News from the UK – sadly, the comments could equally apply, and in many states even moreso, to US students.

UK – Stressed out young children

Diary of a teacher who left – I taught in a school that reflected the insuperable social problems of its catchment area. The answer of the administrators was to introduce what can be rightly labeled “lesson-plan lunacy”. Mercifully, such lesson-plan lunacy is not universal but it is common. The measures introduced included making every teacher write down, and submit for approval, a detailed lesson plan for every lesson taught. These had to be broken down into five-minute units, each of which amounted to a mini-lesson plan in its own right. Most fulltime teachers there taught 24 one-hour lessons a week – it does not need any special insight to appreciate the enormous amount of effort and time that each teacher had to spend on fulfilling this obligation. The system introduced resulted in children not learning to ask questions but merely to answer them. Teachers have no choice but to coach, goad and indoctrinate their students until they could provide the answers that the system demanded. Thus, the purpose of education is no longer the enrichment and fulfillment of individual ability and aptitude but the uniform certification that certain training has occurred. Those of us at the coalface know what a grind it is to endure and survive; sadly, the children are now developing a similar mindset.

Stressed out 4-6year olds in the UK
Reasons to be cheerless The meaninglessness of modern life exposes us to such despair that we need more than a stiff upper lip to cope. A quarter of children aged between four and six say they are "stressed out", and the proportion rises to just over half of children under 16, reported a survey published late last week. It is getting just too much. Children who should have no thoughts in their heads but how to skip, kick a football and splash poster paint around are cracking up. Evidence of the increasing incidence of children's mental ill health is reaching mountainous proportions : self-harm, attention deficit disorder, depression and obsessive behavior have all increased sharply among children in recent years. Therefore, this survey, conducted by a market research company, TNS, was not saying anything we had not already heard plenty of times before. There is a real danger of an ostrich mentality, insisting to all the teenagers with suicidal tendencies that what they feel is not real, they are just unwitting victims of a gigantic cultural fraud. Do not expect the scenario to improve. We are implementing policies and training our children to suffer even more. It is inevitable that, eventually, they will pay us back.

Stressed-out seven-year-olds – politicians’ obsession with exams, league tables and rote learning is creating a nation of stressed infants. Instead of learning a broad range of skills through natural play, children were being rigidly drilled. Instead of them receiving an education that enables them to be creative and self-confident, they are feeling that they are failures at the tender age of seven. We may be in control of them at seven but they grow up into teenagers and adults who in many ways have been damaged for life. The cost of these misguided and inflexible policies will eventually be enormous in terms of human wastage and cost to society. Why administrators refuse to examine systems in countries whose students outperform UK students is still a mystery.

28 Nov 05 London - Dr Dylan Griffiths has spent more than 20 years healing the minds of troubled teenagers. But the British psychiatrist is shocked by what he is now facing on a daily basis. He is treating record numbers of disturbed young patients, unable to cope with the pressures of modern life, who are hooked on drink, drugs and underage sex, or who are so desperate they even contemplate suicide. The age of experimentation among Britain's teenagers is dropping every year, he and other leading health workers warn, creating a mental health time bomb that will create a generation of dysfunctional adults. "For today's teens, marijuana, cocaine and alcohol are as ubiquitous as traffic on the street," said Griffiths. "Adolescents who self-harmed were rare 30 years ago. Today, self-harming is a dramatic, addictive behaviour, a maladaptive way for growing numbers of youngsters to relieve their psychological distress."

A report into adolescent mental health (independent study commissioned by the Priory Group) paints a bleak picture of the growing mental-health crisis among 12 to 19-year-olds. Family break-up, increasing pressure to achieve at school, a lack of tolerance in society and an "anything goes" attitude are all contributing to a rise in the number of young people pushed to the brink of suicide, with others driven to experiment with drugs, drink and underage sex as a way of coping with stress. More than 900,000 adolescents have been so miserable they have considered suicide, the study says. A million have wanted to self-harm and more than half a million have experienced bullying or violence at home. Peer pressure was influential for many adolescents using alcohol or drugs. One in twenty 13-year-olds and around one in six 15-year-olds had experimented with illegal substances, believing it would make them look "cool" and be better accepted at school. Counselors, drug experts and mental health charities agree that action is needed urgently to prevent a generation of young people growing up with serious mental health problems.

Teachers Leaving the Profession - Good teachers are leaving the teaching profession in the USA (I have no figures for the UK) in unprecedented numbers. Even a cursory examination of determinants will conclude why this is occurring.
Persuading good teachers to leave the teaching profession – implement policies enacted in the UK and USA.
Encouraging good teachers to stay in the teaching profession – implement policies enacted in New Zealand and Finland.

