Charter Schools: Getting Your Child on the List in L.A., By Gene Maddaus

To read this article at the LA Weekly website, CLICK HERE.

On a weekday evening in early spring, about 40 parents crammed into a classroom at Larchmont Charter elementary school. They perched on kindergarten chairs, or sat on the floor, or stood in the hallway, craning their necks.

Larchmont is one of the most desirable schools in Los Angeles. It’s also nearly impossible to get into. At that moment, 500 kids were on the waiting list. Admission is by lottery, so it comes down to luck.

Unless you can find a way around the lottery.

That’s why these parents came to Larchmont. They were looking for a way to cut to the front of the line.

School officials explained how it would work. Parents who agreed up front to make an extraordinary volunteer commitment to the school could get admissions priority. They would be called “founding parents.”

They would be asked not only for their time but also for money. The school got public funding, but that wasn’t enough to cover costs. The “funding gap” worked out to $2,500 per child, officials said. That was the school’s not-so-subtle way of conveying the expected contribution. Larchmont is a public school, but it was behaving more like a private academy.

A public school offers a free education to every child in the community — that’s what makes it public. A private school charges tuition and accepts students through a competitive selection process. Larchmont was bridging public and private by exploiting a loophole. Under federal guidelines, charter schools can give admissions priority to “founding parents.” That’s why these parents were being asked to “found” a school that had opened in 2004.

School officials did warn the parents that Larchmont couldn’t guarantee admission to their children. But — wink, wink — no children of founding parents had ever been rejected.

Los Angeles is leading the nation in establishing charter schools. The L.A. Unified School District is ultimately responsible for policing them to make sure they live up to the promise of equal access. The Weekly found that the district is aware of the founding-parent loophole but has done little to close it.

When the state Legislature authorized charter schools in the early 1990s, skeptics feared they would become refuges for highly motivated and affluent parents. Instead of lifting up all kids, they would become private schools, paid for with public money. The safeguard intended to prevent that from happening is the lottery.

That’s what makes it so troubling that schools would rig the lottery to favor preferred parents.

“Manipulating the meaning of who’s a founding parent directly contradicts the Legislature’s attempt to ensure that charters do not become exclusionary places,” says Bruce Fuller, a UC Berkeley professor and the editor of Inside Charter Schools. “They may be called into court to defend that.”

The kindergarten admissions process in Los Angeles is permeated with anxiety. Parents want the best possible environment for their children, and the best possible head start on the road to college. For some, that might be the local public school. But for many — and especially for many in L.A. Unified — the best option might lie elsewhere.

Parents with means have a couple of choices.

One is to move to a neighborhood with better schools, understanding that the school’s quality will figure in the purchase price of the house.

The other is to pony up $20,000 or more for tuition to private school.

But good luck getting in. The private school system is as cutthroat as any outside of Manhattan. The admissions process is so mysterious that “education consultants” can charge thousands of dollars to help parents navigate it.

Adding another layer of complexity are magnet schools and, more recently, charters — which are independently run public schools.

Anyone who’s seen the documentary Waiting for Superman will be familiar with the admissions process at a charter school. By law, if a school has more applicants than spaces, it must hold a public lottery. But often there is a side door.

“The side door is that you start volunteering at the school a couple years before your kid is ready to go,” says Christina Simon, author of Beyond the Brochure, a book about the L.A. private school admissions process. “They donate money. They get on the board. And the wheels are greased for their kids to go there.”

All applicants must participate in the lottery. But federal guidelines allow a handful of lottery “preferences,” which serve as a sort of VIP entrance. One is for siblings. If an older sibling is already enrolled, the younger child can get in automatically. Another preference is for children of school staff. Yet another is for founding parents.

The preference exists so that parents who go to the trouble of creating a charter school can be assured that their kids will be able to attend. The only restriction is an unwritten rule limiting founders to 10 percent of the school’s total enrollment.

Typically, the founding-parents rule applies only to schools just starting up. But nowhere is the term defined. Nothing prevents a school from adding new founding parents after the school is open. This loophole allows schools to select parents much the way a private school would.

A broad coalition of education reformers, politicians and business leaders has embraced charters as the solution to the decay of urban school systems. But the debate over whether charters are actually better than traditional public schools obscures a more fundamental debate: Are they, in fact, public schools?

“It’s meant to be a public school,” says Gary K. Hart, the retired state senator who authored California’s charter school law. “Public schools are open to everyone. Having a bunch of special categories for preference to get into a charter school is not in keeping with the spirit of the law.”

March is always a stressful time at Fountain Day preschool in West Hollywood. Fountain Day is one of the nicer preschools in the area, and its kids go on to top elementary schools, such as Campbell Hall, Wonderland and Larchmont Charter. Last spring, private elementary schools sent out their acceptance letters on March 25, and the weeks leading up to the big day were filled with anxiety.

“I have more panicked parents now than I’ve ever had,” Andrew Rakos, the preschool’s admissions director, told the Weekly. “It’s so much more complicated and convoluted than parents have ever imagined. Doctors, lawyers, executives, actors and actresses — it leaves them all on their knees.”

At the pickup hour, a group of parents compared notes on their options for the fall. Some were applying to private schools. Some were planning to move to better districts. And some were looking at charters.

Margaret Jarry was looking for a place for her son, Henry.

“I’m trying to bribe an old boyfriend to get into a charter school,” she told the Weekly. What did she mean by “bribe”?

“Bribe,” she said.

Jarry had applied to Larchmont Charter. The lottery had taken place a couple weeks before. A friend made up a “vision board” — a collage of positive images that was supposed to help manifest her hopes for her son. But it didn’t work. She drew a high number and was told not to expect to get an offer.

So she called her ex. His wife had helped found the school. Maybe he could get Henry in.

“I can do nothing,” he told her.

He said they could lose their charter if they played favorites with admissions. The only thing he could suggest was that she look into becoming a founding parent. It wouldn’t help for kindergarten, he said, but maybe Henry could get in for first or second grade.

“You get involved now, then in a couple years your priority goes up,” Jarry recalled. “That, to me, was the weirdest concept I’ve ever heard of.”

She decided not to follow up on it. Several months later, she moved to Beverly Hills.

The parents who attended the Larchmont orientation in March were thinking farther ahead. Their kids were as young as 2 years old — three years away from kindergarten — but they were eager to start volunteering.

Dolores Patton, the principal, did most of the talking. She explained the school’s “constructivist” philosophy. She mentioned the chef-made lunches. When asked, she disclosed the school’s test scores. (Last year, the school posted an elite-level API score of 931, on a scale of 1,000.)

She also told Larchmont’s story: A group of parents had teamed up to create a better option for their kids. Some mortgaged their homes to raise money. On opening day, one parent ran out to buy toilet paper.

“Those founding parents had a kind of energy that we are looking to find in a new generation of founding parents,” Patton explained.

At the end of the presentation, most of the parents were ready to sign up. But that’s where it got difficult.

The school couldn’t offer founding-parent slots to everyone who wanted them, because they’re limited to 10 percent of each class. They also couldn’t do a separate lottery among founding parents. State law allows one — and only one — lottery per year.

So how could they choose?

The answer is that they would not choose. Acceptance would be on a “first come, first served” basis. On a random morning in May, the school would send out an email announcing that it was accepting applications.

The first 12 parents through the door would become founding parents.

Hands immediately shot up. What if the email went to the spam filter? Could the school send a test email first? Could they give their husband’s email as a backup?

They started gaming out their chances. Those who lived close by had an edge.

“Best case, I think I could get there in 10 minutes,” said Joy Blaser, the mother of a 3-year-old girl. Those who lived farther away imagined blowing through red lights in a frantic drive across town.

“I think it’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard,” Shana Stein said. “It seems like it’s encouraging high-speed accidents.”

Stein had heard about the school through a friend.

“Basically, almost our only chance of getting in is to be a founding parent,” she said. “If you’re a Caucasian family that is not on free lunch, you need to be either a founding parent or a teacher.”

Her friend Bridget Wiley, an executive at CBS, also was interested in signing up. But she was puzzled by the “first come, first served” process.

“You could have people sleeping in tents,” she said.

School officials figured this was the only way to ensure that parents didn’t get in on the basis of friendships, or professional qualifications or the amount of money they could contribute.

“We weren’t interested in cherry-picking,” said Brian Johnson, the school’s executive director. “We wanted to do something more equitable and self-selected.”

And so, unintentionally, Larchmont reduced the admissions process to its most primal level: It would come down to a race.

Los Feliz Charter School for the Arts decided to do things differently. It would cherry-pick.

The school grew out of a Mommy & Me group in Los Feliz. The parents wanted a school that would use music, dance, theater and visual arts to teach the fundamentals.

Because of its curriculum, Los Feliz attracted a following in the entertainment community. Every year, the school receives hundreds more applicants than it has spots available.

Each year, the school has brought in new founding parents. Parents submit applications. They list their professional qualifications and pledge to apply those skills in service to the school. The school requires them to commit 200 hours of volunteer effort — the equivalent of five weeks of full-time work. Most single moms or dual-income families would have a hard time making that commitment.

The school decides who gets in on the basis of what skills it needs. Last year, when the school was moving, it needed architects. This year, it needs fundraisers. The school found four new founders for this year’s kindergarten class.

“One has done a lot of fundraising for the Philharmonic,” says Karin Newlin, the principal. “Another has done fundraising for two schools. We hope they might lead us in some campaigns.”

The person who makes the decisions is David Landau, a producer of TV commercials and a Los Feliz parent. Landau’s son was admitted to the school just before it became popular. He feels lucky to have gotten in when he did.

“You want the best for your kid,” he says. “They’re not going to college maybe if they don’t get into the place where you think they’re going to thrive.”

As the head of the founding-parent screening committee, he has the difficult task of choosing a handful of parents from a pool of well-qualified applicants.

“What I enjoy is connecting with families who are like-minded and who are committed,” he says. “The hard part is telling people that unfortunately they didn’t make it in.”

Karen Barranco of Highland Park was accepted in 2010. She works in branding and identity design. The school needed someone with her skills because the board is planning to change the school’s name.

Barranco filled out a founding-parent application, wrote a personal essay and went through a series of interviews.

“I even met someone for coffee and showed them my portfolio,” she says. “I felt like I was applying for a job. It’s what you have to do these days.”

Barranco also applied at a few private schools, hoping she could get financial aid. But that seemed unlikely, so she was pinning her hopes on Los Feliz. She also was counting on superstition.

“I’m from New Orleans,” she says. “We do voodoo.”

Landau called with the good news.

“I was thrilled,” she says. “I was really, really happy. I’m not good at lotteries.”

Heather Hope-Allison, a marketing professional from Eagle Rock, was impressed by the school when she toured last year.

“You could see how happy the children looked, and how cool the parents looked,” she says.

She applied to be a founding parent and offered to help produce fundraisers. There was an interview, and then an agonizing wait.

“I was getting so anxious. I kept emailing them, to the point where my husband was, like, ‘Stop,’ ” she says. “I cried when we got in. I seriously bawled. I think it was partly the stress, because I’d heard about people not getting into places.”

