\doc\web\97\08\dap.txt IT'S NOT ELEMENTARY November issue of the Pennsylvania Family Institute's education policy newslette, by Bruce Barron "Developmentally Appropriate Practices" create a big stir Gloria Hoffman started out asking why her daughter's first-grade portfolio contained nothing but a handful of art projects. From: BrucePFI@aol.com Date: Thu, 30 Oct 1997 15:05:42 -0500 (EST) TO all ECC faithful: Here's a copy of the article I recently completed on Developmentally Appropriate Practice for the November issue of the Pennsylvania Family Institute's education policy newsletter. I must say that Bredekamp and Copple of NAEYC were very generous with their time, especially considering they knew we lean toward skepticism about DAP. Your comments are welcome. --Bruce Barron IT'S NOT ELEMENTARY "Developmentally Appropriate Practices" create a big stir Gloria Hoffman started out asking why her daughter's first-grade portfolio contained nothing but a handful of art projects. She ended up in the middle of a national controversy-of which every parent should be aware-on how to educate elementary children. Hoffman discovered that her school district (Cumberland Valley, in Cumberland County) had implemented Developmentally Appropriate Practices (DAP), an approach that encourages primary-level students to learn at their own pace and devalues rote instruction. Hoffman and other parents have initiated a vigorous debate over DAP in Cumberland Valley, which has formed a task force to study the issue. In most districts applying DAP, however, few parents have heard of the concept-nor are they aware of the philosophical forces determining the education their elementary children receive. The DAP worldview DAP represents an attempt to apply research on child development, including awareness of individual variations, to the elementary classroom. It incorporates a constructivist philosophy of learning, which stresses that young children learn better through experience and interaction with the environment than through direct instruction. DAP is promoted by the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), which has distributed 500,000 copies of its Developmentally Appropriate Practice in Early Childhood Programs since 1987. A revised version addressing misunderstandings and criticisms was released earlier this year, including NAEYC's position statement (also newly revised) on DAP. NAEYC has tried to embrace rather than refute many of its critics, arguing that good educational practice is often "both/and" rather than "either/or" (for example, children benefit from the opportunity to make meaningful choices and from clear boundaries on choices, from spontaneous play and structured activities). But the new NAEYC manual still offers plenty of material to raise the eyebrows of back-to-basics traditionalists: * "Highly formal academic instruction" is discouraged. Emphasizing "rote learning of academic skills rather than active, experiential learning" is "incompatible with current knowledge about how young children learn and develop." * Eight-year-olds are not ready for abstract concepts such as north, south, east, and west or putting historical events in chronological order. * Teachers should not rely heavily on rewards and punishments to motivate appropriate social behavior. Sue Bredekamp, coeditor of Developmentally Appropriate Practice, contends that overuse of these external controls can undermine children's internal motivation to learn. * Children may be grouped according to similar interests and needs, but not by ability level (causing children to identify the "smart group" and "dumb group"). Bredekamp says tracking by ability is often difficult to change once assignments are made, and that it causes "late bloomers" to be inaccurately labeled as developmentally delayed. Missing the core These arguments do not convince Hoffman, a former teacher who would prefer to see first-graders getting regular homework assignments and all elementary students challenged to their maximum capacity of knowledge acquisition. Stephanie Bowen, Cumberland Valley's early childhood instructional advisor, says she began advocating for DAP after observing kindergarten classes in which children were expected to sit quietly and work on assignments for up to 45 minutes at a time. She and most educators consider that methodology unsuitable for five-year-olds (though anyone who has seen how Mennonites treat young children in church knows there is still difference of opinion on that issue). Bowen says Cumberland Valley did not change its curriculum expectations when it implemented DAP and that, on the educational spectrum, the district remains rather moderate. For example, it still uses basal readers, has not introduced multiage classrooms, and still gives letter grades to third-graders. But for those with firm academic expectations-such as that all children should be reading and know their addition tables by age 7-DAP's tolerance of individual differences in development smacks of watering down. This criticism is thunderously articulated by E. D. Hirsch, author of the Core Knowledge curriculum (see sidebar) and a leading advocate of specific, rigorous academic content at each grade level. Hirsch refutes the fallacy of "Romantic naturalism" (which suggests that children should develop "naturally" and learn when they want to), countering that some essential learning, like reading and place value, is not "natural" at any age. "Other things being equal," he argues in his book The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them, "the plasticity of the young mind makes most learnings easier and more durable at early ages." Hirsch places DAP within the larger error of emphasizing process ("thinking skills") over essential, specific content. With biting wit, he points to France and Japan, where primary-level children learn the mathematical skills American developmentalists want to put off-"all without great strain on them or their teachers and without any known harmful psychological effects." (A recent Core Knowledge Foundation article assesses NAEYC's revised position paper as "more consistent with the concepts embodied by Core Knowledge.") Bredekamp illustrates NAEYC's both/and style in her response to Hirsch. "We agree with