12/2/2005 Ignoring ministers is secret of a primary school's success
The head of the school that ranked top of today's primary school league tables attributed her success to "ignoring" most of the Government's flagship literacy and numeracy strategies. Barbara Jones, head of Combe Church of England Primary School, urged teachers to trust their own professional judgment about how best to teach children to read, write and add up. Every 11-year-old at the school was at least three years ahead of their age group in this year's English, maths and science tests - making it the top ranking primary out of more than 20,000 in England.

The headteacher's remarks came as Education Secretary Ruth Kelly published a review into teaching of reading in schools that called for increased teaching of phonics. But Mrs. Jones warned ministers against jumping on the phonics "bandwagon", arguing that children learn to read in different ways. It was the second time in three years that the school has topped the elite league table measuring how many 11-year-old pupils reach the level normally expected of 14-year-olds. But Mrs. Jones said the Government's strategies were "eroding teachers' confidence". She said her school did not follow the daily literacy hour or numeracy programmes.

"We don't use the literacy or numeracy strategy as prescriptively as we have been asked to," she said. "We use a variety of approaches and that's where I think the Government has got it wrong in that they advocate one way and then a few years later they suggest another way. Phonics is not the only answer. There isn't one ideal way of teaching reading. Children do not all learn in the same way because we are all different. It is a pity that people jump on these bandwagons and quote examples of schools that see their results increase. You have got to use a bit of common sense. We don't rush things. If it is going to take a fortnight to do something, it is going to take a fortnight. The problem is when you take four days just because the literacy strategy or some other directive says you should. We have never done that. I think what they are doing is eroding teachers' confidence. I just feel that sometimes the baby is thrown out with the bath water. Throughout the school, we spend an enormous amount of time getting the children to express their ideas and clarify their thoughts verbally. This makes their vocabulary very good from a young age. It helps tremendously later on with reading, writing and maths but also all the other subjects. People sometimes think that to get these results we must do nothing but get them to practice for the tests. But the only way to get them achieving at such a high level is to give them a broad and varied curriculum.”

Overall, this year's tables showed that 79 per cent of pupils reached the level expected of 11-year-olds in English, 75 per cent in maths and 86 per cent in science. This represented one percentage point rises in English and maths and no change in science. Record numbers of schools managed to get all their 11-year-olds to the required standard; 229 schools achieved "perfect" scores, up from 190 last year.

However, the head of this year's most improved school urged the Government to scrap the league tables arguing that the rankings were demoralizing for teachers and pupils whose schools were at the bottom of the tables. Three years ago Eastborough Junior Infant and Nursery School was at the bottom of the league tables. Pupils, parents and some teachers at the primary school in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, had low expectations and academic results had slumped. The local population had changed as white pupils left the school and were mainly replaced by children from Pakistani backgrounds, but the school had not changed its strategies to deal with the new challenges. "Our community at the time had low expectations," said Nicola Roth, the headteacher. "There were issues with the teaching. There were issues with the leadership and management and the changing population... We needed different resourcing and different teachers.”

After a radical overhaul, the school has nearly tripled its results. Ms Roth said getting parents involved had been crucial. The school set up English and IT classes for parents and made a point of ringing home regularly with good news, as well as telling parents when their children should be doing better. It has nearly trebled the number of pupils passing the national tests in English, maths and science between 2002 and 2005. But Roth said that although she was "really proud" of her school's achievement, she remembered how "hurtful" it had been to be ranked at the bottom of the tables. "I don't think league tables achieve any purpose," she said. "Lots of other schools have worked really, really hard and will not get the acknowledgement they deserve. It would be better if league tables did not exist. Three years ago, we were on the bottom. That was really hurtful. I would hate for any other school to have to go through that," she said. "As a school we are celebrating. But I would rather it was just abolished. It just does nobody any good." The school achieved 247 out of a possible 300 points in the national curriculum Key Stage 2 tests for 11-year-olds in today's tables. This was a dramatic improvement from 2002, when the school's score was just 85.

Overall, this year's tables showed that 79 per cent of pupils reached the level expected of 11-year-olds in English, 75 per cent in maths and 86 per cent in science. This represented one percentage point rises in English and maths, and no change in science. Record numbers of schools managed to get all their 11-year-olds to the required standard; 229 schools achieved "perfect" scores, up from 190 last year.

Dr. David L. Mollet’s Comment – Along with many other educators, I have been trying since the mid 1970s to persuade administrators (in my case both in the UK and USA) to appreciate that in the elementary school system, standardized testing, league tables, the whole concept of coercing and persuading schools and children to compete against each other is basically wasteful and even harmful. It involves the spending of considerable sums of money that could be better spent elsewhere, is damaging and harmful to many children and, in many cases, will have exactly the opposite results of those intended.