Back to School Educational Trends

It appears as if today’s trends in education include the fact that everything is getting earlier! One online article claims that parents are now taking their three-year-olds to tutoring programs, and using flashcards and homework. Kindergartners are now doing the work that first-graders used to do with letters and numbers, and middle school kids are enrolling in algebra courses a year or two earlier than ever before. Finally, high school students are signing up for prep classes for the SAT college entrance exam.

They say these trends are being driven by several factors as follows:
1) Parents are fearful that children will fall behind if not pushed almost from birth
2) There is frustration with schools that have failed to boost achievement for disadvantaged students or challenge the middle and top tiers sufficiently
3) There is competition for college entrance
4) There’s an overall sense that America is losing ground in the global marketplace.

This last point has been fueled by futurists like James Canton in his book entitled "The Extreme Future" where he said about the top ten trends that will shape the future of America – “Quality public education, in crisis today, will either propel or crash the future aspirations of the American workforce … America’s workforce must be transformed, made more globally competitive, with higher education, science, and innovation skills necessary to ensure future prosperity.”

Sherry Cleary, assistant professor of education at Pitt and director of the University Child Development Center said, “Encouraging students to challenge themselves and expand their horizons is always a good thing, she said. "But if they're being pushed to get a head start on college credits mainly so that they can finish early and go to graduate school early and get a job early, one has to wonder, what's the rush?"

In another opinion, Psychologist David Elkind published his landmark book called, "The Hurried Child" back in 1981. “The pressure to grow up fast, to achieve early in the very great in middle-class America. There is no room today for the ‘late bloomer’... Children have to achieve success early or they are regarded as losers," he said.

This book is about to be reissued, and Dr. Elkind is now saying, the phenomenon is even more prevalent than it was a quarter-century ago.

It is one thing to offering college electives to high school teens, but the younger the child, the more controversial it is. Most child development experts agree that young children learn best in rich play environments that stimulate the senses in age-appropriate ways.

I have seen this time and time again at Children of the City, where programs help children and their mentors and families engage in activities, support for homework assistance, and community programs that help entire families.

Other learning programs like Junior Kumon Math and Reading Centers is now offering academic tutoring for children as young as two, and the Sylvan Learning Centers and Stanley Kaplan now have materials for kindergartners. Junior Kumon claims to have 28,000 children enrolled the United States, in less than two years since they entered the U.S. marketplace.

Trends indicate that introducing the concepts of math and science in middle school used to be called “acceleration” while now it is an “expectation” in the state standards. Once reason is the Trends in International Math and Science Studies survey of 1995 which showed that American students were ahead in fourth-grade math but dropped to the bottom in the 12th grade.

The Los Angeles Unified School District made passing algebra a graduation requirement. 48,000 ninth-graders took the course in 2004, and 44 percent of them failed. Many went on to repeat the course several times and kept on failing until they gave up and sadly, they dropped out.

On the other hand, a program used in the Pittsburgh Public School districts for the middle school curriculum called Connected Math was designed to introduce math concepts in a way that students could apply to real life. It has become as controversial as the reading wars and is now known as the math wars. Students who take the course for the first time in ninth grade will have to score at or above grade level. Those who don't will have to take an additional tutorial class each day.

The fact is that today, teens are killing themselves and each other at triple the rate they were twenty years ago; teen pregnancy rates in the United States are the highest for any Western nation; fourth-grade girls are dieting in record numbers; and twenty percent of youngsters are "flunking" kindergarten. Finally millions of children are medicated daily to make them more "educable" and "manageable" in school and at home.

So in reality, I believe that the answer may in fact lie in what is going on at home as well as what we deem necessary to push youngsters at school academically. If we had more programs nationwide to support students as they grow up, perhaps the results would speak for themselves just like the results speak for students who have been through the Children of the City programs. Community support has helped our community in Brooklyn New York. These programs are proven, and something the rest of the nation could learn from... Visit http://www.childrenofthecity.org/ to learn more.

-- Rocco Basile