him that young children need to have the opportunity to learn important content," she says. "We don't agree that DAP is watering down the curriculum. If you base your teaching on what children are capable of doing and learning, then curriculum should definitely be intellectually challenging." But Hoffman points to test results that show significant drops in Cumberland Valley fifth-graders' Stanford Achievement Test scores between 1990 and 1996 (from the 96th to the 84th percentile in reading, and from the 90th to the 73rd percentile in language arts) as evidence of the negative consequences of DAP. Child-centered philosophy Unfortunately, philosophical differences between DAP advocates and opponents often keep them from agreeing on evaluative criteria. Eileen Griffin, a Connecticut-based consultant who has guided a dozen Pennsylvania districts and intermediate units in applying DAP, speaks boldly of a "paradigm shift" in education, from a focus on the three R's to the five C's-communication, cooperation, commitment, creativity, and compassion. Whereas children formerly adapted to school, Griffin says schools should adapt to the child. Critics find in such principles both a misguided abandonment of basic academic content and a shocking level of permissiveness. During this year's controversy, Cumberland Valley has struggled to reassure concerned parents that this is not the district's intention; Bowen, for instance, clarifies that schools should adapt to students' learning styles, not to their behavior. "If some students don't learn something the first way, it's our responsibility to try to teach them another way," she explains. Since DAP promoters' opposition to heavily content-laden primary curricula is a matter of philosophical conviction rather than empirical data, they are usually undaunted by evidence such as the results of Project Follow Through. This federally funded study of 75,000 disadvantaged primary students found that the basic skills model surpassed DAP models in measures of cognitive and affective development. More than robots DAP effectively articulates several principles worth heeding, or worth citing for support when advocating for one's own children. Notably, the NAEYC statement calls for sensitivity to family preferences and thorough parental involvement, explicitly rejecting the professionals-know-best attitude common in the education community. DAP highlights the importance of building up intrinsic motivation in young learners. As Bredekamp and Copple state, "It is essential for children to acquire the mechanics of reading, but it is also important for them to develop the desire to read." And DAP counteracts tendencies to idolize academic achievement by showing that healthy development entails more than acquisition of knowledge. But even the "new and improved" DAP reflected in NAEYC's revised material is vulnerable to several important criticisms: * By reducing the achievements required of all primary-level students, DAP sidesteps the unavoidable truth that some essential content (like math tables) must be learned whether it is enjoyable or not. And it only delays (if not worsens) the eventual difficulty in teaching children who do not develop sufficient intrinsic motivation to learn. * In some forms, DAP may move beyond accommodation of individual differences to an incipient relativism. Griffin's "paradigm shift" document describes the child as "collaborator in constructing [one's] own knowledge" rather than "recipients of the teacher's information," reflecting a vision of education that may undermine the role of the teacher (and, by extension, other adults) as authority figures. * DAP's stated goal of delivering individually appropriate education is hard to fulfill because teachers can give so little time to each of 20 or 25 students in a classroom. (Bredekamp is among the advocates of smaller class sizes, preferably 15 to 18 children.) * DAP's stress on encouraging children's "natural" development embodies the implicit assumption that children in their natural state are basically good-an optimism with which adherents of a Christian worldview will not be comfortable. Persons examining their own school district's elementary practices must be attentive to site-specific nuances. For example, some DAP teachers have eliminated direct instruction, while Bredekamp more diplomatically suggests that good teachers use a variety of strategies. At Cumberland Valley, practices vary from one classroom to the next, as teachers are permitted to use the techniques with which they feel comfortable. While not rushing to conclusions, however, parents should also not be intimidated by assurances that "no one does it that way any more." Your school's policy on whether to arrange students in rows or clusters, when to teach multiplication tables, or how long young children should be expected to attend to a single activity, it is not the only option available, and indeed many experts support other approaches. Gloria Hoffman hopes her children will have the opportunity for a different option. While serving on the Cumberland Valley DAP task force, she is also advocating for increased parent choice, as in neighboring districts that offer both DAP and more traditional classrooms, and has contemplated starting a Core Knowledge charter school. (SIDEBAR) Core Knowledge picks up steam E. D. Hirsch hasn't just complained about child-centered education-he's created a viable alternative. Hirsch, the University of Virginia English professor and leading proponent of knowledge-based education, has seen over 500 public schools, including the whole Nashville, Tenn. school district, adopt his Core Knowledge curriculum. Advocates of academically rigorous elementary education have embraced Hirsch, a self-described political liberal and education conservative, and his Core Knowledge Foundation's impressively substantive curricula, which dictate content in far greater detail than Pennsylvania's newly proposed standards. The seven Core Knowledge curriculum volumes (from What Your Kindergartner Needs to Know to What Your Sixth Grader Needs to Know) and various other resources are available from the Core Knowledge Foundation, 2012-B Morton Drive, Charlottesville, VA 22903, (804) 977-7550, www.coreknowledge.org.