The New York Times has about three stories about parents that they recycle over and over. One of their favorite story topics is "The Crazy Parent" — that hysterical, grade grubbing parent who pushes their poor children way too far and buys that Harvard sticker for the car when their kids are still watching Elmo. I'm not saying that there aren't parents like that, but I do get tired of that story line in the Times.
I'm not sure why the Times keeps going after that topic, when most parents are completely normal. Since this article from Kate Zernike is on the most e-mailed list, we'll will probably get a lot more of "Crazy Parent" articles in the future.
Zernike writes about parents who sign up their kids for Kumon to get them reading before kindergarten. The horror level at those Kumon parents was a little over the top.
My kids learned to read early probably because I read them stories every day, they had ABC books, and they watched Sesame Street. I didn't do all that because I wanted to give them an edge in the cut throat world of kindergarten. It's just part of the parenting package, and the kids liked it. I suppose if you don't have time for one-on-one reading time, then you might want to send your kids to Kumon for an hour a week. Does it hurt the kids? No. Does it help the kids? Probably not.
While Kumon and other after school supplementary services are probably not going to propel pre-schoolers to Harvard, those programs are very helpful in older grades, because schools aren't drilling kids on multiplication tables anymore. I'm looking around for a good writing program to supplement my older child's sixth grade curriculum. I have friends who send their kids to reading programs. Ian has nearly six days of after school specials.
In an ideal world, we wouldn't have to do this stuff. In an ideal world, we would be all educating our kids like Tilda Swinton, in alternative private school in a Scottish town. And we do do a lot of free-style educating of our kids, but there's some stuff that I just can't on a canoe trip or at an urban garden (posts and pix to follow).
Apt. 11d 
I got something slightly different from the Kumon article. I really do believe, as far as Kumon goes in the pre-school years, that that form of drilling does little to benefit the reading abilities of typically developing children. To be disuaded from this belief, I’d have to see some data that showed that those early Kumon classes affected eventual outcomes (oh, say, like the Head Start studies, which, if I remember correctly, showed some improvements in early years, that dissipated as the kids grew older). Kumon doesn’t do those studies, or does them poorly because they’re interested in marketing and not science. My guess is that like most interventions for typically developing children, they’re going to have little effect.
On the other hand, I do think that kids need more practice with the idea that practice improves performance (the cute segment at the end of that article where a child is asked to say “I practice”; “I practiced”; “I will practice” — though I bet that’s a lot cooler in Latin). I haven’t found it necessary in math for my kids (because they have learned their math facts with the degree of teaching of them they get in school), but I could see another parent feeling their kids need more than that, or that their schools offer less practice than ours does. But, even for my kids, I think it’s important to teach that practice -> improvement. We’ve been toying with piano for that purpose (I think dance, sports. . . .) might also work. I’d say we’ve only had mediocre success with child 1 on the goal of teaching practice w/ piano. We’re reassessing right now. The goal, ultimately, is to teach the child that to get good at A, you might have to practice B (i.e. golf & strength training, or math and arithmetic, or jazz and scales).
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PS: Even in an ideal world, I would not make Swinton’s choices with my children and I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t send them to an alternative school where they spend too much time gardening. But then, I think one of the problems with the world is that too many people spend too little time doing math problem sets, especially statistics and probability.
I do admit my daughter has waist length hair that she refuses to cut, I have, after many struggles, told her that she has to cut it at least once a year.
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I continue to not understand why people seem to think it’s so important for their kids to go to Harvard (not that Kumon at 2 is the way to do that, even). I don’t particularly want my kid to be a conformist hedge fund manager (which, coincidentally, a good friend–a Harvard grad–did before his company came under SEC scrutiny. He was laid off and hasn’t been able to find a new job since. It’s too bad about him, too, because he’s an interesting and talented guy who could have been so much more productive had he not become a hedge fund manager.)