One of her first jobs was to help run the lottery. There were more than 500 applicants for 25 spots. Her name was called in the 140s, she says. Without the founding-parent preference, her child wouldn’t have gotten in.

L.A.’s charter school movement is akin to an educational Wild West. The old rules have been thrown out, and charters have been given broad freedom to try out new ideas. But in that environment, someone has to be sheriff.

That someone is L.A. Unified. It should be policing charter schools. Instead, it has focused on facilitating them. The issue of founding parents has come to the district’s attention before. But the charter school division has failed to establish a policy, much less enforce it.

The division is run by Jose Cole-Gutierrez. He came to L.A. Unified from the California Charter Schools Association, where he lobbied the district on behalf of local charter schools. He has been accused of being too accommodating toward the district’s charter schools on a range of issues.

“We should not have somebody running the charter school division who has a connection with the Charter Schools Association,” says Sonja Luchini, who argues that charters don’t do enough for special-needs students like her son. “It’s the fox watching the henhouse.”

L.A. Unified does not keep track of who gets admitted through lottery preferences. The district does not even know how many schools give out founding-parent preferences, or how those schools define the term.

So L.A. Weekly conducted its own review, looking at the founding documents for each of the district’s 200 charter schools. The analysis showed one-third of them — 65 schools — grant a preference in their charters to founding families or some variant of the term, such as founding board members or developers. Large “charter management” organizations, like Green Dot, also offer founding-parent preferences, even though those schools were not founded by parents.

Only a handful define the term with any precision. That leaves it up to individual school administrators to grant lottery preferences as they see fit. The Weekly called representatives of two dozen schools in an effort to determine how the founding-parent preference is allocated.

Many schools said the charter language is just boilerplate. They said they have never used the founding-parent preference because they don’t want to play favorites. Several others said they only used the preference in their first year of existence.

The Weekly also found that the founding-parent program at Los Feliz has come to the attention of L.A. Unified once before. Although the district raised concerns, it did not stop Los Feliz from picking students on the basis of their parents’ jobs. Instead, it merely got Los Feliz to be less obvious about it.

In its charter, Los Feliz defined founding parents as “any parent involved in the founding of the school that volunteered 200 hours toward the creation of the school.”

In 2008, Cole-Gutierrez asked Los Feliz to make the requirements less explicit. If it were spelled out too clearly, it could give people the wrong idea.

“It can be considered a form of tuition and limit some community members from seeking enrollment in the school,” Cole-Gutierrez wrote in an email. “This has been a general concern of board members.”

In response, the school agreed to delete the “minimum hour” language.

“We agree with LAUSD that it sends the wrong message,” wrote George Abrams, the Los Feliz board president.

But the change seems to have had no effect on how the founding-parent preference is awarded. Founders are still required to commit to 200 hours of service to the school, and many give more than that. The “minimum hour” language has since been added back into the charter.

Parents also are pressured to contribute to the school, whether they are “founders” or not. As a public school, Los Feliz can’t charge tuition. But the imperative to give money is drilled into all parents at orientation.

“Our school does need to fundraise,” Newlin told parents of the incoming class in August. “We have to rely heavily on all you guys. To balance our budget, we need to fundraise $300,000.”

Last year, she said, the school raised $328,000. That was an impressive figure. Back when she worked at the public schools in Palos Verdes, the PTA was proud to raise just $100,000. But because Los Feliz had to pay to rent its building, its costs were not completely covered by state funding. So Newlin said they would have to once again “make the push for the annual give.”

“Some gave $100,” Newlin told the crowd. “Some gave as much as $20,000. Any amount you feel comfortable to give goes a long way. … I’m coming out of the public schools, so this is painful. But we’re probably going to need to continue to have you help us.”

At any school — public, private or charter — parent involvement is important to success. Even at elite private schools, admissions directors say a parent’s willingness to commit time and energy is more important than that parent’s wealth or status.

An argument could be made that parents who put in a Herculean volunteer effort should get a boost in the admissions process. It helps the parent and the child, but it helps the school even more.

“The amount of effort it takes to get a new school off the ground is incredible,” says Amy Held, executive director of Citizens of the World Charter School, which opened last year with a cohort of founding parents. “You need parents to help serve lunch every day. You need parents to set up your IT department. You need parents to help with fundraising.”

Charter advocates say charter schools need to have the flexibility to get the most out of their parent body.

“Parent participation is very important,” says Vicky Waters, spokeswoman for the California Charter Schools Association. “Charters have that autonomy in governance that allows them to do what is best for them.”

But Bruce Fuller, the UC Berkeley professor, argues that though such an arrangement may be mutually beneficial, it ends up skewing the student population.

“It’s a clever method for inviting in particular kids and families you want in the school,” Fuller says. “These mechanisms may not be created with any ill intent. But by enriching the mix of families and kids, the charter starts to look like an elite private school.”

Larchmont is 54 percent white and 17 percent Latino. That is strikingly different from the L.A. Unified schools in the same neighborhood. Van Ness Elementary, a few blocks away, is 5 percent white and 71 percent Latino. Vine Street Elementary, just up the street, is 1 percent white and 93 percent Latino.

“I’d like to see the school represent its community rather than representing kids who are in families that can afford to volunteer during the day,” says L.A. Unified board member Bennett Kayser, a charter skeptic who was elected to the board with teachers union support.

Kayser says it was “bad policy” to grant founding-parent preferences in lotteries.

“They should be doing a lottery,” Kayser says. “Anything that is going to taint that shouldn’t be part of the process.”

Striving for diversity, Larchmont and Los Feliz also have preferences in the lottery for kids who are poor enough to qualify for subsidized lunch. (The founding-parent preference outranks the free-lunch preference, however.) But the subsidized-lunch preference actually makes these charters more — not less — like private schools. Private schools also employ diversity preferences.

The founding-parent preference was intended for charters that are founded by parents. But the preference also is used by large charter-management organizations. In those schools, parents play a supporting role. But the actual founding is done by the charter organization. So why do they need a founding-parent lottery preference?

“Sometimes there are some parents who really, really help you,” says Marco Petruzzi, the CEO of Green Dot. “They help on the door-knocking. They help on the organizing. They help set up meetings. For those parents, we have, at times, given them founding-parent status.”

Petruzzi says not all Green Dot schools use the preference, and Green Dot stops awarding founding-parent status after the school’s first year.

“You can only issue it once,” he says. “It’s not like you issue it every year. … We are extremely careful not to get out of bounds on any of these laws. That could mean the charter being revoked.”

Two other charter-management organizations, Aspire and Partnerships to Uplift Communities, include similar provisions in their charters. An Aspire spokeswoman says the organization has not used its founding-parent preference yet in Los Angeles. PUC’s charters give preference to “developers,” but a PUC spokeswoman denies that such preferences had ever been granted.

Larchmont was in a difficult spot. In previous years, there had not been as much demand for founding-parent spots. But now the word was out, and the school was overwhelmed. Officials also were aware — because a reporter had shown up at orientation meetings — that whatever they did would have to withstand public scrutiny. So they turned to L.A. Unified for guidance.

The district ultimately decided there was no fair way to offer the preference after the school was founded.

“We want to make sure everyone has equitable access,” Cole-Gutierrez tells the Weekly. “Founding families is for a school that is starting. … A school that has been in existence for several years, and is way past its founding, in our review is not consistent with the definition of founding families.”

In late August, parents who had signed up got an email from Brian Johnson, the school’s executive director.

“Unfortunately, you will not have an opportunity to become a founding parent at Larchmont Charter School,” he wrote. “We understand this may be deeply disappointing to many of you and for that we are very sorry. We regret attempting to design and roll out a process that in the end we could not responsibly continue with.”

Johnson still hoped they would enter the lottery, but he understood if they wanted something that was more of a sure thing. So he recommended they try Citizens of the World, which is looking to establish new charters in Mar Vista, Silver Lake, Echo Park and Venice. The parents still could become “founders” there.

When Shana Stein got the email, she was indeed disappointed. She understands that Larchmont was scared of tangling with the L.A. Unified bureaucracy, but she worries what effect it would have on the school in future years.

“With charter schools, there is a certain amount of fundraising and level of commitment that has to go on,” Stein says. “By not having founding parents, it makes me worry about the school’s ability to be able to maintain that consistent level of commitment and cheerleading and fundraising.”

For Joy Blaser, though, it was a load off her mind.

“I’m actually a little relieved I don’t have to go through the process of having to run down there,” she says.

Los Feliz has pressed ahead with its founding-parent program.

To read this article at the L.A. Weekly website, CLICK HERE.

Founding parents were essential to helping the school find and move to its new location in Glassell Park.

The building is unique for a schoolhouse. It was initially designed for the Chiat/Day advertising agency by some forward-thinking architect who must have believed it would foster creativity. It has no walls. Instead of classrooms, the structure has a large central area, divided by cargo containers. It also has a dance studio, a music-recording facility and an arts space for an artist in residence.

On Labor Day weekend, Stephanie Ragle, a founding parent, was busily coordinating volunteers as they prepared for the first day of school. Ragle and her husband have an architecture firm and were deeply involved in the move to the new location. In the first year, there had been complaints that the school was too noisy, so a bunch of parents had installed sound-deadening panels and added new walls between classrooms to break up the space.

“This school is what you make it,” says Ronni Minnis, another founding parent, who was chosen for her organizational skills, which are the product of 15 years as a celebrity personal assistant. “It could not have been done without the founding parents.”

If L.A. Unified had decided to crack down on Larchmont, why was it allowing Los Feliz to continue?

In an interview, Cole-Gutierrez says he did not know that Los Feliz offers lottery preferences to new founding parents.

“I think that might require some further looking and following up,” he says.

Ryan Deto contributed to this story.

Children With Autism Are Connecting via Transportation, By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY

August 13, 2011

I loved reading about how young children with autism are learning and connecting via transit museums. It appeared in today’s NY Times. If you’d like to read the article at the NY Times site, CLICK HERE. If you are interested in autism, please check out my interview with Julie Azuma, who started a child inspired web based business to help her daughter, Miranda, who was diagnosed with autism almost 20 years ago. CLICK HERE to listen to that interview.

Ravi Greene can tell you how to get anywhere in New York City by transit — like the beach, on the 6 train.

“The 6 goes elevated from Whitlock Avenue to Pelham Bay Park,” he explains. “And at Pelham Bay Park, you can transfer for a Bx29 or a Bx12 — the Bx12 to Orchard Beach.”

Ravi has drafted elaborate proposals for expanded bus service in Brooklyn, and has memorized the exact date that the W train stopped running in 2010.

And he is only 5 years old.

Like many children with autism spectrum disorders, Ravi is fascinated by trains and buses, entranced by their motion and predictability. And for years, these children crowded the exhibitions of the modest New York Transit Museum, chattering about schedules and engine components and old subway maps.

