Public Montessori Programs Strengthen Learning Outcomes at Lower Costs: Study
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A study found that public Montessori programs have better learning outcomes at lower costs, but the discussion highlights concerns about the definition and implementation of Montessori, as well as potential biases and limitations of the study.
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https://www.pnas.org/action/downloadSupplement?doi=10.1073%2...
Talk of causation anywhere other than the unit of randomization is speculation.
>As shown in Figure S1, we began with a list of 588 public Montessori schools in the United States supplied by the National Center for Montessori in the Public Sector
>[procedural stuff, possibly introducing bias but not definitional]
>Finally, because “Montessori” is not a trademarked term, we checked whether schools met our minimum standards for Montessori inclusion
>- At least 66% of the lead Primary classroom teachers are trained by one of the two most prominent Montessori teacher training organizations, the Association Montessori Internationale (AMI) or the American Montessori Society (AMS). One school was excluded on this basis.
>- No more than two adults, the trained teacher and a non-teaching assistant, in the classroom on a regular basis. No school was excluded on this basis
>- Classrooms are mixed-age, with at least 18 children ranging from 3 to 6 years old. Five schools did not mix ages so were excluded.
>- At least a 2-hour uninterrupted free choice period every day. Five schools were excluded on this basis.
>- Each classroom has at least 80% of the complete set of roughly 150 Montessori Primary materials, and fewer than 5% of the materials available to children in the classroom are not Montessori materials. No school was excluded for failing to meet this criterion. [italics mine, furthermore, holy crap!]
I think one thing that is particularly noticeable is that, while there is definitely some particular form of education being put forward here which is interesting, there is obviously a very "aesthetic" trend as well, because plenty of schools are failing on the practices and the teachers while somehow none are failing the materials. But maybe this is actually just path-dependence in measuring the exclusion per criterion?
Also, this is just about preschool. For regular school, I've grown more skeptical, because it didn't work well for either of my kids. They struggled with the independence and planning, and didn't get much done. One switched to special education during primary school and is doing excellent there (but that has much more guidance and costs more, though I wish it was available for everybody), the other switched to a regular school during secondary school after almost failing to pass year after year despite his extraordinary intelligence. He's doing somewhat better now.
It's a good option to have, but it's quite likely the advantage is bigger for preschool than school.
Lower income families may not have been able to take advantage of the lottery due to distance constrains thus self-opting out.
I have not read the study methodology details, the schools may have been chosen to avoid this problem but just wanted to point out that just because something say "random lottery" it may not be.
You would need to have a second group of those who lost the lottery and were all put into the same non-Montessori school with no others who didn't opt-in maybe.
He's now finally getting better at it, at 16, which is about time, because at the university, you have to be able to do all of this. I sucked at it in university, so maybe it's actually good that he ran into these problems earlier than that, but for him to actually finish school, it was not a good fit.
> He's now finally getting better at it, at 16, which is about time, because at the university, you have to be able to do all of this.
You definitely don't.
American universities are pretty keen to graduate you if that's plausible at all. See also: remedial classes.
I compared Montessori and non Montessori labeled daycares/preschools for my 3 and 4 year olds, and was unable to discern a meaningful difference in the course of the day.
Edit: I ended up going with the daycare that had cameras (so that at least management could audit employees), and a livestream for the parents, which was at a non Montessori daycare. Staff turnover also seemed lower. Was more expensive, but have been happy with results.
The difference between these two, from my experience, is HUGE. Certified AMI schools, while a little more rigid in terms of teaching fine motor skills, generally have been better at making my kid more independent at doing things he likes to do. AMS schools are kind of wishy washy by comparison, and my kid was bored and under-engaged.
Once I asked some advocate of the method, what was it exactly; the reply was very good and detailed, but then I pointed out institutes that “follow” the method, which were nothing as what he described. From that point, it was a mess. “Well, you must not absolutely do it that way” “there are variations” etc. I was pretty dissatisfied with the description, and was clear that is not very well defined.
"The final implementation criteria for school inclusion were thus:
• At least 66% of the lead Primary classroom teachers are trained by one of the two most prominent Montessori teacher training organizations, the Association Montessori Internationale (AMI) or the American Montessori Society (AMS). One school was excluded on this basis.
• No more than two adults, the trained teacher and a non-teaching assistant, in the classroom on a regular basis. No school was excluded on this basis.