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bj, I love your idea of practice–>improvement. Appreciating that with most skills/passions, the path is “crappy, crappy, crappy, crappy,…better, good”. Not completely abandoning product for process but knowing that any worthwhile product doesn’t come without a commitment to process, no matter how mundane.
I do believe that this is a huge value that we can impart to our kids. And with it comes an authentic sense of confidence.
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Reading is too important to leave entirely to school. I’ve noticed that in stories of early 20th century life, it was often expected that children learn to read before they hit school, rather than at school itself, which actually makes a lot of sense. (Mid-century, one begins to encounter stories about teachers who are horrified by the idea of children learning to read before coming to school–I think that comes up in To Kill A Mockingbird and in Florence King’s memoir Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady.) The process of learning to read requires a lot of practice and on-the-fly correction, which is why schools have often used smaller reading groups.
I like Kumon’s math approach and I’m a huge fan of their Geometry and Measurement workbook series. I’m less sure what they can do that Bob can’t, besides be more expensive.
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Reading is awfully important, an equivalent of language in modern society, but plenty of kids learn to read seamlessly, just as they acquired language.
But, as we know, some kids don’t acquire language through passive and non-direct instruction, and the same is surely true of language. I still think early drilling instruction is unlikely to be useful for most kids, but it could be important to some.
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It seems to me that Harvard grads have more options than local business college grads–and maybe more options than third-tier college grads–and that is why, ceteris paribus, I would want my daughter to go to Harvard.
Alas, she doesn’t have quite the grades or board scores for Harvard, so she will probably go to someplace like Tufts, which will still give her plenty of options. Whether she uses that freedom to lead an examined life will be of course be up to her.
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When I taught English in China, the lowest age class I taught was “kindergarten” once a week. The kids were supposed to be 4-6, but given ways of counting ages in China, that really meant 3-6, and then the local newspaper published an article (possibly paid for by the school I taught at) claiming that children should start learning foreign languages as early as possible, preferably as an infant. While there were no actual infants in my class, I suspect some of the “three” year olds were actually much younger. Of course, it was expected that all 25 of these kids could sit still at a desk and work in a workbook for two hours, monitored only by me and a teaching assistant. Since that’s asking a lot of a really mature 6 year old (especially since none of the really little ones could properly hold a pencil, and almost none of the kids could read or write anything in Chinese) the class was total chaos, and usually at least one student had a tantrum before break. Also, the class was from 6-8pm, which was too late for pretty much all the kids. The one advantage was they were really really cute, and I am a sucker for little kids speaking foreign languages.
But yeah, really early language learning…right in theory, totally wrong in execution.
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oh, I actually meant children learning their own language, I.e. the one spoken by their caregivers, family, and society. I completely agree that’ there’s a lot of really bad implementation of the fact that most kids don’t have to be taught their parents’ language but just pick it up like sponges to the teaching of “second” languages.
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B.I.,
Isn’t it terrible that those kids would have been better off just watching Dora? Oh well, what the parents don’t know won’t hurt them.
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But, all else isn’t ever equal. Being and becoming the kind of child who, at 18, has a good shot at Harvard means that they will be a certain kind of person (not the same identical kind of person, as Brooks has argued), but a certain type of talent. And, as Flanigan pointed out in her Chua review, becoming that kind of person involves choices that are made throughout the child’s as of yet limited years. We were debating the “Harvard doesn’t have an effect” study the other day, and looked at the schools of all the Supreme court justices (who I believe all went to Ivy’s, except for Clarence Thomas). Our conclusion: not that Harvard prepares you to be a Supreme Court justice, but that being the kind of person, who at 18, can convince Harvard to accept you prepares you to be a Supreme court justice.
(something that the “harvard effect” studies doesn’t control for).
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Sandra Day O’Connor went to Stanford for her BA and law degree, but that’s almost an exception that proves the difference.
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I can promise you that my ideal world would involve neither Kumon, or a Steiner Woodorf school for my kids. It would involved better writing education and less homework though.
