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This was written by Nancy Carlsson-Paige, Diane E. Levin and Geralyn Bywater McLaughlin. Carlsson-Paige is professor emerita at Lesley University and an author of several books; Levin is a professor of early childhood education at Wheelock College; and McLaughlin is the founding teacher at the Mission Hill School in Roxbury, Ma., as well as the director of the Defending the Early Years coalition and founder of Empowered by Play.

By Nancy Carlsson-Paige, Diane E. Levin and Geralyn Bywater McLaughlin

A coalition of national leaders in the field of early childhood education are becoming increasingly concerned about the impact of recent federal education policy reforms on early childhood education and care around the country. The coalition, called Defending the Early Years, believes that children develop best — socially, emotionally and cognitively — when they have educational experiences that promote creativity, thinking and problem solving skills, and engage in meaningful activities geared to their developmental levels and needs.

The educational leaders met recently to discuss growing concerns that federal Race to the Top policy mandates on early childhood education are undermining education practice that research tells us is in the best interest of young children’s optimal development and learning. Their concerns fell into three major categories.

1. Current standards are not based on knowledge of child development — both how children learn and what they learn.

The standards require that children learn specific facts and skills — such as naming the letters — at specified ages. This has led to more teacher-directed “lessons,” less play-based activity and curriculum, and more rote teaching and learning as children try to learn what is required.

Yet decades of research and theory tell us that young children learn best through active learning experiences within a meaningful context. Children develop at individual rates, learn in unique ways, and come from a wide variety of cultural and language backgrounds. It is not possible to teach skills in isolation or to mandate what any young child will understand at any particular time.

Some commencement speeches are more amusing than others. Here is is one from the 2012 graduation season that stands out for attemping to impart a real life lesson — how not to give up — with humor. It was delivered by Garry Marshall, an award-winning television and film director, writer, producer, and actor, who spoke at Lafayette College in Easton, Pa., on Saturday, May 19.

Marshall’s speech:

Hi. How are ya? How ya doing? Thanks for having me here at Lafayette.

You’re about to enter the real world. I’ve been in the real world and I think you may need aspirin once in a while.

You see, I remember ... graduating from Northwestern University and I was so excited. I was going to get out there and get my diploma and do things, and I was ready, and I was out two weeks and I got a call, and I had to go into the Army and I spent the next two years in Korea. But, what ya gonna do? You gotta do what you gotta do. And I came back, and again I took the diploma....

T here was a comedian named Joey Bishop, and I went to him because I wanted to work for him and I said, ‘Here’s my diploma,’ and he looked at it and then he turned it on its back and said there’s nothing written on the back. I said ‘No, they only put it on the front, I made it through college.’ He said ‘Go home, and on the back write some jokes so I can see what you can do.’ So I went home, I wished it was a larger diploma because I had to write legal size because I had a lot of jokes. But he didn’t hate them and he didn’t love them. But I was trying. That was a setback. I knew I was going to have setbacks — and you’re going to have setbacks and you gotta bounce back.

Anybody who thinks President Obama’s education policies have been unfriendly to public education should pay close attention to Mitt Romney’s newly announced school reform vision. Because what you don’t like about Obama’s, you may like even less about Romney’s.

“A Chance For Every Child” is the name of the education program that the presumptive Republican presidential candidate spelled out in a speech and then a white paper released on Wednesday.

(LARRY DOWNING/REUTERS)

Romney is advancing a pro-choice, pro-voucher, pro-states-rights education program that seems certain to hasten the privatization of the public education system.

In a Romney-run education world, the parents of poor and special education students would choose a school — public or private, based on standardized test scores and other data — and then a specific amount of public money would follow the child to the school.

It’s a voucher system that would, among other things, require families of the neediest children to constantly shop around for schools in an unstable market and would likely exacerbate the very thing — a chronic achievement gap — all of this is supposedly intended to fix. Obama opposes vouchers.

Romney’s education vision is based on an ideology that demonizes unions and views the market as the driver of education reform. His program is not based on quality research or best practices; indeed, it doesn't mention the one reform that has been shown over years to be effective, early childhood education.

It also inores the role that outside-school factors play in how well a student does in the classroom. School reformers and politicians can talk all they want about how a great teacher can overcome the effects of living in poverty and turmoil, but, systemically, they can’t. A hungry or tired or sick student just won’t do as well as one who isn’t. You only have to look at the most successful schools — traditional public and public charter and private — to know this to be true.

This was written by education historian Diane Ravitch . She is a research professor at New York University and author of numerous books, including the best-selling “The Death and Life of the Great American School System,” a critique of the flaws in the modern school reform movement. This piece appeared on her blog.

By Diane Ravitch
Several months ago, U.S. News & World Report announced that it planned to rank the nation’s schools of education and that it would do so with the assistance of the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ).

Since then, many institutions announced that they would not collaborate. Some felt that they had already been evaluated by other accrediting institutions like NCATE or TEAC; others objected to NCTQ’s methodology. As the debate rated, NCTQ told the dissenters that they would be rated whether they agreed or not, and if they didn’t cooperate, they would get a zero. The latest information that I have seen is that the ratings will appear this fall.

To its credit, NCTQ posted on its website the letters of the college presidents and deans who refused to be rated by NCTQ. They make for interesting reading, as it is always surprising (at least to me) to see the leaders of big institutions take a stand on issues. Two of the conservative Chiefs for Change are on NCTQ’s technical advisory panel.

Here is the full text of Mitt Romney’s remarks on education reform as prepared for delivery on Wednesday at The Latino Coalition’s Annual Economic Summit in Washington, D.C.:

Mitt Romney Speech

As Prepared for Delivery to Latino Coalition

Thanks to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for hosting us. This year the Chamber marks 100 years of Standing Up for American Enterprise.  Few organizations have fought longer or harder for the principles of economic freedom. And these days, your voice is more important than ever.    

I am grateful to the Latino Coalition for the invitation to be part of your Annual Economic Summit. In recent days we’ve heard a lot about business from the President and if you’re feeling like you deserve protection under the Endangered Species Act, I can’t blame you.

  This is a time when everybody in this administration should be doing everything in their power to support you. If every one of our small businesses added just two employees, Americans could pay more mortgages and buy more groceries and fill their gas tanks.