“This is really their element,” said Ravi’s mother, Juliana Boehm, who brings Ravi and Oliver, his 8-year-old brother, who is also on the autism spectrum, to the museum almost weekly. “If I suggested another activity,” she added, “it may have provoked anxiety.”

Now, the museum, and others like it, are moving beyond accommodating the enthusiasm for trains and buses among children with autism and trying to use it to teach them how to connect with other people — and the world.

Marcia Ely, the New York Transit Museum’s assistant director, helped create the outreach after sensing the overwhelming demand: Schools for children with autism flooded her with requests for field trips; she was regularly stopped on the street by parents of autistic kids who wanted to talk when she was carrying her transit museum umbrella; and she saw the same children returning to the museum every weekend.

The museum created a “Subway Sleuths” after-school program for 9- and 10-year-olds with autism that focuses on the history of New York City trains but seeks to make the children more at ease socially. Oliver was allowed in the program a year early.

The response to the program been so positive that the museum is planning to expand it in the fall.

The link between trains and autism is well documented. Autism refers to a spectrum of disorders that typically includes impairment in social interaction and sometimes includes stereotyped interests, like trains. People with autism have difficulty processing and making sense of the world, so they are drawn to predictable patterns, which, of course, trains run by.

That explains why children with autism tend to be attracted more to subways, which travel on back-and-forth tracks, with little variability, than to planes, which move in more variable fashion. And they like subjects with a lot of detail that they can master.

In Britain, home to Thomas the Tank Engine and the site of Thomas fund-raiser walks organized by the National Autistic Society, the movement to tailor transit museum programs to children with autism is more established. The London Transport Museum recently hosted an event for high school students to spend time with the timetabling department. The National Railway Museum in York, England, set up a disability forum to start catering to visitors with autism.

Liz Syed started a train club in Cheshire, England, where families facing autism spectrum disorders meet monthly, play with toy trains and talk about their children’s fascinations.

“When we go to train museums, they’re absolutely filled with children with autism,” Ms. Syed said. “They’ve all been really well attended. It’s partly for the kids and partly for the parents. It’s nice to meet other people trailing around train museums.”

Of course, not every child taken with Thomas the Tank Engine has autism. What distinguishes the condition is intensity. Dr. Shirley Cohen, a retired Hunter College professor who helped start a program in New York City schools for children with autism, described how one child would not do any work in the classroom unless he could spend time at a Thomas the Tank Engine table. Another boy whose bedroom was decorated with Thomas décor never wanted to leave the room.

“What happens is that it becomes the central focus of their life and it sort of takes over,” Dr. Cohen said.

The ability of children with autism spectrum disorders to remember details can be astonishing. Lauren Hough, an adviser to the “Subway Sleuths” program, said that when she asked how to get anywhere in the city, some of the participants could tell her not just which train to take, but the exact number of stair steps in each of the stations.

One of the most extreme examples of someone obsessed with trains in New York is Darius McCollum, 46, who has Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism. Mr. McCollum has been arrested more than two dozen times, mostly for impersonating transit workers and even commandeering a subway train and a bus.

Researchers and educators in the autism world are constantly trying to manage this passion. When trains rumble over the Manhattan Bridge past the rooftop playground in Brooklyn that the League Education and Treatment Center has for its children with disabilities, some students with autism stop playing and must be calmed down because they become so excited at the sight of a train.

During a recent field trip to the transit museum organized by the treatment center, Johnathan Veras, 5, mistakenly thought the visit was over. He burst into tears and started shouting, “I want to stay!”

Johnathan’s mother, Yochabell Veras, said that among her son’s three passions — cars, trains and robots — he finds trains the most soothing. He loves to watch the trains that pass by his living room window in Coney Island, Brooklyn, and gets upset when they are not on schedule. “When he sees the trains, he calms down,” Ms. Veras said.

Some researchers have been trying to harness this preoccupation to help children with autism develop. Simon Baron Cohen, who runs the autism research center at Cambridge University, found that when young children with autism spent 15 minutes a day watching animated videos of vehicles with human faces on them, their ability to recognize emotions improved after one month.

“Kids with autism treat moving trains, especially ones that have limited motion like just going along the tracks, as a natural reward,” he said. “It catches their attention. Once you’ve got the child’s attention, you can do many types of teaching.”

Parents hope their children’s intense attraction to trains, and being around others with similar interests, can lead to something valuable in their adult lives.

“He’s very interested in electronics and building in general,” Ms. Boehm said of Oliver. “And if he’s working somewhere — he has brilliant ideas — it would help him to work in another group because a lot of times he keeps things to himself.”

On a recent Friday, the family once again visited the transit museum, which is in an abandoned subway station just over the Brooklyn Bridge from Manhattan.

At the museum’s entrance, the boys crouched before old subway and bus maps, and expounded on the route changes that have occurred since their printing. The A train is the city’s longest line, Oliver said, stretching 41 miles through three boroughs. (It’s actually 31 miles; Oliver’s father, Allan Greene, had given him the wrong number.) Then they pressed through the old-time turnstiles and headed to the platform, identifying each restored train they walked by.

Their mother shared another habit the boys have: When she takes them on the subway, they clap politely when certain models of train cars come into the station. “They applaud like they are at a golf tournament,” she said. “They kind of like the old ones; they sense that their time is almost up.”

Their father added: “Some people like to talk about their favorite ice cream. They just light up when they talk about trains.”

Push for A’s at Private Schools Is Keeping Costly Tutors Busy, By JENNY ANDERSON

June 7, 2011

Siddharth Iyer spent eight Mays cramming for finals, first at Stuyvesant High School and then at Columbia University.

Nine years later, it is still crunch time for Mr. Iyer, a top tutor at Ivy Consulting Group, as his clients face a deluge of end-of-year exams. “He’s been prepping my son all week,” said the mother of one, a senior at Riverdale Country School in the Bronx, speaking on the condition that she not be named because Riverdale discourages both tutoring and talking to reporters.

“Prepping” — in this case for an oral exam in Riverdale’s notorious Integrated Liberal Studies, an interdisciplinary class laden with primary sources instead of standard textbooks — did not start the week before the exams, the mother pointed out. She said she had paid Mr. Iyer’s company $750 to $1,500 each week this school year for 100-minute sessions on Liberal Studies, a total of about $35,000 — just shy of Riverdale’s $38,800 tuition.

Last year, she said, her tutoring bills hit six figures, including year-round SAT preparation from Advantage Testing at $425 per 50 minutes; Spanish and math help from current and former private school teachers at $150 an hour; and sessions with Mr. Iyer for Riverdale’s equally notorious interdisciplinary course Constructing America, at $375 per 50 minutes.

Private SAT tutors have been de rigueur at elite New York private schools for a generation, but the proliferation of subject-matter tutors for students angling for A’s is a newer phenomenon that is beginning to incite a backlash. Interviews with parents, students, teachers, administrators, tutors and consultants suggest that more than half of the students at the city’s top-tier schools hire tutors, an open secret that the schools seem unable to stop.

“There’s no family that gets through private school without an SAT tutor,” said Sandy Bass, the mother of two former Riverdale students and the founder of the newsletter Private School Insider. “Increasingly, it’s impossible to get through private school without at least one subject tutor.”

A decade ago, Advantage Testing, perhaps the city’s premier tutoring company, was essentially an SAT-prep factory; in the years since, said its founder, Arun Alagappan, academic tutoring has grown by 200 percent.

“More and more you have ambitious and intellectually curious students signing up for difficult classes,” said Mr. Alagappan, whose 200 tutors bill $195 to $795 for 50 minutes (though he said pro bono tutoring accounted for 26 percent of the work). “It’s no longer O.K. to have one-on-one coaching for sailing but not academics.”

What is most troubling to those trying to curtail academic tutoring is that instead of remedial help for struggling students, more and more of it seems to be for those trying to get ahead in the intensely competitive college-application race. Gone are the days of a student who was excellent at math and science just getting by in English and history; now, everyone is expected to be strong in everything (including fencing, chess, woodworking and violin).

As more solid or even stellar students hire expensive tutors, the achievement bar rises, and getting ahead quickly becomes keeping up.

“B used to mean good,” said Victoria Goldman, author of “The Manhattan Family Guide to Private Schools and Selective Public Schools” and a Riverdale board member until 2007. “Everyone’s forgotten that.”

Michael Michelson, director of academic studies at Riverdale, said the school’s policy was to discourage tutors, and to make teachers accessible for extra help. “We believe that all of our students are capable of fully understanding this course material without the aid of tutors,” Mr. Michelson wrote in an e-mail. “We are troubled by the inequity that exists when families (we believe unnecessarily) employ tutors.” He said he believed that the vast majority of Riverdale students did not use tutors.

At a gathering last month of the heads of private school Parents’ Associations, the Dalton representative voiced concern about the escalation of tutoring, wondering how schools could better track it and what it meant for students who could not afford it, said one person who was at the meeting. (Ivy Consulting, Advantage and other tutoring outfits do offer free tutoring for low-income students.)

At Nightingale-Bamford, the May online newsletter linked to an article about the downside of tutoring, after the prevalence of high-priced help even in elementary grades became a frequent topic at lower-school coffees this spring, according to a parent who attended.

Some parents are outraged that the sky-high tuition no longer seems to fully buy the brand-name education.

“There’s always resentment when you are paying that much money and you have bright kids, that you have to supplement that,” said one Dalton parent, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the school does not want parents to speak to the news media.

But Larry Roth, who was head of the Parents’ Association at Dalton while his two sons attended the school, said the sentiment he heard was “If I am an affluent person, why wouldn’t I help my kid out?” a notion he found wrongheaded.

The schools have a complicated relationship with tutoring. Generally, they discourage it: Riverdale requires students to specify on graded take-home assignments whether they have had assistance; Dalton asks families to exhaust the school’s resources first, and then if outside help is deemed necessary, the school’s learning specialists try to coordinate it. But if tutoring lifts students’ scores and grades, and thus their admission chances at the most competitive colleges, that can benefit the schools’ reputations.

“The policy is that you are not supposed to have a tutor,” said the Riverdale mother. “The reality is that they all have them.”

Dalton has tried to level the playing field by offering free tutoring, starting in middle school a decade ago, then adding elementary grades and high school last year. The after-school service draws between 25 and 50 students, said a person familiar with the program. Dalton has 1,300 students.

And while the schools encourage students to work with their teachers instead of racking up tutoring bills, parents said teachers were often unavailable — because they have taken second jobs tutoring students at another school (they are prohibited from tutoring for pay at their own schools).

Some families are afraid to use the school services or let the administration know they are hiring outsiders, lest their child be perceived as struggling, leading to the widespread practice of what some call “stealth tutoring.”

Wendy Mogel, a clinical psychologist and the author of “The Blessing of a B-,” said excessive tutoring, stealth or declared, can damage a child’s intrinsic motivation and self-esteem. “The tutoring is saying, ‘You have to perform at a high level in every subject and we don’t believe you can solve your problems on your own,’ ” Dr. Mogel said.