• Classrooms are mixed-age, with at least 18 children ranging from 3 to 6 years old. Five schools did not mix ages so were excluded.
• At least a 2-hour uninterrupted free choice period every day. Five schools were excluded on this basis.
• Each classroom has at least 80% of the complete set of roughly 150 Montessori Primary materials, and fewer than 5% of the materials available to children in the classroom are not Montessori materials. No school was excluded for failing to meet this criterion."
So seems like the criteria for this research is fairly good.
In general though it's hard to tell if a school is Montessori or not. The method is not trademarked and anyone can claim to be a Montessori school ,or Montessori inspired etc...
There are two organizations that certify - AMI, which was created by Maria Montessori's daughter and functions mostly in Europe, and AMS which is an American organization founded by people inspired by the Montessori method.
AMI is stricter while AMS is more modern, but most places that identify as Montessori is neither.
I would say the best way to identify if a school is Montessori is first if they have mixed-age classrooms, the standard is a 3 year class (so 1-3, 4-6, 7-9...).
If all the kids in a class are in the same age, it's not Montessori.
Second, for preschool, you expect the class to be very organized with intermittent shelves and work areas, and very neat (no mountain of toys etc...) - https://www.google.com/search?udm=2&q=montessori+classroom
Look for a school/teachers with AMI (Association Montessori Internationale) certification.
You can’t understand Google unless you know that both Larry and Sergey were Montessori kids. — Marissa Mayer
It is not like they were Abel and Gauss as impressionable tech workers seem to think.
So I don't see how special needs would bias the results. If the lottery excludes those with special needs (either by design or due to self-selection) then there's no bias between control group and treatment group. If the lottery doesn't exclude but the enrollment decision is biased by special needs, then it doesn't matter because they use ITT and not enrolment.
Big ticket items like a dedicated SPED department, or a professional working 1:1 with a student can be accounted for. But if a special needs child participates in a standard class (which they do) and the standard teacher needs to do more than average work to accommodate them; that cost is not earmarked for that specific student. Once the bean counters see it, it is just "teacher salary", which gets averaged out across all the students.
I only read up on the 'impact' part of the study's claim, not the 'lower cost' part. I thought you were talking about the impact part.
The cost part is obviously suspect, for the reason you stated. It is so obviously suspect that I had subconsciously 'tuned it out'!
That doesn't necessarily mean the result will extrapolate, though. It seems plausible that teachers in Montessori schools are more motivated and knowledgeable than the average teacher and have made a conscious decision to teach in such a school. If every public school were to become a Montessori school, you would still get the cost savings (student-to-teacher ratios are higher in Montessori!) but you might lose that above-average enthusiasm and expertise and so the learning gains might not carry over. It's just really hard to know whether something might generalize in the educational sciences.
yes, but montessori training can be done in one year (if you do it fulltime, my wife did i over multiple years 2 or 3 months each summer)), and it is entirely child focused. very different from traditional teacher training.
if we assume that every teacher starts their training with some amount of enthusiasm then the difference in enthusiasm and even more so in expertise should be minimal.
We accept that different colleges (and other post-secondary training) at different cost points serve different populations.
We somehow do not accept the same idea for secondary or primary education. Why not improve educational outcomes for some of the population?
Different levels of Montessori authenticity make the results even more impressive. They do have some inclusion criteria, like 2/3 of the teachers must be AMI/AMS certified but even so I'd expect a lot of these public school montessori programs to be less "true montessori" than what you'd get at a fully certified AMI/AMS school.
Who cares? It's not about me or someone else (or you), it's about the issues at hand. If the commenter wants to make a claim, they are welcome to.
People on HN can't read a study without finding one of the few methodological flaws they are aware of - as if that's some form of serious analysis.
Indeed there's all kinds of Montessori.
I can vouch for my daughter's .
If anybody wants to give it a go, my benchmarks are:
1) find reviews of parents, especially no abuse, shouting, kids in the last year should LOVE the place.
2) observe even for few minutes a class in their focus time -- you will feel almost shocked if you haven't seen this before -- like you entered Santa's workshop -- children should be deeply engaged in their activities. If you haven't seen it before you might suspect abuse (that's why point 1 is so important), no way kids love to wipe the floors, lay tables, prepare food and so on, but they actually do.