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For the purposes of this calculation, Stanford is in the ivy league. Harvard is a shorthand for ivy-league like school, and ivy-league like school means the Ivy League + Stanford + MIT and sometimes Caltech (i.e. schools w/ less < 15% acceptance rates)
In US News & World Report's rankings, baed solely on acceptance rate, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Columbia, Princeton, MIT, Brown, Dartmouth, Caltech.
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Sorry, I meant “Stanford is the exception that proves the rule.”
Aren’t acceptance rates easy to game? You just do an advertising blitz and lure more suckers into applying.
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Amy P
Yeah, the U of C went from a 60% acceptance rate to about a 28% acceptance rate in about 5 years, and nothing changed except the advertising, but suddenly, they can boast about how much more “selective” they’ve become. From professors, the undergrads have gotten worse, if anything (though…I take grumbling from crotchety profs with a grain of salt, however it might be true that kids have become slightly less single-focused nerdy and more generally well-rounded successful, but with no absolute driving passion for something.)
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I was talking about this very thing with some people from my husband’s department. They are very happy with the quality of their graduate applicants, but the college would like to see a lower acceptance rate, so they are thinking of spreading their nets wider by using GRE-triggered recruiting. The hope is to attract an even higher cut of graduate student, but as I asked them, if you get twice as many applications, are you really going to spend twice as much time reading applications? If the same amount of time is spent reading twice as many applications, you may wind up making worse choices because the process has sped up.
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From professors, the undergrads have gotten worse, if anything…
I don’t think teenagers read as much as they used to. That is a serious problem.
(All that follows is my opinion.) Reading is a skill which must be practiced. Decoding is a skill which even very young children can acquire, but if the children don’t use the skill, they don’t progress. Beginning to read at an early age doesn’t lead to later brilliance.
There is an age at which students need help to learn to read, if it hasn’t happened naturally, or if the child is showing clear signs of dyslexia. If they’re still in diapers, they have so much to learn!
Fear is contagious. The New York Times article is better than any paid advertisement, in driving parents to toddler prep classes. How many of that toddler’s peers will suddenly show up at Kumon?
bj, Kumon doesn’t do those studies, or does them poorly because they’re interested in marketing and not science…
Or, they’ve done them, but they don’t show positive results, so they won’t release them. I hate, hate parenting decisions driven by fear. I see similarities between this NYT baby Kumon article and the mom who used Botox on her 8 year old. In both cases, the parents believe they’re doing the best thing for their children, they argue that others do it too, and they plead competition. In both cases, they aren’t interested in childhood.
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Is there any evidence that early reading correlates with later performance? I always assumed onset of literacy was strongly influenced by specific features of cognitive development. I didn’t read early, but once I started reading I quickly progressed. My daughter seems to be following the same path.
Of course, I got into Harvard via legacy status, so I’m a poor data point.
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I’ve never seen any evidence that early reading leads to later performance, Dan. NYC parents feel a lot of pressure to get their kids into the G&T schools, because the regular PS schools are uneven. That’s why they’re using these Kumon programs. Outside of that NYC subset, there’s no evidence that a vast number of parents are this intense. This is a typical NYT Style section article, which takes a handful of parents as proof of a trend.
re: reading and talking. The funny thing about Ian is that he learned to read effortlessly. He knew his ABCs by 18 months and then quickly started reading words with full comprehension, before he was speaking full sentences. He’s had to learn speech through directed instruction, but not reading. His reading level leveled off though, because of his language problems. Idiomatic expressions kill him.