One common parental complaint is that a tutor seems almost expected for certain classes, like Riverdale’s Integrated Liberal Studies and Constructing America. “There are tutors who have bought an apartment with the money they’ve made on Constructing America,” said Ms. Bass, whose older daughter took the class the first year it was offered, 2003, and did not use a tutor.

Mr. Michelson said that a few years ago, Riverdale administrators met with Mr. Iyer’s business partner, Ryan Chang, out of concern that by Ivy Consulting marketing itself as “experts” in the school’s interdisciplinary classes, the tutoring was “harming our community.”

“Naturally, the only people they could appeal to were the families that could afford their high fees,” Mr. Michelson said. “Because they had worked with so many of our students, they had our materials, and they were using it and giving our students access to information — it created an inequity that was profoundly disturbing.”

Mr. Iyer denied it had a curriculum tailored to the course and said about 70 percent of their tutoring was geared toward standardized tests. He said the meeting was amicable.

This article appeared in the NY Times on June 7. If you would like to read it there, please CLICK HERE.

More Preschoolers Test as Gifted, Even as Diversity Imbalance Persists, By SHARON OTTERMAN

This article appeared in the New York TImes on June 21, 2011. To read it there, CLICK HERE.

The number of gifted preschoolers in New York City is on the rise, but they mostly live in the city’s middle-class and wealthier districts.

That’s the picture of next year’s kindergarteners who qualified for gifted programs, according to the city’s Department of Education, which released admissions statistics on Tuesday.

There are two kinds of gifted programs for kindergarteners in New York City: district programs, which require a preschooler to score in the national 90th percentile on a standardized test, and citywide programs, which require a score in the national 97th percentile.

All students who qualify for a district program are guaranteed a seat, but it is hard for children to get a citywide placement, because there are usually many more students who qualify than available seats.

This winter, about 14,000 preschoolers took the test for placement in gifted programs, and 2,700 of them this week received offers to attend a district or citywide program. Last year, 2,500 students received a placement out of 12,500 students who took the test.

“We worked to increase outreach by holding workshops in every borough and delivering handbooks to elementary schools and community groups,” said Matthew Mittenthal, a spokesman for the Department of Education. “As a result, nearly every district saw an increase in test takers.”

But the number of test takers — and test passers — was unevenly distributed around the city, reflecting a pattern that emerged in 2008 when the test was instituted as the sole citywide admissions criterion for placement in gifted kindergarten programs.

District 2, which includes the Upper East Side, Midtown and much of Lower Manhattan, offered 448 children seats in a gifted program, far more than any other district. In District 3, which includes the Upper West Side, 252 children received gifted placements. In District 7, a poverty-ridden part of the South Bronx, however, only five children received gifted placements.

The city does not keep data on the ethnicity of the preschoolers until they start kindergarten in September. But the programs have been growing less ethnically diverse over time. This year, for example, about 73 percent of gifted kindergarteners were white or Asian, up from 68 percent in 2009-10 school year. (White students were 46 percent of the gifted kindergarteners in 2010-11; Asian students were 27 percent.)

Black children made up 11 percent of this year’s gifted kindergarten classes this year, down from 15 percent in 2009-10. Representation of Hispanic students was 12 percent in both years.

The school system as a whole is roughly 70 percent black and Hispanic, and some City Council members, and other critics, have raised concerns about the lack of diversity in the programs, noting the professional test preparation that some parents give their children in search of an edge.

The city is looking for a new set of gifted and talented tests to begin in the 2012-13 school year. But it is not planning to change its policy of using citywide tests as the main admissions criterion, according to a request for proposals from testing companies issued late last year. Instead, the city plans a broadly similar system of testing to the one that is currently used.

More City Preschoolers Are Perfect, Test Scores Show, By SHARON OTTERMAN

This article appeared in the NY Times on July 28, 2010. To read it there, CLICK HERE.

The number of prekindergarten students acing the city’s gifted and talented test spiked this year, with 1,000 4- and 5-year-olds reaching the 99th percentile, the highest possible, on the nationally scaled exam, the Department of Education said on Tuesday.

That’s a 34 percent jump from last year, when 745 students scored in the 99th percentile. Fewer students over all took the test this year than last year — 12,400 in 2009-10, compared with 14,800 in 2008-9. The data was first reported by the Web site Insideschools.

Officially, preschoolers have to score at least in the 97th percentile to be admitted into one of five citywide programs for gifted students. But with only about 300 kindergarten seats in those programs, it has become nearly impossible to get into the majority of them without a perfect 99 score.

A district-by-district breakdown shows that District 2, which includes the Upper East Side and much of Lower Manhattan, led the city in top-scoring students, followed by District 3, which includes the Upper West Side. More students also took the exam in District 2 than in any other district. Outside of Manhattan, Districts 20, 21 and 22 in southern Brooklyn had the most top scorers.

Parents and teachers have said that one reason for the higher scores is the rise of professional test preparation for preschoolers, particularly in wealthier districts. Marc Sternberg, the deputy chancellor whose portfolio includes programs for gifted and talented students, recently expressed concern that the test was being “gamed” through professional test prep.

There were only a handful of 99th-percentile scores in some of the city’s poorest districts, like District 4, which includes East Harlem, and Districts 9 and 12 in the South Bronx.

The city is now in the process of evaluating its testing system, and will be putting out a request for bids on a new five-year testing contract in the fall. The test now being used is a mixture of the Otis-Lennon School Ability Test, a reasoning test, and the Bracken School Readiness Assessment, a knowledge test.

Here is the breakdown showing the number of children scoring in the 99th percentile in each district:

1. 16
2. 193
3. 144
4. 2
5. 17
6. 39
8. 7
9. 4
10. 20
11. 16
12. 3
13. 46
14. 11
15. 43
16. 7
17. 13
18. 9
19. 6
20. 81
21. 67
22. 91
23. 4
24. 11
25. 41
26. 25
27. 11
28. 24
29. 6
30. 22
31. 19
32. 2

Can the Right Kinds of Play Teach Self-Control? By PAUL TOUGH

Published: September 25, 2009

This article first appeared in the New York Times on September 25, 2009. To read the article at the Times website, CLICK HERE.

“Come on, Abigail.”

“No, wait!” Abigail said. “I’m not finished!” She was bent low over her clipboard, a stubby pencil in her hand, slowly scratching out the letters in the book’s title, one by one: T H E. . . .

“Abigail, we’re waiting!” Jocelyn said, staring forcefully at her classmate. Henry, sitting next to her, sighed dramatically.

“I’m going as fast as I can!” Abigail said, looking harried. She brushed a strand of hair out of her eyes and plowed ahead: V E R Y. . . .

The three children were seated at their classroom’s listening center, where their assignment was to leaf through a book together while listening on headphones to a CD with the voice of a teacher reading it aloud. The book in question was lying on the table in front of Jocelyn, and every few seconds, Abigail would jump up and lean over Jocelyn to peer at the cover, checking what came next in the title. Then she would dive back to the paper on her clipboard, and her pencil would carefully shape yet another letter: H U N. . . .

Henry fiddled with the CD player. Like Abigail and Jocelyn, he was a kindergarten student in Red Bank, a small town near the New Jersey shore. The students at the elementary school came mostly from working-class and low-income families, and, like the town itself, the student population was increasingly Hispanic. Jocelyn, with flowing dark hair, was the child of immigrants from Mexico; Henry was Hispanic with a spiky haircut; Abigail was white and blond.

“Abby!” Henry said. “Come on!” He and Jocelyn had long ago finished writing the title of the book on their lesson plans. They already had their headphones on. The only thing standing between them and the story was the pencil clutched in their classmate’s hand.

G R Y. . . .

“O.K., we’re starting,” Jocelyn announced. But they didn’t start. For all their impatience, they knew the rule of the listening center: You don’t start listening to the story until everyone is ready.

“Oh, man,” Henry said. He grabbed his face and lowered his head to the desk with a clunk.

C A T E R. . . .

“Let’s begin!” Jocelyn said.

“I’m almost done!” Abigail was hopping up and down now. “Don’t press it!” She bounced from foot to foot, still writing: P I L. . . .

“I’m pressing it!” Henry said. His finger hovered over the play button on the CD player . . . but it did not fall, not until Abigail etched out her last few letters and put on her headphones. Only then, finally, could the three of them turn the pages together and listen to “The Very Hungry Caterpillar.”

When the CD finished, each child took a piece of paper and drew three pictures to illustrate what happened at the beginning, in the middle and at the end of the book. Then they captioned each one, first drawing a series of horizontal lines under the pictures, one for each word, and then writing out each word, or an approximation thereof: For “butterfly,” Abigail wrote “btrfli.” Their language skills were pretty impressive for kindergarten students. But for the teachers and child psychologists running the program in which they were enrolled, those skills were considered secondary — not irrelevant, but not as important as the skills the children displayed before the story started, when all three were wrestling with themselves, fighting to overcome their impulses — in Abby’s case, the temptation to give up on writing out the whole title and just submit to the pleas of her friends; for Jocelyn and Henry, the urge to rip the pencil out of Abby’s hand and start the CD already.

Over the last few years, a new buzz phrase has emerged among scholars and scientists who study early-childhood development, a phrase that sounds more as if it belongs in the boardroom than the classroom: executive function. Originally a neuroscience term, it refers to the ability to think straight: to order your thoughts, to process information in a coherent way, to hold relevant details in your short-term memory, to avoid distractions and mental traps and focus on the task in front of you. And recently, cognitive psychologists have come to believe that executive function, and specifically the skill of self-regulation, might hold the answers to some of the most vexing questions in education today.

The ability of young children to control their emotional and cognitive impulses, it turns out, is a remarkably strong indicator of both short-term and long-term success, academic and otherwise. In some studies, self-regulation skills have been shown to predict academic achievement more reliably than I.Q. tests. The problem is that just as we’re coming to understand the importance of self-regulation skills, those skills appear to be in short supply among young American children. In one recent national survey, 46 percent of kindergarten teachers said that at least half the kids in their classes had problems following directions. In another study, Head Start teachers reported that more than a quarter of their students exhibited serious self-control-related negative behaviors, like kicking or threatening other students, at least once a week. Walter Gilliam, a professor at Yale’s child-study center, estimates that each year, across the country, more than 5,000 children are expelled from pre-K programs because teachers feel unable to control them.

There is a popular belief that executive-function skills are fixed early on, a function of genes and parenting, and that other than medication, there’s not much that teachers and professionals can do to affect children’s impulsive behavior. In fact, though, there is growing evidence that the opposite is true, that executive-function skills are relatively malleable — quite possibly more malleable than I.Q., which is notoriously hard to increase over a sustained period. In laboratory studies, research psychologists have found that with executive function, practice helps; when children or adults repeatedly perform basic exercises in cognitive self-regulation, they get better at it. But when researchers try to take those experiments out of the lab and into the classroom, their success rate is much lower. Angela Duckworth, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, has spent the last seven years trying to find reliable, repeatable methods to improve self-control in children. When I spoke to her recently, she told me about a six-week-long experiment that she and some colleagues conducted in 2003 with 40 fifth-grade students at a school in Philadelphia.

