Loss of Playtime the Next Global Warming?

SunnyChanel — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 00:30:00 GMT

Childhood Experts are feeling a wee bit troubled. They are worried about a generation of kids who aren’t getting enough of good old-fashioned playtime. The AP reported that this was the hot topic at the Wonderplay conference last week in New York City, a gathering that included 900 early childhood educators from 22 states. During his keynote speech, the psychologist and author Michael Thompson declared "We have to fight back. We're going to fight for play."

In these busy times of too much TV, too much school work, and too many video games, kids don’t have the free time to participate in spontaneous play. There is the worry, which was voiced by Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a Temple Uiversity psychologist, that without play as part of children’s every day lives, that they will lose “the innovation and creative thinking” that is gained from free play. She made the scary prediction that “the lack of play in early childhood education ‘could be the next global warming.’”

Among the key factors, according to Thompson (From the AP):
-- Parents' reluctance to let their kids play outside on their own, for fear of abduction or injury, and the companion trend of scheduling lessons, supervised sports and other structured activities that consume a large chunk of a child's non-school hours.

-- More hours per week spent by kids watching TV, playing video games, using the Internet, communicating on cell phones.

-- Shortening or eliminating recess at many schools -- a trend so pronounced that the National PTA has launched a "Rescuing Recess" campaign.

-- More emphasis on formal learning in preschool, more homework for elementary school students and more pressure from parents on young children to quickly acquire academic skills.

Now stop reading this and go play with your kids.

Photo Credit

Story via: Salon/AP

No Child Left Behind Sets Impossible Goals

Hannah Tennant-Moore — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 19:20:00 GMT

Yet another of the Bush administration’s chickens has come home to roost, this time in the arena of early education. The No Child Left Behind law has begun creating problems for schools that are not unlike the balloon payments dogging many homeowners.

This past year, more schools failed to meet the federal law’s testing requirements than ever before, in large part because, for many states, NCLB required relatively small improvements in the first few years, followed by gigantic leaps in the next few years.

In California, for instance, many schools were making good progress, increasing test scores by about 3 percent a year. But this year, these solid schools are required to up student performance by a whopping 11 percent; for most of them, it has proven impossible. One study estimated that every single elementary school in California would fail to meet the NCLB requirements by 2014, the year in which the law aims to have every American school achieve 100 percent proficiency in math and reading—a goal which many experts have long argued is impossible.

“And they’re asking for another 11 percent increase next year and the next, and that’s where I’m saying I just don’t know how,” said a California school principal (pictured). “I’m spending sleepless nights.”

Perhaps most worrisome, NCLB (unintentionally) mandates harsher punishments for schools in states with harder tests and higher academic standards; schools with lower standards, on the other hand, stand a better chance of meeting NCLB’s improvement requirements.

School administrators have been counting on Congress to change the law to reflect more realistic standards of achievement. But with war, environmental degradation, and economic disaster to contend with, it’s unlikely that early education laws will be seriously revisited anytime soon.

Photo: New York Times

Strollerderby : early education

Loss of Playtime the Next Global Warming?

No Child Left Behind Sets Impossible Goals