Collaborative Montessori Initiative

creativity declines in adulthood as we become more aware of the notions of right and wrong answers, she said.

Becoming an adult means leaving the world of your parents and starting to make your way toward the future that you will share with your peers. Puberty not only turns on the motivational and emotional system with new force, it also turns it away from the family and toward the world of equals.

emotion and motivation

control

a political party that once called for the abolition of the Education Department has radically enhanced the federal presence in public schools. After repeating the mantra of local control and states' rights for a generation, the GOP now intrudes on both.

original aspirations for an American public school system

Montessori (36) curriculum does not mention EFs, but what Montessorians mean by “normalization” includes having good EFs. Normalization is a shift from disorder, impulsivity, and inattention to self-discipline, independence, orderliness, and peacefulness (37). Montessori classrooms have only one of any material, so children learn to wait until another child is finished. Several Montessori activities are essentially walking meditation (Fig. 3).

As in Tools, the teacher carefully observes each child (when a child is ready for a new challenge, the teacher presents one), and whole-group activities are infrequent; learning is hands-on, often with ≥2 children working together. In Tools, children take turns instructing or checking one another. Cross-age tutoring occurs in Montessori mixed 3-year age groups. Such child-to-child teaching has been found repeatedly to produce better (often dramatically better) outcomes than teacher-led instruction (38–40).

Children chosen by lottery to enter a Montessori public school approved by the Association Montessori Internationale (AMI) were compared to those also in the lottery but not chosen, at the end of kindergarten (age 5) and the end of grade 6 (age 12) (41). At age 5, Montessori children showed better EFs than peers attending other schools. They performed better in reading and math and showed more concern for fairness and justice. No group difference was found in delay of gratification. At age 12, on the only measure related to EFs, Montessori children showed more creativity in essay writing than controls. They also reported feeling more of a sense of community at school.

In fact, when longitudinal studies of testing were examined to see if the achievement test scores of young children could predict the achievement test scores received by those same children a few years later, the answer was that the tests did not predict well at all.

scores received by young children on assessments of their social and behavioral skills turned out to be completely useless as predictors of the scores the children received on the same measures a few years later.

young children are undergoing significant changes in brain growth, physiology, and emotional regulation throughout their first eight years of life

curriculum emphasized active learning, in which the children engaged in activities that (i) involved decision making and problem solving, and (ii) were planned, carried out, and reviewed by the children themselves, with support from adults

failing schools can already be shut down by school districts under the No Child Left Behind law

parent trigger simply takes the option provided to the school board and hands the power to the parents

high value-added (HVA) teachers — those that do the best job of raising students’ scores on standardized tests.

while the new research may identify HVA teachers, it’s still not clear what constitutes good teaching.

There’s one predictor of value-added, which is teacher experience. In the first couple of years, teachers’ value-added goes up quite a bit. Beside that, people who have more-advanced degrees, [have] higher SAT scores, graduated from a better college, are certified versus uncertified — none of these things are strong predictors of value-added.”

All along, Gates says, he had been asking questions about teacher effectiveness. How do you measure it? What are the skills that make a teacher great? “It was mind-blowing how little it had been studied,

True education reform requires engaging all of the country’s teachers.

the misconception that matters the most is the notion somehow a good test measures all of what’s important.

you sample from this big domain of achievement a modest number of things that allow you to predict the whole. That’s all a test is

its value is only as a tool for estimating what kids really know about the whole.

The problem is that as people have become increasingly focused on the tests that matter, the tests for which people are held accountable, scores on those tests have often become misleading, sometimes wildly misleading. And that’s ironically undermined what we can say with confidence about how much kids actually know and can do.

nobody is spending a lot of time prepping kids specifically for that test. So when scores go up on one of those tests, we have a fair degree of confidence that kids really know more.

look for the big picture. Make comparisons to countries that make sense to compare us to, but don’t pay attention to small differences, because you can’t trust them.