 3) recess will be supervised by teachers instead of aids (another big whoop); 4) students will receive "personalized experiences" with the classroom teachers during recess (huh?). http://www.epschoolsri.com/news/recess.php

The district's claim that it is merely "enhancing" recess sounds suspiciously like a euphemism masking the very opposite: the elimination of recess. Call me a fear monger, but I can't help it when the district's own spokesman goes on the radio and announces that the district, "got rid of recess as we knew it and replaced it with something better." And it doesn't help either that the district's website distinguishes between "unstructured free time play" and recess. Why the distinction? The site assures parents children will recieve fifteen minutes of recess per day, but does not give any assurance of when or how much "unstructured free time play" children will receive. All it says is, "Children will have their unstructured free time play." That is because recess is no longer recess in East Providence. As the district has explained, it got rid of recess as we know it and replaced it with "enhanced recess." Enhanced recess is not the same as "unstructured free time play." Enhanced recess is totally up to the teacher's discretion. It may come at any time of the day, morning or afternoon, or it may not come at all on any given day. It may be inside the classroom or outside. It may consist of the teacher taking children outside for a stretch break or a game of duck duck goose. As for the old recess as we knew it, what the district now calls "unstructured free time play," the district won't say when or how much children will get.

If you read the news, you probably hear alot about the crisis in public education, about our dysfunctional public school system. You probably also hear alot about the supposed causes of the failure: inadequate funding, poverty, teacher performance, level of parental involvement, etc . . . . These issues are secondary. This story gives us a glimpse of the real cause of the crisis in public schools: the boneheaded thinking of those who run the schools.