Talking Numbers Counts For Kids’ Math Skills

This article/interview from NPR may be talking about preschoolers, but at it’s heart, it’s a great endorsement of experience-based education. When children learn by rote memorization, they are not learning the deeper meanings and qualities of the material – whether it’s numbers or ABC’s. They may learn to read, for example, but without making connections to their own lives and the world around them their ability to really understand what they are reading is deeply limited.

University of Chicago psychology professor Susan Levine finds that “for children to develop the math skills they’ll need later on in school, it is essential that parents spend time teaching their children the value of numbers by using concrete examples — instead of just repeating them out loud.”

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Playing to Learn

The New York Times’ Susan Engel envisions a world where children learn by doing and are given ample time to master the critical skills they need through activities that are relevant. Engel asks us to: “Imagine, for instance, a third-grade classroom that was free of the laundry list of goals currently harnessing our teachers and students, and that was devoted instead to just a few narrowly defined and deeply focused goals.”

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Charter Schools and Student Performance

Now for something more current… Read this fantastic oped piece by the Wall Street Journal’s Paul Peterson. He reviews some of the research that’s out there on the benefits of school choice. He also effectively debunks the faulty studies and falsehoods being used to shake public confidence in charter schools recently. Don’t miss the unique data Peterson presents on how school choice has worked in other countries:

“They discovered that the greater the competition between the public and private sector, the better all students do in math, science and reading. Their findings imply that expanding charters to include 50% of all students would eventually raise American students’ math scores to be competitive with the highest-scoring countries in the world.”

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