“We did everything right,” she told me: led the kids through self-control exercises, helped them reorganize their lockers, gave them rewards for completing their homework. And at the end of the experiment, the students dutifully reported that they now had more self-control than when they started the program. But in fact, they did not: the children who had been through the intervention did no better on a variety of measures than a control group at the same school. “We looked at teacher ratings of self-control, we looked at homework completion, we looked at standardized achievement tests, we looked at G.P.A., we looked at whether they were late to class more,” Duckworth explained. “We got zero effect on everything.” Despite that failure, Duckworth says she is convinced that it is possible to boost executive function among children — she just thinks it will require a more complex and thoroughgoing program than the one that she and her colleagues employed. “It’s not impossible,” she concludes, “but it’s damn hard.”

Which is why Abigail, Henry and Jocelyn are potentially so important. They and their classmates are enrolled in Tools of the Mind, a relatively new program dedicated to improving the self-regulation abilities of young children, starting as early as age 3. Tools of the Mind is based on the teachings of Lev Vygotsky, a Russian psychologist who died of tuberculosis in 1934, at age 38, and whose educational theories and methods were, until recently, little known in the United States. Over the past 15 years, Deborah Leong and Elena Bodrova, scholars of child development based in Denver, have turned Vygotsky’s philosophy into a full-time curriculum for prekindergarten and kindergarten students, complete with training manuals and coaches and professional-development classes for teachers. Tools of the Mind has grown steadily — though its expansion has sped up in the past few years — and it now is being used to teach 18,000 prekindergarten and kindergarten students in 12 states around the country. Leong and Bodrova say they believe they have found the answer to the problem that has bedeviled Duckworth and other psychologists for so long. Their program, they say, can reliably teach self-regulation skills to pretty much any child — poor or rich; typical achievers as well as many of those who are considered to have special needs. (They make the claim that many kids given diagnoses of A.D.H.D. would not need Ritalin if they were enrolled in Tools of the Mind.) And if Leong and Bodrova are right, those improved self-regulation skills will lead not only to fewer classroom meltdowns and expulsions in prekindergarten and kindergarten; they will also lead to better reading and math scores later on.

At the heart of the Tools of the Mind methodology is a simple but surprising idea: that the key to developing self-regulation is play, and lots of it. But not just any play. The necessary ingredient is what Leong and Bodrova call “mature dramatic play”: complex, extended make-believe scenarios, involving multiple children and lasting for hours, even days. If you want to succeed in school and in life, they say, you first need to do what Abigail and Jocelyn and Henry have done every school day for the past two years: spend hour after hour dressing up in firefighter hats and wedding gowns, cooking make-believe hamburgers and pouring nonexistent tea, doing the hard, serious work of playing pretend.

Over the last decade or so, the central debate in the field of early-childhood education has been between one group that favors what you might call a preacademic approach to prekindergarten and kindergarten and another group that contends that the point of school in those early years is not to prepare for academic study; it is to allow children to explore the world, learn social skills and have free, unconstrained fun. The preacademic camp began to dominate the debate in the late 1990s, drawing on some emerging research that showed that children’s abilities at the beginning of kindergarten were powerful predictors of later success. If a child reached his 5th birthday well behind his peers in measures of cognitive ability, this research showed, he would most likely never catch up. The good news in the research was that if you exposed struggling children to certain intensive reading and math interventions in prekindergarten and kindergarten, when their minds were still at their most pliable, you could significantly reduce or even eliminate that lag. And so the answer, to many scholars and policy makers, was clear: there was no time to waste in those early years on Play-Doh and fingerpainting, not when kids, and especially disadvantaged kids, could be making such rapid advances in the critical cognitive skills they needed.

More recently, though, a backlash has been growing against the preacademic approach among educators and child psychologists who argue that it misses the whole point of early-childhood education. “Kindergarten has ceased to be a garden of delight and has become a place of stress and distress,” warned a report released in March by a research group called the Alliance for Childhood, which is advised by some of the country’s most esteemed progressive-education scholars. There is now too much testing and too little free time, the report argues, and kids are being forced to try to read before they are ready. The solution, according to the report’s authors, is a return to ample doses of “unstructured play” in kindergarten. If kids are allowed to develop at their own paces, they will be happier and healthier and less stressed out. And there will still be plenty of time later on to learn how to read.

On the surface, Bodrova and Leong would seem to belong to the second camp. They say, after all, that play should have a central place in early-childhood classrooms. And they do find fault with the academic approach, arguing that in practice, many of the early-childhood academic initiatives that have been introduced in the No Child Left Behind era have failed to produce any significant improvement in academic skills. At the same time, they don’t agree that the solution is unstructured free play. The romantic idea that children are born with flowering imaginations and a natural instinct for make-believe is simply wrong, they say. Especially these days, they contend, when children spend more time in front of screens and less time in unsupervised play, kids need careful adult guidance and instruction before they are able to play in a productive way.

Bodrova and Leong began working together with early-childhood teachers in 1992, soon after Bodrova immigrated from Russia to be a visiting professor at Metropolitan State College of Denver, where Leong was a professor of child development. When they visited local classrooms, they were struck by how out of control things often seemed. It was a period when preschool and kindergarten teachers were taught to “follow the child’s lead,” to let children guide the learning process with their own interests and unfettered imaginations. In practice, Bodrova and Leong observed, classrooms were often chaotic free-for-alls.

Bodrova and Leong had both studied Vygotsky, and they discussed whether some of his methods might help improve the climate of these classrooms. For Vygotsky, the real purpose of early-childhood education was not to learn content, like the letters of the alphabet or the names of shapes and colors and animals. The point was to learn how to think. When children enter preschool, Vygotsky wrote, they are “slaves to their environment,” unable to control their reactions or direct their interests, responding to whatever shiny objects are put in front of them. Accordingly, the most important goal of prekindergarten is to teach children how to master their thoughts. And the best way for children to do that, Vygotsky believed, especially at this early age, is to employ various tools, tricks and habits that train the mind to work at a higher level. So Tools of the Mind students learn to use “private speech” — to talk to themselves as they do a difficult task (like, say, forming the letter W), to help themselves remember what step comes next (down, up, down, up). They use “mediators”: physical objects that remind them how to do a particular task, like CD-size cards, one with a pair of lips and one with an ear, that signify whose turn it is to read aloud in Buddy Reading and whose turn it is to listen. But more than anything, they use play.

Most of Vygotsky’s counterparts in the field of child psychology, including influential figures like Jean Piaget and Maria Montessori, held that imaginary play was an immature form of expression, a preliminary stage of development. But Vygotsky maintained that at 4 or 5, a child’s ability to play creatively with other children was in fact a better gauge of her future academic success than any other indicator, including her vocabulary, her counting skills or her knowledge of the alphabet. Dramatic play, he said, was the training ground where children learned to regulate themselves, to conquer their own unruly minds. In the United States, we often associate play with freedom, but to Vygotsky, dramatic play was actually the arena where children’s actions were most tightly restricted. When a young boy is acting out the role of a daddy making breakfast, he is limited by all the rules of daddy-ness. Some of those limitations come from his playmates: if he starts acting like a baby (or a policeman or a dinosaur) in the middle of making breakfast, the other children will be sure to steer him back to the eggs and bacon. But even beyond that explicit peer pressure, Vygotsky would say, the child is guided by the basic principles of play. Make-believe isn’t as stimulating and satisfying — it simply isn’t as much fun — if you don’t stick to your role. And when children follow the rules of make-believe and push one another to follow those rules, he said, they develop important habits of self-control.

Bodrova and Leong drew on research conducted by some of Vygotsky’s followers that showed that children acting out a dramatic scene can control their impulses much better than they can in nonplay situations. In one experiment, 4-year-old children were first asked to stand still for as long as they could. They typically did not make it past a minute. But when the kids played a make-believe game in which they were guards at a factory, they were able to stand at attention for more than four minutes. In another experiment, prekindergarten-age children were asked to memorize a list of unrelated words. Then they played “grocery store” and were asked to memorize a similar list of words — this time, though, as a shopping list. In the play situation, on average, the children were able to remember twice as many words. Bodrova and Leong say they see the same effect in Tools of the Mind classrooms: when their students spend more time on dramatic play, not only does their level of self-control improve, but so do their language skills.

In the past, when psychologists (or parents or teachers or priests) tried to improve children’s self-control, they used the principles of behaviorism, reinforcing good and bad behaviors with rewards and punishments. The message to kids was that terrible things would happen if they didn’t control their impulses, and the role of adults, whether parents or preschool teachers, was to train children by praising them for their positive self-control (“Look at how well Cindy is sitting!”) and criticizing them for their lapses. And in most American prekindergartens and kindergartens, behaviorism, in some form, is still the dominant method. But Bodrova and Leong say that those “external reinforcement systems” create “other-directed regulation” — good behavior done not from some internal sense of control but for the approval of others, to avoid punishment and win praise and treats. And that, they say, is a kind of regulation that is not particularly valuable or lasting. Children learn only how to be obedient, how to follow orders, not how to understand and regulate their own impulses. The ultimate goal of Tools of the Mind is not emotional or physical self-regulation; it is cognitive self-regulation — not the ability to avoid grabbing a toy from the kid next to you (though that’s an important first step), but the much more subtle ability to avoid falling for a deceptively attractive wrong answer on a test or to concentrate on an arduous mental task. And those abilities are more difficult to affect by other-directed regulation. Because the abilities are more abstract, they are less likely to be elicited by rewards. Kids are rarely able to organize their thoughts better in order to get an ice-cream cone.

As a result, many practices that most prekindergarten teachers consider essential are more or less banned from Tools of the Mind classrooms. There are no gold stars, no telling the class that they are all going to have to wait until Jimmy is quiet; even timeouts are discouraged. When there is a conflict — when, say, Billy grabs a toy from Jamal — the Tools of the Mind teacher’s first questions are supposed to be: What was it in the classroom that made it hard for Billy to control himself? And what mediators could help him do better next time? The teacher does remind Billy that there is a rule and he broke it, but she doesn’t make a big deal out of the incident. “We pretty much try not to use this whole concept of misbehavior,” Bodrova told me. “These kids are not born criminals. Even if they do something that is completely out of bounds, they do it because they can’t stop themselves.”

There are not yet firm experimental data that prove that Tools of the Mind works. But two early studies that began in the late 1990s in Denver showed some promising results: After a year in the program, students did significantly better than a similar group on basic measures of literacy ability. And more recent studies, including one overseen by Adele Diamond, a professor at the University of British Columbia who is one of the most prominent researchers in the field of cognitive self-control, have shown that Tools students consistently score higher on tests requiring executive function. Angela Duckworth told me that when she read Diamond’s report, which was published in Science in 2007, “I got very excited.” Her failed 2003 study had persuaded her that the usual approach to self-control in early-childhood education, a brief intervention here or there, wouldn’t work. But Tools of the Mind was clearly a different strategy. “It’s an immersion approach,” she said. “It’s not that these kids are pulled out and they do self-control for half an hour a day. Everything is about self-regulation, every single moment. Everything about the culture that the classroom creates reinforces that.”

