“April is the cruelest month,” T.S. Eliot wrote in the opening canto of The Waste Land. The month in which America celebrates child abuse prevention. Each spring, the English Language Arts, math, and science tests arrive, New York City’s third- to eighth-grade public school students busily filling in bubbles. As …
This morning, succumbing to my raging digital addiction, I opened yet another email from Education Week. The American Society of Addiction Medicine defines this malady as a “process” condition—distinct from an obsession with activities such as shopping, eating, and doing drugs. A primary, chronic disease of brain reward, motivation, memory …
These are dark times for the children in the garden. They have lost their place at the center of education. The shepherds of early development are struggling to move them in from the periphery. But the task is daunting, efforts thwarted in the age of standards-based accountability. Teaching Kindergarten: Learner …
The subject line was irresistible: “Early Childhood Pushes Up.” The Teachers College Record, a hotbed of radical critique, had delivered another gem to my inbox. Here was a scathing commentary on Obama’s “Cradle-to-Career” education policy. “Wish you hadn’t moved to Australia,” I emailed Jeanne Marie Iorio, a senior lecturer at …
Support for the arts has been steadily dwindling in the United States. Lots of competition out there for a slice of the multi-trillion-dollar American budget. And, besides, we’re too busy with more important stuff, aren’t we? But other, more enlightened views have held sway. Fifty years ago last September, Lyndon …
Early childhood professionals have long been a beleaguered species. For starters, they’ve had to battle the perception that they’re “just babysitting,” providing “day care.” Never mind the field’s heroic history, chronicled in Exchange magazine a few years ago by Roger Neugebauer and Debra Hartzell. Heading the list was the Sheltering …
There’s nothing like a megadose of civic action to boost my serotonin—especially in these dark times. Several days ago, Parent Voices NY posted to their website an eloquent, diplomatic request
September 9th marks the first birthday of Bill de Blasio’s universal preschool initiative, a cornerstone of his agenda to combat inequality. On this day the largest and most segregated school district in the nation will greet its children. Segregation is hardly a new phenomenon in New York City. It’s been …
How can you resist a book that links Vygotsky’s theory of social constructivism with the Framers’ vision for American democracy? I couldn’t. When I first looked at Learning Together: The Law, Politics, Economics, Pedagogy, and Neuroscience of Early Childhood Education, I nearly ran in the other direction. I’m married to …
Oh, the Places You’ll Go! may have preceded the publication of Betty Hart’s and Todd Risley’s landmark study by five years. But oh, how deliciously apt. The researchers’ discovery of language disparities among children across the socioeconomic spectrum has taken off. Reducing the gap of 30 million words between low- and …
