Wrong Turns, Right Moves in Education

The Preface:

The United States always strives to be the best in the world at everything. This is not a bad quality to strive for, but over the past 30+ years, it seems the U.S. educational system has taken a wrong turn focusing predominantly on standardized test scores to determine the success of our children to the detriment of a wholesome classroom environment conducive for learning. As the decision makers across the country continue to place more and more importance on a score, the physical, social, and emotional development of children has suffered. Because of America’s preoccupation to be the best, we have lost our way with what is right for kids. America’s response to raise lower standardized test scores in all children has been to provide longer school days, increased minutes daily of content time, begin a child’s school experiences as early as possible with more advanced curriculum than a child is developmentally ready for, and restrict outdoor, unstructured play time. Simply put, public schools across the country have not reached their full potential no matter how much money or resources are thrown at the system to improve the test score. Sadly, this path is impeding our nation by producing some of the most unhealthy and stressed out children we have ever seen.

During this same time period as a university professor, I was very much involved in studying children’s motivational patterns to promote intrinsically driven children rather than using reinforcement only tools which seemed to promote extrinsically driven children. I have been an educator for 38 years, but my role over the past 25+ years has been to prepare university students to be the next generation of quality physical education teachers in the K-12 setting while also being hired every summer to conduct in-service trainings for K-12 physical education teachers. I also published physical education curriculum for K-12 teachers to enhance their ability to guide children and adolescents to be more intrinsically motivated rather than have to be told what to do and then see students walk away and never engage in physical activity again. Throughout my years working with teachers and students, I thought teachers were dropping the ball, but subsequently began to realize that it wasn’t the teachers as much as it was the classroom environment. My message for many years was that teachers needed to raise their expectations, teach with clear objectives daily, and recognize that their interactions with students wouldn’t just impact those students, but would impact anyone those students came in contact with ten-fold. By 2011, I realized that it didn’t matter how high a teacher’s expectations were or how quality the lesson was, the lack of focus and emotional stability, as well as the rise in childhood and adolescent chronic diseases were creating a volatile classroom which prevented quality learning from taking place. This environment has led to unstable teaching practices and in many cases, less mentoring opportunities due on average, to a five year retention rate of teachers. Knowing that teachers become burned out in five years or less and students become burned out by 3rd grade, I knew something had to be done.