It’s one of the reasons that visiting a Tools of the Mind classroom can cause moments of cognitive dissonance. While there’s a lot of dressing up and playing with blocks, plenty of messing around with sand tables and Legos and jigsaw puzzles, there are also a few activities that seem not just grown-up but protocorporate, borrowed directly from the modern office. Every morning, before embarking on the day’s make-believe play, each child takes a colored marker and a printed form called a play plan and draws or writes his declaration of intent for that day’s play: “I am going to drive the choo-choo train”; “I am going to make a sand castle”; “I am going to take the dollies to the beach.” At the beginning of prekindergarten, children are coached on dramatic play — called Make-Believe Play Practice — with the teacher leading the children, step by step, through the mechanics of pretending. (The training manual describes how a teacher might coach a child to feed a baby doll: “I’m pretending my baby is crying. Is yours? What should we say?”) In kindergarten, every student carries around a clipboard with the day’s activities on it — that’s what Abigail was writing on at the listening center — and each Friday, every child has a 5- or 10-minute “learning conference” with his teacher, a mini-performance review in which the children discuss what they accomplished in the last week, where they fell short and what skills they want to work on in the week to come. All of these practices, along with plenty of others that fill the day, are designed to reinforce habits of self-control.

This comprehensiveness creates an extra level of complication for researchers examining Tools of the Mind. There are now four separate large-scale long-term experimental studies under way across the country. But even if the researchers do find, in a few years, that the program has long-term effects on executive function and school performance, they still won’t know exactly which techniques in the Tools of the Mind package are the most useful, or whether they all need to be employed in concert in order to have an effect. Stephanie M. Carlson, a professor of child psychology at the University of Minnesota who studies executive function, told me she is impressed with what she has seen so far of Tools of the Mind. But, she pointed out, “it’s a really heavy-hitting approach, and there are a lot of different techniques used during the course of the day. What we don’t know is what the secret ingredient is.” It might be all the dramatic play, but it also might be the literacy practice, or the learning conferences, or something else entirely.

In the end, the most lasting effect of the Tools of the Mind studies may be to challenge some of our basic ideas about the boundary between work and play. Today, play is seen by most teachers and education scholars as a break from hard work or a reward for positive behaviors, not a place to work on cognitive skills. But in Tools of the Mind classrooms, that distinction disappears: work looks a lot like play, and play is treated more like work. When I asked Duckworth about this, she said it went to the heart of what was new and potentially important about the program. “We often think about play as relaxing and doing what you want to do,” she explained. “Maybe it’s an American thing: We work really hard, and then we go on vacation and have fun. But in fact, very few truly pleasurable moments come from complete hedonism. What Tools does — and maybe what we all need to do — is to blur the line a bit between what is work and what is play. Just because something is effortful and difficult and involves some amount of constraint doesn’t mean it can’t be fun.”

Paul Tough is an editor of the magazine and the author of “Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America,” which is out in paperback this month.

Blanks for the Memories. What’s Your Earliest Childhood Recollection? Scientists Delve Into Brain Circuitry for Answers

May 31, 2011

Blanks for the Memories.
What’s Your Earliest Childhood Recollection? Scientists Delve Into Brain Circuitry for Answers, by Melinda Beck

This article appears in the Wall Street Journal today. To read it at the Journal’s web site, CLICK HERE.

A rowdy cousin … an Eeyore T-shirt … a dog-shaped balloon.

Why we remember some scenes from early childhood and forget others has long intrigued scientists—as well as parents striving to create happy memories for their kids. One of the biggest mysteries: why most people can’t seem to recall anything before age 3 or 4.

Now, researchers in Canada have demonstrated that some young children can remember events from even before age 2—but those memories are fragile, with many vanishing by about age 10, according to a study in the journal Child Development this month.

Researchers asked 140 children, aged between 4 and 13, to describe their three earliest memories, and repeated the exercise two years later with the same children. On average, the 50 youngest children, aged 4 to 6 during the first interview, recalled events from when they were barely 2 years old, as verified by their parents. When they were interviewed two years later, only five of those 50 children mentioned the same earliest memory. By contrast, 22 of the 61 children who were 10 to 13 at the first interview were able to mention the same earliest memory when they were interviewed again two years later.

“By 10, those memories are crystallized. Those are the memories we keep,” says psychologist Carole Peterson at Memorial University of Newfoundland, the lead investigator. “It’s the memories from earliest childhood that we lose.”

The inability of adults to remember the earliest years of childhood—also known as infantile amnesia—has been the subject of speculation for more than a century.

Modern researchers think that storing and retrieving memories require language skills that don’t develop until age 3 or 4. Others believe that while children can recall fragments of scenes from early life, they can’t create autobiographical memories—the episodes that make up one’s life story—until they have a firm concept of “self,” which may take a few more years.

Researchers are finding intriguing cultural differences, too. In a study published in Child Development in 2009, Dr. Peterson and colleagues asked 225 Canadian children and 113 Chinese children, aged 8, 11 and 14, to write down as many early memories as they could in four minutes. The Canadian children were able to recall twice as many memories from their early childhoods, going back six months earlier, than Chinese children. What’s more, the Canadian children’s memories were much more likely to be about their own experiences, whereas the Chinese children focused on family or group activities.

The difference isn’t in memory skills, experts believe, but in how experiences are encoded in children’s brains, which is greatly affected by the attention adults pay to them. In this case, researchers concluded, the Western parents were more likely to savor and tell stories about moments when a child said something funny or did something unusual, underscoring their individuality, while Asian cultures value collective experiences.

Indeed, experts say that if parents want their children to remember particular events from their early lives, they should discuss them in as much detail as possible and help children see their significance. Talking over events with an adult “gives a meaning to memories that children may not have before,” says psychologist Judith Hudson of Rutgers University who has studied how mother-child interactions influence memories. Ask a child, “Remember when we went to the zoo? What did you see?” she suggests. “Suddenly, it’s something to talk about and share.”

Psychologist Robyn Fivush at Emory University, another early-memory expert, has shown that children whose mothers reminisce elaborately with them, eliciting their views and relating them to new experiences, at ages 3, 4 and 5, tend to have earlier first memories as well as better coping skills and higher self-esteem than those who mothers don’t. “We create a sense of who we are through these memories,” says Dr. Fivush.

Traumatic events, such as the 9/11 terrorist attacks, also tend to become seared in children’s memories. In a study titled “I Was Very, Very Crying,” published in Applied Cognitive Psychology last year, Dr. Peterson and colleagues interviewed 145 children aged 2 to 13 who were treated in a hospital emergency room for injuries. Children who recalled crying a lot at the time were more likely to remember specific details two years later.

Yet most early childhood memories are far more mundane, which baffles experts and parents alike. Dr. Peterson says that when she asked parents of children in her studies to verify that the events they recall were real, “Many of them say, ‘He remembered that? How interesting.’ ”

Neuroscientists believe that there are different kinds of memories, stored in many different neural circuits. “We can’t go to a particular spot in the brain to see where our third birthday party is stored,” says Dr. Hudson.

Some memories are generic—what your house, your street or your school looked like. Those get called up as background, like the sets of a movie. Others are semantic, for facts and other information. Still others are episodic, for events that took place.

Scientists think the brain’s prefrontal cortex processes experiences, using sensory input from the eyes, ears, nose and mouth, sorts them into categories, and tags the various memory fragments with specific associations (smells of home, friends from camp, bugs, a pet, for example).

When a memory cue comes in, the brain searches its circuits for related fragments and assembles them like a jigsaw puzzle. Some fragments bring associated fragments along, which is why one old memory often leads to others. Tastes and smells are particularly evocative, which is how Marcel Proust was famously able to construct a whole discourse on his childhood just by tasting a Madeleine, says Gayatri Devi, a neuropsychiatrist who specializes in memory problems in New York City.

Each time people bring up the same memory, those related fragments and circuits become stronger. “When you are 80 years old, remembering your kindergarten days, it’s really the memory of a memory of a memory,” says Dr. Devi.

That may help explain why children’s earliest memories are so unstable: Their neural traces are weak and shallow, whereas the few memories we revisit as we get older lay down stronger traces.

Still, because the brain is constantly reassembling the fragments, they are vulnerable to distortion.

“It’s possible to have a very detailed and vivid memory and be wrong about the details,” says Dr. Hudson. As the distorted memory is repeatedly recalled, it can be very difficult to tell is the memory is or isn’t real.

In one famous case, the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget had vivid memories of being kidnapped at age 2 in Paris, complete with the kidnappers scratching his nurse’s face. Years later, the nurse confessed to fabricating the story—but Piaget had heard his family discuss it so often that his mind created a false memory.

Some therapists claim to be able to “recover” repressed memories of childhood traumas, but the field fell into disrepute in the 1980s when some unscrupulous therapists were found to be planting false memories of incest and child abuse.

Is it possible to recall more of your own childhood memories? Some researchers believe that people can access more if they have the right cues. Discussing past times with family members can jog the memories as well as offer different perspectives.

Photographs and letters are also helpful; knowing specific dates like the birth of a sibling or a move to a different house can help place fragmentary memories in time.

Writing out early memories often brings up others. In fact, psychologists say writing one’s life story can help people find meaning in their lives. “You can call it narcissism,” says Dr. Hudson. “But we all carry about this collection of experiences, and if you can make sense of it, it can tell you who you were, who you are and who you are going to be in the future.”

Unforgettable?

Canadian researchers asked a group of children for their earliest memories and repeated the process two years later. The older children were more likely to mention the same early memories, while the youngest had largely forgotten theirs. (Researchers’ prompts are shown in parentheses.)

4-year-Old

Initial interview: When I was little, I was leaving my mom in the room and I was crawling. And then I came back in and my dad lifted me up by my legs and I made a sound. (Where did that happen?) At a different house…I was really little, I was about 2½.

Two years later: Not recalled.

8-Year Old

Initial interview: When I was in Vancouver, I was at the doctor and he was giving me some needles and I got licorice. (What happened?) Mom bribed me. He was checking and he had to give me a needle in that leg and that leg. And that leg hurt the most, I even remember what leg hurt the most. Mom bribed me with the licorice. (What else do you remember?) The color licorice. It was red. And green. (How old were you?) I think I was three. When I stepped in the office it was sorta scary because that was the first time I had a needle for a very long time. I didn’t know how it felt.

Two years later: (Do you remember when you were little visiting the doctor in Vancouver and having to get a needle and your mom bribed you with licorice?) Yes I do remember that. I remember the doctor used one of those tappy on the knee things and I was scared to do it. Then she gave me a needle in this leg. I remember it was this one. Then I wouldn’t get it done because I was afraid it would hurt and they would take too much blood out and then my mom said, “Well, I’ll buy you some red and green licorice to get you to do it” and then that’s how that one happened.

