Sooner and Faster

In the Washington Post, elementary teacher Emily Kaplan wrote about her experience in a no-excuses charter school:

"This school is obsessed with success....  The school's youngest students — children of color from predominantly low-income families — can do a lot.  These 5-, 6-, and 7-year-olds who start each day by pumping their fists into the air while chanting about success are articulate in person and on the page; they are perspicacious readers and creative, rational mathematicians.  The nine hours a day they spend in classrooms... enable them to attain academic milestones earlier than their peers in more traditional school environments."

But this arc to success does not continue.  "Once children at this school reach adolescence, many struggle....  Existing evidence indicates that these students — who have spent their entire educational careers, from kindergarten onward, in classrooms named after four-year colleges, striving toward big long-term goals like 'excellence' and 'success' — aren’t graduating from college in large numbers.  They aren’t excelling, and the extent to which they are even succeeding is debatable."

Kaplan concludes... "Maybe letting small children linger in childhood would endow them with more of the real skills necessary to STAY FOCUSED ON ACHIEVING EXCELLENCE.  Maybe, in the long run, it would better enable them to MAKE SMART CHOICES."

Contributed by Zvia Dover

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