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I haven’t read the article, but I think there’s a difference between early reading and hyper-early reading. A neighbor of a friend is teaching her 1-year-old to sight read words with Teach Your Baby to Read, much to my friend’s disgust. I put in a big reading push with the Bob books and various other phonics readers when my daughter was about 4.5 and was very pleased with the results. I got to see a bit of how they taught reading in her public pre-K class and I think I did the right thing–the teacher was leading the kids in chorused “reading” of the same sentences over and over again, so some of the kids were probably just memorizing the sentences. (Out in the conventional reading instruction world, there are a lot of guessable repetitious texts or texts where you can “read” the text by looking at the picture–it’s almost like they’re trying to induce reading problems.) The kids’ private school in Texas has a super duper phonics program (they learn hand signs for different phonograms and they learn every single pronunciation of “ough”). C’s early reading did lead to her spinning her wheels in school after we moved to Texas, but she’s read so much more at her age than I did, even considering the distractions of the Wii, computer games, videos, etc. She is a much more knowledgeable child than I was at her age. I’ve given her little brother a break on reading. He’s 6 and a kindergartener, but we’re only about half way through the phonics readers that his sister finished when she was still 4. I’m hoping we’ll finish the books this summer, because he ought to be a pretty strong reader for 1st grade. I feel like his math is a lot stronger than hers was at the same age, though.
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My kids learned to read early probably because I read them stories every day,
Totally (or at least mostly) off topic, but I shudder when I read something like this. My parents and grandparents insisted on reading to me all the frigging time when I was a little kid. What a nightmare.
Maybe your kids loved it, but even when I was, say, 3ish and couldn’t read especially well, I detested having other people read to me.
It totally ruined the book to hear it in someone else’s voice rather than on my own, however flawed. Nails on a blackboard is the image that comes most readily to mind.
Yeah, I have issues. Lots of them.
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“Or, they’ve done them, but they don’t show positive results, so they won’t release them.”
Yeah, that’s the other alternative, and the expected one. It’s really tough to show positive intervention effects in any case.
I do think that the early pre-school cramming in NYC is related to getting kids into school. They’re trying to give their kids a temporary competitive advantage, so it doesn’t really matter if early skills are correlated with future performance, as long as it gets you into the preschool/kindergarten of your choice (read the “ivy chronicles” for a black humor version of getting into NYC schools. It was pretty funny, as long as you’re not trying to get into schools in NYC).
I think that’s one of the issues with college admissions as well; in school admissions, schools are trying to decide who to accept based on what their potential is (as opposed to a job, where we’re generally trying to hire based on what we think the person can do now). To predict potential, they rely on correlations. But once parents know what the correlations are, they try to prep kids for those correlations. It breaks the systems down, but also increases the competition for everyone.
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There’s an interesting article about UC’s changes in admissions (and even in their curriculum) done to attract more applications. This piece in the Chronicle of Higher Ed has a snippet, but I’ve seen a longer one somewhere, that says that UC even changed its common core curriculum in order to make itself more attractive to applicants.
http://chronicle.com/article/Application-Inflation/125277/
But, I don’t think that market driven application inflation actually explains the rates in the <15% list (9 schools, but we could call them the top 10 in prestige, verified by my own immersion in the crazy social milieu where people know those things). Caltech is an outlier, that appears mostly because of US News's ranking of it based on their "secret" number crunching.
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“Maybe your kids loved it, but even when I was, say, 3ish and couldn’t read especially well, I detested having other people read to me. ”
Most kids do love it, you know. In fact, a frequent issue encountered by parents of early readers is children thinking that their parents will stop reading to them if they admit how well they read on their own.
Now, I think my daughter, who is 10, probably won’t let me read to her any more, for precisely the reasons you complain about. She still likes hearing her dad, though, perhaps ’cause he’s kept the tradition going. I generally listen to my daughter, but occasionally force her to listen to me read poetry.
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As the parent of a high school junior with pretty good (97th percentile) test scores, I have to say, in fairness, that the Ivies (using the term strictly) seem to be pretty good, at least this year, in not doing mass mailings to marginally qualified applicants in order to boost the colleges’ “selectivity.” In contrast, even the top non-Ivies (Duke, Chicago) are pretty shameless in their attempt to solicit an application from my daughter, which they will then reject.
