by Robert Pondiscio
June 9th, 2009
Tags: parenting, Research and Reports, sleep
Posted in Parents, Research and Reports | 11 Comments »
An NIH study of over 15,000 teenagers shows a link between sleep and mental health. “Teens whose parents let them stay up after midnight on weeknights have a much higher chance of being depressed or suicidal than teens whose parents enforce an earlier bedtime,” notes USA Today’s Greg Toppo.
The findings are the first to examine bedtimes’ effects on kids’ mental health — and the results are noteworthy. Middle- and high-schoolers whose parents don’t require them to be in bed before midnight on school nights are 42% more likely to be depressed than teens whose parents require a 10 p.m. or earlier bedtime. And teens who are allowed to stay up late are 30% more likely to have had suicidal thoughts in the past year. The differences are smaller but still significant — 25% and 20%, respectively — after controlling for age, sex, race and ethnicity.
Going to bed after midnight on weeknights reportedly increases the risk of depression by 42%. The lead researcher, Columbia University Medical Center’s James Gangwisch, says the takeaway for parents is “try as much as possible to sell teenagers on the importance of getting enough sleep.”
Hey, it’s his study, but I have to wonder: Perhaps the difference-maker isn’t the sleep, but having a bedtime? Is it possible that parents who set rules and routines for their children such asregular bedtimes are more involved in their kids’ lives? Maybe their kids are less likely to feel adrift and depressed as a result.
by Robert Pondiscio
June 9th, 2009
Tags: content, skills, standards
Posted in No category | 2 Comments »
Jay Greene has a smart, sobering piece on national standards. “People tend to be in favor of them when they imagine that they are the ones writing the standards,” he notes. “But when everyone gets into the sausage-making that characterizes policy formulation, it generally becomes clear that no one is going to get what they want out of national standards. What’s worse is that the resulting mess would be imposed on everyone.”
Jay also quotes Sandra Stotsky on the sausage-makers:
Instead of choosing nationally known scholars to chair and staff these committees–to assure us of the integrity and quality of the product–the NGA and the CCSSO have, for reasons best known to themselves, treated the initiative as a private game of their own. The NGA and the CCSSO haven’t even bothered to inform the public who is chairing these committees, who is on them, why they were chosen, what their credentials are, and why we should have any confidence whatsoever in what they come up with.
While not writing about national standards, Mark Bauerlein at the Chronicle of Higher Education might as well be in describing the inevitable conflicts and disappointments when it comes time to choose texts in curriculum meetings.
Traditionalists in the room want to identify core texts, events, figures, and ideas, and on various grounds of historical influence, civic inheritance, and aesthetic virtue they stick with a generally Eurocentric tradition. Progressivists want to enlarge the canon and contexts, to give representation to other cultures and identities, and explode the reigning “normativities,” and they resist a core knowledge of any kind being set down as official.
The result is satisfying to neither side, he notes. ”There doesn’t seem to be any way out of the impasse,” which Bauerlein thinks “partly explains the rise of the skills’ movement in education circles.”
by Robert Pondiscio
June 9th, 2009
Tags: curricular content, early childhood education, New America Foundation, Sara Mead
Posted in Curriculum, Literacy | 3 Comments »
This blog has long noted the strange indifference of the ed policy community to curriculum. In wonk world it’s all about structures, and all will be well as long as a child has a great teacher, held accountable by testing, incentivized by merit pay, and serving at the pleasure of a principal in a charter school (or variations on that theme). Curriculum? The invisible hand will presumably see to that.
The New America Foundation’s early ed specialist, Sara Mead, is a notable exception. Writing last week about the Administration’s proposed $300 million Early Literacy Grants, Mead praised the program, but registered concern that its “emphasis on reading comprehension could lead many schools to devote excessive time to teaching so-called ‘comprehension strategies.’
As we’ve written here before, and as Daniel Willingham compellingly argues here, the best way to strengthen children’s ability to comprehend what they read is to expose them to rich and diverse content across various domains, so that they have the general knowledge to easily understand written passages on a wide variety of topics. That requires less time spent drilling comprehension strategies, and more time reading a variety of texts (especially non-fiction), and studying science, social studies, music, and the arts. If this program can help school districts move in that direction—while also maintaining a focus on strengthening students’ decoding skills and helping them gain fluency and vocabulary—that could be a really good thing.
Mead, who has clearly invested considerable time on the mechanics of teaching and learning, was at it again yesterday on her Early Ed Watch blog. Commenting on last week’s Common Core report linking high academic achievement in other countries with a rich, broad curriculum, she highlighted Lynne Munson’s observation that the content of a student’s education has a greater influence on his level of achievement than does delivery or accountability systems.
As research by both the American Federation of Teachers and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute has shown, the early elementary school years are home to some of the weakest areas in existing state standards, and the early grades curriculum — particularly for low-income students — is too often a “content-free zone.” What can we learn from other countries about improving children’s access to high-quality, rich content — in a full range of academic subjects, including music and the arts — in the early grades?
Perhaps there should be a conference of ed policy types who are as concerned as Sara Mead about early elementary curriculum. We can book the washroom of a 737 for the meeting.