And all that done in almost complete silence.
Proper Montessori with good, empathetic, dedicated educators is amazing!
So, sadly, they weren't able to directly compare 'public Montessori PK3' with 'public non-Montessori PK3'.
That doesn't change the fact that the title and article (which is all that most people will read) paints that as comparing public Montessori preschool vs public non-Montessori preschool.
But that's not what it's doing!
The baseline condition was NOT one where everyone had access to a public PK3 as a fallback if they didn't win the lottery.
Think you mean to say that if you are well be enough to send your child to a private school...I try not to pull out the "privilege" card but good grief.
My parents cared enough to find ways to get me into private schools on grants and scholarships.
My neighbors had just as many if not more opportunities to do so but did not care enough to do so for their children.
Yes, it’s caring. Education as a top priority for poor families is the number one way a parent can give their kid a better life than they had. Most do not even try.
This is a similar but separate effect. Rich, uncaring parents can raise unachieving idiots.
It’s easier to be caring with resources. But plenty of public school difference-in-outcome studies have found a signal from parental participation that I believe remained after adjusting for income.
There's a dilemma here, because in order to find ways to improve education, we have to try stuff, right? But how do we remedy the situation when those experiments fail? That's less related to the Montessori thing, but it's interesting to think about.
Or worse, know we need a remedy when no one is even checking for success or failure?
Thankfully the US is well on its way to dismantling the Department of Education. So no stuffy bureaucrats getting in the way /s
You're exactly right, though. OLPC failed mostly because it didn't think to teach the teachers how to use the laptops as classroom tools (not that they would have succeeded otherwise). Countries that had the infrastructure to do the onboarding themselves were relatively well-set up to teach their kids anyway.
If this is interesting to you, I highly recommend Morgan Ames' The Charisma Machine.
seems they missed that figuring out the laptop and integrating it into the curriculum are two different things.
i read your post btw, one thing i am wondering about is that you wrote that countries didn't improve electricity in schools because OLPC claimed that this wasn't necessary.
my own speculation is that they simply didn't enough research and didn't expect that the situation would be so bad. it is also my understanding that the hand crank was dropped early because the laptop could not handle the physical stress of cranking, it would break apart. but then a separate hand crank charger was eventually produced after all: https://wiki.laptop.org/go/Peripherals/Hand_Crank but if i did the math right then it would still take an hour to charge the battery with that.
since there was no hand crank the need for electricity was already well known before any deployment, and part of the deployment efforts included improving the electricity infrastructure.
Oh yeah, they had their heads miles up their own asses. That's absolutely a major part of the story. Idealism led to hubris.
The hand crank is a big part of the story, though its role is more complicated than you might expect. It wasn't a silver bullet. Some developing nations, like Paraguay, had decent electrical infrastructure, but their OLPC deployments still went poorly due to lack of training and lack of maintenance/repair programs.
Also, it takes very basic physics to prove that the hand crank could never have been the silver bullet in the first place. My math in the essay agrees that no child-operated hand crank was ever going to be sensible.
Almost 100% pass rate to college, mostly the best colleges. Did the education provided there affect this? Likely, but it was much more the self selection of having the best students that were doing a SAT like test to get in.
Which should make no sense because the teachers themselves work odd years in one school, even years in the other school.
Peers make a huge difference. Before university, I split my high school between two schools - one that was near the top academically, and one that was quite poor. The latter did have some smart students intellectually, but almost none did well academically because it wasn't valued by their peers.
Then I went to a very average state university for undergrad, and a top school for graduate studies. The difference wasn't that high in terms of teaching (the average school actually had much better teachers, but offset it by low expectations). The real difference was in the peers.
You like engineering? You like coding? Want to do some cool side project? Very hard to find someone like you in that average university.
Then when I started working, I started tutoring some middle school kids. The kids seemed totally capable mentally, and I was trying to figure out how they can't retain simple facts like number of months in a year. Until finally it hit me. They don't have problems learning things. It's just that no one in their orbit (peers or parents) care if they know these things. When I was a kid, I'd be an idiot amongst my fellow students if I didn't know it. So I did. Everyone did.
But if you're around people who think it's OK not to know how many days are in a year, chances are you won't know it, no matter how intelligent you are.