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“In contrast, even the top non-Ivies (Duke, Chicago) are pretty shameless in their attempt to solicit an application from my daughter, which they will then reject.”
In their defense, Duke & Chicago might argue that your daughter may not be familiar with their schools (which are not in your neck of the woods), while the Ivy’s might be (well, if we define a broad woods).
It’d be interesting to know if students in Illinois & North Carolina receive solicitations from the “other” Ivy’s (Dartmouth, Cornell, UPenn).
But, it’s also a reasonable proposition that Duke & Chicago are prestige climbers (Vanderbilt, too, right?).
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PS: Are Duke and Chicago really not in the running for a 97% child? That’s the kind of thing that start’s to freak parents out. I for one, was noting that Claremont College and Pomona (really, a schools that I’ve only vaguely heard of) have less than 20% acceptance rates. That must be marketing, no?
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And, yes, I exist in a social system in which my 10 & 7 year old report that their friends are discussing what colleges they are interested in.
We hear that Yale is currently popular among the elementary school set. My daughter denies it, but I think that’s ’cause Bailey (the character, not the actress, from the season finale of Suite Life on Deck) is going to Yale and Cody was rejected.
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bj,
If it makes you feel better, these schools also trying to balance their intake geographically, so NE parents are right to panic. Their kids really do need to be more wonderful than an Alaskan or a Hawaiian with the same test scores. So just being a West Coast family is probably going to help you, at least a bit.
On the other hand, the same issue of differing standards probably applies to Asians, to their detriment. My Korean friend’s 6-year-old is an amazing pianist, but don’t we kind of expect him to be? If you’re Asian and not an amazing musician or amazing in some other stereotypical way, doesn’t it suggest that you’re a bit of a slacker?
Personally, acceptance to UT Austin ($20k a year tuition and living expenses) or Texas A & M (also $20k) would be perfectly acceptable. There’s a tuition benefit at my husband’s college, plus a sort of consortium of schools that give each other’s faculty’s kids a break on tuition, which is nice, but I’m not counting on it still being around in 10-15 years. I have a soft spot for Yale, though (and maybe Princeton). OK, and maybe Notre Dame or Catholic University of America. Aside from them, I wouldn’t be impressed with letters arriving from Very Expensive U for my kids.
I think there’s been adequate discussion of the way that lower-tier private schools somehow brainwash applicants into believing that they’re worth $40-$50k a year, when nobody 500 miles away has ever heard of that school. A related issue that I’ve heard enough attention paid to is that a lot of kids waste huge amounts of money going to out-of-state state schools, including ones worse and less well-known than their home state schools. (A couple of my younger relatives did this while having University of Washington as an in-state option.)
Another issue that I don’t think has been adequately considered is that where you go to college puts you on a trajectory with regard to internships, job fairs, etc. I know that Harvard, etc. are very important for NE corridor media, academic and government jobs, but if you wanted to work in an industry centered in a different part of the country, the traditional Ivies might be surprisingly unhelpful. Experience suggests that well known 2nd-tier private schools can be very influential within a particular geographic area (I think I’ve seen this in both Southern California and Texas). I don’t know why exactly. There may be a vast web of alumni who are just dying to give a job to a new graduate from the alma mater, or maybe even non-alumni who are devoted fans of the college team.
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“A related issue that I’ve heard enough attention paid to is that a lot of kids waste huge amounts of money going to out-of-state state schools, including ones worse and less well-known than their home state schools.”
Sorry, “A related issue that I haven’t heard…”
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“This is a typical NYT Style section article, which takes a handful of parents as proof of a trend.”
Three people of an NYT reporter’s acquaintance count as a trend.
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“Three people of an NYT reporter’s acquaintance count as a trend.”
Yeah. Unfortunately, I often know the 4th person in the trend. (Not usually one of the 3, though sometimes, since occasionally NY Times reporters do know people who don’t live in NY).
I try not to be part of the trend (no botoxing my kids yet or even Kumon) but I can see them through the minivan window.
