The Center for Public Education reviewed several data sources to find out if recess is becoming a vestige of a bygone age, as accountability ratchets up the pressure on schools. “To borrow from Mark Twain,” CPE notes, “reports of recess’s death seem to have been grossly exaggerated.”
Even so, the pressure on schools to find more instructional time is real, and it seems to be leading many districts to shave minutes from the recess time they provide. In addition, children who attend high-poverty, high-minority, or urban schools are far more likely than their peers in other locations to get no recess at all—a definite “recess gap” that commands our attention.
Eighteen percent of elementary schools with a poverty rate over 75 percent do not provide first graders with recess, compared to 4 percent of schools with less than 35 percent poverty rate. These patterns “persist through sixth grade: 24 percent of sixth graders in high-minority schools, 28 percent in high-poverty schools, and 24 percent in urban schools do not get recess, compared to 13 percent of sixth graders overall,” the CPE reports.
Understood, we’re talking about recess here, but it’s curious to conclude as CPE and at least one major paper did, that the problem of eliminating recess in the name of greater accountability is “overblown.” It’s unlikely that if 18% of patients taking a drug had adverse reactions that anyone would argue the danger of the drug was overstated. Lawyers would be lining up around the block.