Write to Melinda Beck at HealthJournal@wsj.com

Too Young for Kindergarten? Tide Turning Against 4-Year-Olds, By WINNIE HU

May 27, 2011

This article appeared in the New York Times on May 27, 2011. If you would like to read it at the NY Times website, CLICK HERE.

Erin Ferrantino rarely has to consult the birthday chart in her kindergarten classroom to pick out the Octobers, Novembers and Decembers. This year, there was the girl who broke down in tears after an hour’s work, and the boy who held a pencil with his fist rather than his fingers.

Those two, along with another of Ms. Ferrantino’s pupils who were 4 when school started, will be repeating kindergarten next year.

“They struggled because they’re not developmentally ready,” said Ms. Ferrantino, 26, who teaches in Hartford. “It is such a long day and so draining, they have a hard time holding it together.”

Soon, Ms. Ferrantino may not have to be on the lookout for children with birthdays in the late fall. Connecticut, one of the last states to allow 4-year-olds to enter kindergarten, is considering changing its rules so that children would have to be 5 by Oct. 1, not Jan. 1, prompting a fight over access, equity and persistent achievement gaps based on race and class.

The policy debate among lawmakers, educators and children’s advocates echoes the cocktail-party chatter in well-off neighborhoods, where parents have long weighed the advantages of delaying kindergarten on an individual basis — particularly for boys — a practice known as redshirting.

Supporters of the earlier cutoff date in Connecticut say it would level an unequal kindergarten playground in which the youngest are often poor black and Hispanic children whose parents cannot afford to give them this so-called gift of time. Others worry that the change could leave thousands of 4-year-olds in a holding pattern, perhaps worsening the readiness of those without access to high-quality preschools.

“We may actually be harming them by not letting them start until a year later,” said Sara Mead of Bellwether Education Partners, a nonprofit consulting firm in Washington.

Kindergarten began to flourish in the United States in the late 19th century to teach children as young as 2 and 3 through play. It has become increasingly academic amid an emphasis on standardized testing throughout public education. That has spurred a movement to limit the “children’s garden” to 5-year-olds.

Today, 38 states and the District of Columbia have established or are phasing in birthday cutoffs by Oct. 1, according to the Education Commission of the States, a nonpartisan agency, with California the most recent. Only Connecticut still has a year-end cutoff; New York and New Jersey are among eight states that leave the decision to local districts. For most New Jersey districts, that date is Oct. 1; for most in New York, it is in December. (New York City’s is Dec. 31.)

In Connecticut, about 24 percent of the approximately 39,000 kindergartners who start school each year are 4. But in the poorest districts, where parents may not be able to afford day care or preschool, 29 percent of kindergartners start at 4. In the wealthy ones, it is 18 percent. About 2 percent of kindergartners in those wealthy districts start at age 6, compared with fewer than 0.1 percent in the poor areas. The proposed change in Connecticut would take effect in 2015.

“It’s a glaring weakness that we should have fixed long ago,” said Mark McQuillan, Connecticut’s previous education commissioner. “Many of the wealthy parents enroll their children at 6 or 6 ½, and other families — particularly poor families — enroll their children as early as 4 ½ because they need the school support. It’s a huge developmental span.”

Some research suggests that children who enter kindergarten later perform better on standardized tests, but critics contend that family background and preschool experience often have a bigger influence on academic success than age. In any case, they say, such benefits disappear by middle school.

Indeed, Ms. Mead and others point to research linking a later start to higher dropout rates down the road, and to lower lifetime earnings because they begin their careers later. Some parents and teachers say redshirting — a term borrowed from college athletics, in which students are pulled from participation to prolong their eligibility — can exacerbate problems like bullying and low self-esteem among teenagers.

The Connecticut Education Department has not studied the effects of age differences on achievement, but some kindergarten teachers have reported that their youngest pupils are more likely to miss class, have difficulty focusing and generally require more handholding.

Jennifer Dominguez, a kindergarten teacher in Hartford, said she felt so strongly that 4-year-olds were at a disadvantage that she held back her own son, Kobe, until he was 5; he will turn 9 on Dec. 30. “The January birthdays are so much more mature and able to handle the curriculum,” she said. “The October, November and December birthdays, they’re just learning about what school is.”

Courtney Gates-Graceson, a lawyer in East Lyme, Conn., decided to enroll her son, Sebastian, who turns 5 on Sept. 29, in a $14,000-tuition preschool rather than to start him in kindergarten. “I don’t want his academic enthusiasm to be quashed if he can’t compete with the older kids in his class,” she said.

But what about those without $14,000 to spend?

“Kids will have to wait around another year to get into school; that’s time wasted,” said Milly Arciniegas, president of the Hartford Parent Organization Council. “No thanks, that’s not the solution.”

Paul Wessel, executive director of Connecticut Parent Power, an advocacy group, called the plan “an incomplete solution to a larger problem.”

Hartford school officials said children with late birthdays could be absorbed into the district’s free preschool programs, but other districts do not have that capacity. Connecticut education officials had called for expanding the state-financed preschool program, along with raising the kindergarten entry age, but legislators balked at the estimated $40 million cost. The program subsidizes preschool for 10,000 3- and 4-year-olds, primarily in 19 low-income areas.

Similar concerns prompted California, which voted last year to move its cutoff date to Sept. 1 from Dec. 2 one month at a time starting in 2012, to establish transitional kindergartens for children with birthdays in the fall.

Karen Gasparrini, a kindergarten teacher in Stamford, Conn., said that without a quality preschool option, “all they’ll be is older; it doesn’t mean they’re better prepared.”

In Westport, Conn., an affluent district where nearly all children attend preschool, Elliott Landon, the schools’ superintendent, said he had noticed no difference in the 70 kindergartners who were 4 when school started. “The earlier we get them, the better,” Dr. Landon said. “If they’re in need of remediation, we can do that; and if they’re in need of acceleration, we can do that, too.”

Zombie Prevention: Your Child’s Sleep By JANE E. BRODY

May 23, 2011

This article appeared in the New York Times on May 23. If you would like to read it at the New York Times website, CLICK HERE.

I have an important question — actually, several related questions — for all parents of school-age children: Do you know how much your children sleep? Do you know how much sleep they really need?

And do you know what their biological clocks are telling them about when to go to sleep and when to wake up?

Although young children are likely to arouse their groggy parents every morning, with no respect for weekends, after puberty the tables turn. Often I hear a familiar lament from parents of adolescents: Every day it’s a struggle to get the kids up and out to school on time.

Many youngsters and most teenagers do not get enough sleep, and this can result in serious consequences, impairing school performance and even raising the risk of depression and other mood disorders.

To help you and your children better appreciate their sleep needs, I’d like to suggest a little test. For a week or two before school ends and again during summer vacation, keep a three-column sleep diary for your children. Or, if they are able and willing, ask them to do it themselves.

In one column, record lights-out time during the school week and on weekends or vacation days. In a second column, record sleep latency — that is, how long it takes them to fall asleep. And in the third column, record wake-up time, noting whether arousal occurs naturally or with an alarm (or dousing with cold water!).

While it’s true that sleep needs vary from one person to another, there are some very reasonable, science-based guidelines to help you determine whether children are getting the sleep they need to function at their best in school and at play and to get along well with friends and relations.

And if you are a parent of teenagers, you may come to a much better understanding of why they have so much trouble getting up on school mornings in time to wash, dress, eat breakfast and get to the bus or their first class on time.

In years past, TV got all the blame for curtailing the sleep of the younger set. Now, the modern devices that were meant to enhance communication and save us so much time have created nearly endless days. There is no longer a “sacred” hour beyond which a child cannot contact someone, search for information or shop online. And for far too many youngsters, sleep takes a back burner to staying in touch, whether by cellphone, e-mail, instant or text messages or Skype.

By the Numbers

According to the National Sleep Foundation, newborns should sleep 12 to 18 hours out of every 24 (every new parent hopes), with a gradual reduction to 12 to 14 hours for toddlers ages 1 to 3; 11 to 13 hours for preschoolers 3 to 5; and (yes!) 10 to 11 hours for schoolchildren ages 5 to 10.

I suspect, though, that relatively few fourth and fifth graders get 10 hours of shut-eye a night. My grandsons, at 10, were lucky to sleep eight or nine hours, even on weekends. Researchers at Stanford University have reported that 9- and 10-year-olds need only about eight hours a night.

But things get really challenging at puberty and throughout adolescence. Not only do teenagers need more sleep than adults — eight and a half to nine and a quarter hours a night, according to the sleep foundation — but the times at which they get sleepy and are able to awaken naturally and feel rested shift in a way that does not mesh with the start times at most schools.

The typical teenager, sleep studies have shown repeatedly, does not fall asleep readily before 11 p.m. or later. Yet many have to get up by 6 a.m. or earlier to get to school for a class that starts at 7:30 or 8 a.m. More than a few doze off during that class, and often the next one as well. Even if awake, they’re in no condition to learn much of anything.

In one study, more than 90 percent of teenagers reported sleeping less than nine hours a night, and 10 percent said they slept less than six hours. As James B. Maas, a Cornell University psychologist and leading sleep researcher, has observed, most teenagers are “walking zombies” because they get far too little sleep.

Even in 1998, before smartphones and iPads could be blamed for teenagers’ sleep deprivation, a study of more than 3,000 adolescents by two sleep specialists, Amy R. Wolfson of the College of the Holy Cross and Mary A. Carskadon of Brown University, found that high school students who got poor grades slept an average of 25 minutes less and went to bed 40 minutes later than those who got A’s and B’s.

In a laboratory study of 40 high school students, Dr. Carskadon and colleagues found that nearly half the students who began school at 7:20 a.m. were “pathologically sleepy” at 8:30 a.m. Calling such early start times “abusive,” she said, “These kids may be up and at school at 8:30, but I’m convinced their brains are back on the pillow at home.”

Sleep deprivation results in “three strikes against learning,” Dr. Carskadon said in an interview. “Students are not awake enough to attend to information they’re supposed to be learning, their knowledge acquisition is impaired and their ability to retrieve information is reduced. What is learned during the day is consolidated during sleep.”

After five nights of too little sleep, many teenagers try to catch up on the weekends, sleeping until 11 a.m. or noon, if not later. But, Dr. Carskadon said, this solution can backfire because it further distorts their biological clocks and can make it even harder for them to get up on time during the school week.

Other consequences of sleep deprivation in youngsters include “an erosion of happiness — an increased risk of depression and other mood disturbances” in those with an underlying vulnerability.

School districts that have switched to later start times for high school students have noted an improvement in grades, a decrease in dropouts and a reduction in traffic accidents. By shaving five minutes off the time between classes, one district avoided having to extend the school day, which might otherwise interfere with sports programs and jobs.

Suggested Improvements

If you’ve kept a sleep diary for your children, look for a discrepancy between their sleep needs on nonschool days and what they must do during the school year.

Dr. Carskadon, who described adolescence and sleep as “the perfect storm,” offered these tips that could result in a better match between teenage sleep schedules and school demands:

¶ School districts should start the day later for adolescents.