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97%ile is definitely in the running for UChicago. Heck, even as low as 95%ile is fine. 😉 But it’s still a crapshoot because it’s that kind of school, not quite the lottery that some others are but this year their acceptance rate went down to 16%.
It’s nice to see some love for practice on this thread. Kumon offers “deliberate practice”, which is key for developing mastery. With many schools decrying what they call “drill and kill”, lots of students are missing out on this. I went to Kumon when my child’s teacher told me skills were not that important because my D was learning the “concepts”. Yeah, right.
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I read stories like these and my inner hipster comes out. “Follow the trend? No way! I never want to be that crazy parent.” Maybe that’s the plan. Instill the fear of being like these crazy people, and thus reduce the competition.
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We had the 4 year old that could read chapter books that everyone was jealous of. What they didn’t know is that it was actually hyperlexia, related to her Asperger’s diagnosis. In other words, she understood almost no spoken language, and I had to write her letters that said things like “mommy loves you.” I’m wondering if what Kumon creates is actually hyperlexia rather than reading.
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We haven’t looked much at Chicago (“where fun goes to die”). But 95th percentile is not really in the running for Duke, unless you are a recruited athlete, an underrepresented minority, or a development office case.
Vanderbilt is definitely a climber sort of school, which has sent us a few mailings, but 97th percentile is a possibility there, so it doesn’t annoy me.
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Amy P, I gather colleges & universities use merit scholarships to recruit students, so the sticker price is not necessarily the final price.
A friend’s son (2 and a bit) now insists she keep her finger on the words she’s reading to him. I’m sure he’ll start reading soon, and that’s very different (in my opinion) than being taught to read at 2 by flashcards. He obviously knows there’s a connection between the black squiggles and the words she speaks, and he’s trying to figure it out.
At one point a school sent home a letter stating that parents should read to their children through late elementary (maybe even middle) school. My kids looked at me in horror. “but…that’s so…slow!” Had to fight with several teachers to prove that our daughter really, truly could read that quickly.
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“We haven’t looked much at Chicago (“where fun goes to die”).”
But I think that’s all changed now. Really, “nothing could be farther from the truth.” The marketing guys (Royall & Company) told them that “where fun goes to die” just didn’t work as a marketing ploy and they changed it. Now, Chicago has lots of “fun” happy people.
I’ll admit that I’m fond of Chicago (the city, as well as the school).
Although some state schools do attract merit scholars and others with scholarships, I think there’s also a fair number of kids who go out of state because they want the “college experience” and that’s hard to do at the university that’s down the block from your house. It’s a pretty steep cost to pay, and especially unfortunate when you’re downgrading your school to do it.
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bj,
That was an interesting article. Zimmer is not popular around here with the professors (or the grad students, really), they see him as a slick corporate type who knows a bit about math and cares nothing about “the life of the mind.” The switch to the common app was part of that, I’ve heard of professors refer to the new undergrads as “common app” students. I also don’t see how the university wants to get rid of its “fun goes to die” rep when it is still located in Hyde Park, where the streets are absolutely deserted by 8pm on weekends.
Also, I always thought with test scores, it wasn’t necessarily the higher you scored the better your chances of getting accepted, but as long as you got over a certain score (like, 1400 on the old scale), you were ok, and it was all the other things you did. Like, a student with stellar extra-curriculars and a 1400 would have a better chance than a student with a 1600 and very little else.
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bj
ps. another problem with the new marketing is the fun happy undergrads are outnumbered by the bitter, life-hating graduate students.
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But 95th percentile is not really in the running for Duke, unless you are a recruited athlete, an underrepresented minority, or a development office case.
The middle 50% of Duke first-year students have SAT scores in the 90-98%ile. Their scores are actually a little lower than Chicago’s. I think 95%ile is definitely “in the running” for Duke.
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Hmm, well, maybe I am unduly pessimistic about the child’s chances at Duke. If so, I guess it is unfair of me to critize their marketing.
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