I Just read through the Center on Education Policy’s “Choices, Changes, and Challenges: Curriculum and Instruction in the NCLB Era” report. The report examines the effect that the No Child Left Behind act has had on curriculum and instructional time in public education in the 5 years since it was enacted. Unfortunately, the affect hasn’t been good – as one could imagine, there has been a large decrease in time spent on subjects/activities that are not the focus of federal oversight (i.e. social studies, science, art and music, physical education, lunch and/or recess) and an increase in time spent on those that are (i.e. English language arts & Math).
To accommodate this increased time in ELA and math, 44% of districts reported cutting time from one or more other subjects or activities (social studies, science, art and music, physical education, lunch and/or recess) at the elementary level. Again, the decreases reported by these districts were relatively large, adding up to a total of 141 minutes per week across all of these subjects, on average, or nearly 30 minutes per day. These decreases represent an average reduction of 31% in the total instructional time devoted to these subjects since 2001-02.
The report also indicates that the average number of minutes-per-week devoted to art/music, physical education and lunch/recess combined (among the school districts surveyed) was 490. Thats 13 minutes less than the total minutes-per-week devoted to English language arts alone (503 minutes-per-week). This is a large reduction in the amount of time dedicated to creative play during the school day. As the developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1978) has noted, the role of play in development is an important one. Play, according to Vygotsky, creates a zone of proximal development which allows the child to act “above his daily behavior.” Through play, children can rework and act-out the social practices which they encounter in everyday life – particularly in school-life. What kind of learning can take place in an environment where children are only given the opportunity to receive information and spit it back out through testing? Its good to know that our lawmakers are hard at work reauthorizing this piece of legislation…
child’s play in the NCLB era
I Just read through the Center on Education Policy’s “Choices, Changes, and Challenges: Curriculum and Instruction in the NCLB Era” report. The report examines the effect that the No Child Left Behind act has had on curriculum and instructional time in public education in the 5 years since it was enacted. Unfortunately, the affect hasn’t been good – as one could imagine, there has been a large decrease in time spent on subjects/activities that are not the focus of federal oversight (i.e. social studies, science, art and music, physical education, lunch and/or recess) and an increase in time spent on those that are (i.e. English language arts & Math).
According to the report:
The report also indicates that the average number of minutes-per-week devoted to art/music, physical education and lunch/recess combined (among the school districts surveyed) was 490. Thats 13 minutes less than the total minutes-per-week devoted to English language arts alone (503 minutes-per-week). This is a large reduction in the amount of time dedicated to creative play during the school day. As the developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1978) has noted, the role of play in development is an important one. Play, according to Vygotsky, creates a zone of proximal development which allows the child to act “above his daily behavior.” Through play, children can rework and act-out the social practices which they encounter in everyday life – particularly in school-life. What kind of learning can take place in an environment where children are only given the opportunity to receive information and spit it back out through testing? Its good to know that our lawmakers are hard at work reauthorizing this piece of legislation…