¶ School-sponsored late-evening activities should be limited.

¶ The curriculum should include information about sleep and biological rhythms to encourage students to make informed choices about their sleep schedules.

¶ However, parents should identify and set “an appropriate bedtime.”

¶ To help establish an acceptable sleep-wake cycle, teenagers should avoid bright light and stimulating activities in the evening and get light exposure in the morning.

¶ Families should establish relaxing pre-sleep rituals, reminiscent of the bedtime stories of early childhood.

This is the first of two columns on sleep needs.

Fast-Tracking to Kindergarten? by KATE ZERNIKE

May 15, 2011

This article was published in the New York Times on May 15, 2011. If you would like to read the article at the New York Times website, CLICK HERE.

ON command, Eze Schupfer reads aloud the numbers on a worksheet in front of her: “42, 43, 12, 13.” Then she begins to trace them.

“Is that how we write a 12?” her instructor, Maria Rivas, asks. “Erase it.”

“This is a sloppy 12, Eze,” she says. “Go ahead: a one and a two. Smaller. Much better.”

Eze moves to 13.

“Neater,” Ms. Rivas insists. “Come on, you can do it.” Finally, she resorts to the kind of incentive that Eze, her pink glitter sneaker barely grazing the ground, can appreciate: “You’ll get an extra sticker if you can do a perfect 13.”

Eze is 3. She is neither problem child nor prodigy. And her mother, Gina Goldman, who watches through a glass window from the waiting room, says drilling numbers and letters into the head of a 3-year-old defies all the warmth and coziness of her parenting philosophy — as well as the ethos of Eze’s progressive preschool. But she began bringing Eze and her older brother to these tutoring sessions nearly a year ago on the advice of a friend, and has since become the kind of believer who is fueling a rapid expansion of Junior Kumon preschool enrichment programs like this one, a block from the toddler-swollen playgrounds of Battery Park City.

As competition in education has spread down, the tutoring industry has followed.

Research suggests that there is little benefit from this kind of tutoring; that young children learn just as much about math, if not more, fitting mixing bowls together on the kitchen floor. But programs like Kumon are gaining from, and generating, parents’ anxiety about what kind of preparation their children will need — and whether parents themselves have what it takes to provide it. For those whose idea of enrichment is introducing “Buenas Noches, Luna” into their toddlers’ bedtime reading ritual, this is yet another reminder that no matter how much you do, there is always some other program that — who knows? — just might mean a difference.

“The best you can say is that they’re useless,” said Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, who compared the escalation of supplemental education with Irish elk competing to see which had the biggest antlers. “The result is that they go around tottering, unable to walk, under the enormous weight of these antlers they’ve developed,” she said. “I think it’s true of American parents from high school all the way down to preschool.”

Other tutoring companies like Sylvan have also moved into the prekindergarten market. But Kumon, a Japanese import that calls itself the world’s largest math and reading enrichment program, has pushed most aggressively, admitting students as young as 2. Those young students have become an increasingly important part of its business: Kumon grew by about 12 percent last year, to 250,000 students nationwide; Junior Kumon grew by more than 30 percent. In New York, where the company is colonizing storefronts like so many Starbucks, enrollment in Junior Kumon has tripled since it began opening centers in 2007.

“Age 3 is the sweet spot,” said Joseph Nativo, chief financial officer for Kumon North America. “But if they’re out of a diaper and can sit still with a Kumon instructor for 15 minutes, we will take them.”

While worksheets are considered soul sapping in the schools where many Junior Kumon parents aspire to send their children — the kind of affluent places holding screenings of “Race to Nowhere” — at Kumon, they are the essence of the experience. Repetition, derided elsewhere as drill and kill, is considered the key to developing concentration.

PARENTS pay $200 to $300 a month for their 2-, 3-, 4- or 5-year-old to spend up to an hour twice weekly being tutored at a Junior Kumon center — 20 to 30 minutes each on reading and math. Children are then expected to do 20 minutes of homework on each subject every day, with their parents guiding and grading them. Recommended reading lists start in preschool with “Goodnight Moon” and “Each Peach Pear Plum.”

Ms. Goldman, who works at an agency representing artists, took her son, Huxton, to Kumon last September, shortly after he turned 5, in an effort to make sure, she said, “that he wouldn’t be behind the curve” when he started kindergarten the next year.

If she was hesitant, her children’s preschool was “disgusted,” she said. But she saw immediate results — Huxton began reading, adding and subtracting — and Eze, newly 3, started soon after. “These results translated into a self-esteem boost that I didn’t anticipate,” Ms. Goldman said. “They’ve gotten that there’s a thrill in achieving something. I care more about that than I care about them reading.”

She liked that it required her to participate in her children’s homework. “I treat them both with more respect now, because I see what they’re capable of intellectually,” she said. And she liked that it was reward-based, even as she recognizes that some experts decry using prizes as incentives to learn. “That’s life,” she said. “If you do something, you get something.”

Now, as she considers what extracurricular activities to keep on their schedule (her children also take swimming, karate, music, art and German classes), Ms. Goldman said she would not think of giving up Kumon.

“It used to seem like a horrible thing to do to your kid — why would you force this?” she said. “I don’t feel that way anymore.”

Officials at Kumon say it is often thought of as an “Asian” program — a description they reject. There is no competition or pressure, they say; everyone gets a perfect score on the worksheets because they are given countless opportunities to correct themselves. But Junior Kumon has proven popular among many accomplished immigrant parents.

Estee Bauernebel, who grew up in Australia of Korean, Japanese, Chinese and Malaysian heritage, took Kumon classes herself as a child. Seeing the education her son was getting in a public elementary school “was heartbreaking,” she said. “In Australia they’re doing basic multiplication in first grade.”

She enrolled him first, at 7, and then her daughter, Mia, at 3, after she became jealous of her brother’s homework — a not uncommon story at Junior Kumon centers. “She used to cry at night because she couldn’t read,” Ms. Bauernebel said. “It was so traumatic for all of us.”

Kumon officials say they had always allowed preschoolers into the programs. But about 10 years ago, they repackaged and began marketing it as Junior Kumon. “People sometimes believed ‘my kids are too young,’ ” said Mr. Nativo, the chief financial officer. “We highlighted the fact that the earlier you start, the better.”

The company created additional flash cards aimed at younger children, and altered the setup of the centers. While students in older Kumon programs work independently at tables set up in rows, Junior Kumon students sit around horseshoe-shaped tables, overseen by “assistants” — they are never called teachers. The company installed windows between the parents’ waiting rooms and the Junior Kumon rooms, to ease any separation anxiety.

“The Junior Kumon program is the anchor of our center,” said Amy DeBock, who owns a franchise in South Grafton, Mass., that serves the affluent communities surrounding it. “The students who do well in Junior Kumon, they will continue and continue and continue with the program.”

She was concerned when the economy collapsed that parents would pull their children out. But she has seen no dropoff. “I really think parents will get rid of everything else but education for their children,” she said. “With all the information coming out about the competition and the push on education, especially in our area, parents are just wanting their children to have the best, to be ahead.”

Most Kumon centers are franchises. But recognizing the prohibitive costs of rent in New York City, the parent company began opening centers itself in New York City a little over three years ago. It now has 36 in the five boroughs — 13 in Manhattan — with 14 more expected to open this year.

At the Battery Park City center, students walk in with a sense of purpose, carrying light-blue pouches with their homework. They check in on an attendance sheet and search out their folders with new worksheets, then sit down and take out their pencils.

For the uninitiated — not to mention anyone with small children — a visit to Junior Kumon can be unnerving.

Little Kate Wattenberg, a 6-year-old who recently graduated from Junior Kumon, has just finished 90 multiplication problems in six minutes. As she prepares to check out for the day, she shows the center’s director, Diana Sutowski, the entry in her reading journal for the last book she read, “Knights in Shining Armor.” “I liked that he did become a knight because he practiced a lot,” she had written.

“Can you tell me what the future tense of practice is?” Ms. Sutowski asks.

“I will practice,” Kate says.

“The past tense?”

“Past is it already happened,” Kate thinks aloud. “I practiced.”

Before she leaves, Ms. Sutowski congratulates her with a high five.

Kate’s mother, Jessica, brought her to Junior Kumon because, she said: “I do try to follow education, and I am scared for the future of our country. These children are going to be central to our social security, to our political decisions.” Like most students at Kumon, Kate comes from a background where she is likely to get plenty of educational stimulation and sophistication — when Ms. Wattenberg tells her daughters that they are going home to make pizza with a friend that evening, Kate’s younger sister, 4, cheers, “I want pesto!”

Many who study child development say that that kind of exposure — to parents who use big vocabulary words and bring books into the house — is the best preparation for a young child, and question how much programs like Junior Kumon really help.

Parents and policy makers may be ambivalent, Professor Gopnik said, but the popularity of programs like Kumon is “pushing very young children’s lives and curriculum in preschool programs more and more in this direction.”

“Part of them are saying, ‘This isn’t right, 3-year-olds should be playing in the sandbox and putting together mixing bowls,’ but then they’re thinking that maybe if the kid next door is doing it, it’ll be time to go to Harvard and my child won’t have the same advantage,” she said. “We are in a culture where education is the path to success, and it’s hard for people to recognize how deep and profound learning is when children are just playing.”

“When you’re putting blocks together, you’re learning how to be a physicist,” agreed Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a psychologist at Temple University and an author of “Einstein Never Used Flash Cards.” “When you’re learning how to balance things and calculate how tall you can make your building, you’re learning how to be a physicist. Having your kid drill and kill and fill in worksheets at 2 and 3 and 4 to the best of our knowledge so far does not give your child a leg up on anything.”

“Yes, your child might know more of his letters than the child who spent Saturday in the sandbox,” she said. “But the people who are team players, who are creative innovators, they are the ones who are going to invent the next iPad. The kids who are just memorizing are going to be outsourced to the kids in India who have memorized the same stuff.”

Programs like Junior Kumon may not do harm, she said. But they do help push a consensus that young children need more and more structured curriculum.

At the Battery Park City Kumon, Maverick Scott, a financial analyst, pulled a book from his backpack: “Every Child an Achiever: A Parent’s Guide to Kumon.” It had helped persuade him to bring his son, Cyrus, to Junior Kumon at age 4.

“This is math and reading,” he said. “They don’t do that in preschool.”

Cyrus sometimes resisted doing the homework, he said. This was obvious when Cyrus had already counted how many pages he had to complete before they even started. Now Kumon work has become routine, Mr. Scott said, even on vacation. “It’s very natural.”

Now 5, Cyrus has advanced into the classes for older children.

Back in the Junior Kumon room, Ella Shrotri was completing her third day. Her parents brought her here shortly after her older brother started Kumon. She was more developed than he was socially, they said, but they wanted to help her develop academically.

Ms. Rivas, the instructor, helped guide Ella’s tiny hand as she traced a lower-case “a.” “A circle then, down,” she said gently. “We’ll try again next time,” she said finally.

There would be time. Ella was still two weeks shy of 3.