I strongly believe that peers are important and choosing school based on the type of peers is a valid choice. As another (more positive) example, we live in HK in a multilingual family (I speak French, my wife speaks Cantonese), my son goes to an international school in English and Mandarin. Most of his classmates speak at least 2 languages, many speak 3. In that environment, it's easy for my son to see value in speaking multiple languages and he's never rejected one language. I have a friend whose daughter is in France in a monolingual school where her peers don't value speaking multiple languages. As a result she's ashamed and refuses to speak Cantonese.
Or maybe Cantonese is less fashionable in France than French is in Hong Kong?
The finding here is, competitive parents have an impact on the college approval rates of their children. Get them to all send their kids to the same school, that school gets better approval rates, regardless of the teachers.
Rudolf Steiner would say all that early learning is harmful and they should have been playing and imagining spiritual things.
What would those be and how do we measure them?
There are studies that show Montessori students tend to have better executive function, better working memory, and no significant difference in creativity. I'm not aware of any that look at lifetime income or anything like that.
I would really like to see an extension of this learning method up through high school --- the closest thing I'm aware of was a school I attended in Mississippi for a couple of years --- classes were divided between academic and social, social classes (homeroom, phys ed, social studies, &c.) were attended at one's age, while academic classes (reading, math, science, geography, history, &c.) were by ability (with a limit on no more than 4 grades ahead up to 8th grade) --- after 8th grade that was removed and students were allowed to take any classes.
Some of the faculty were accredited as faculty at a local college, and where warranted, either professors travelled from there to the school, or students travelled to the college for classes --- it wasn't uncommon for students to graduate high school and simultaneously be awarded a college degree.
Apparently, the system was deemed unfair because it accorded a benefit to the students who were able to take advantage of it, with no commensurate compensation for those who were not, so the Miss. State Supreme Court dismantled it.
Which families tend to win the lottery to go to these schools? The parents that can afford to. Even if the school is free, the transportation is often not. Plus the parents have to have enough free time to be aware of the lottery for their 3 year old.
(disclaimer: my wife got accredited by AMI)
There exist various implementations of Montessori. AMI was founded by Dr. Montessori [0] and certifies schools so that parents can have some assurance of adherence to a standard. The many materials in a Montessori classroom, including things that look like a dollhouse, don't exist for unstructured play but are learning tools for the guide and student to use in their work. Once the student gets a lesson using a material, then they can choose to practice using the material in their self-directed work periods, which can be in groups.
My kids had a mostly positive mixed experience in Montessori. In addition to evaluating how a child comes to grip with the method, there is also how they work with their guide. My observation is that even skilled practitioners don't always achieve a strong rapport with every student. In those situations the Montessori classroom's weakness is that there is only one guide for all subjects as opposed to a traditional school's subject-specific teachers.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_Montessori_Interna...
This is very much dependent on the school (and probably age of the students). At the one my kids go to, as soon as they’re in 1st grade, they have multiple teachers: science, music (which doubles as theater - the entire school does an annual play), art, and P.E., in addition to their main teacher.
which tradition is that? in my country subject-specific teachers don't appear until middle school. so that's a rather moot point for kindergarten and primary school.
This isn't a hardset rule. We had the main teacher but we also had specific teachers as well for stuff like music, art, languages, or gym class. By middleschool there was no more "main" teacher. You were basically in a committee of teachers all specific including science, english, and history by that point. Part of that I'm sure was to prepare you for highschool in a non montessori setting.
We enrolled her at the local Montessori and she rushed to the map section but was told she is forbidden from using it until she takes the lesson on that or whatever is called. That lesson was 2-3 months away, and meanwhile all other kids were able to play with the maps.
This, combined with other rigidities and a crazy schedule totally unsuited for working parents (9-1pm wtf) made it impossible. After struggling a lot for two months, she went back to her old daycare and was very happy there, and is now at her elementary school now
Part of this is, I think, to teach responsibility; for example, if a student gets a work out, they’re expected to put it back exactly how they found it. Montessori classrooms are incredibly well-organized, with everything having its (labeled) place.
Oh man… survivorship bias thinking is dangerous.
Disagree that this means the probabilistic signal is negative. They did become especially capable psychos.
But in hindsight I could tell it depends heavily on the teachers as well as the students you are saddled with because of how much group stuff there is. There was clear divisions between the kids who would reliably do their work and the kids who procrastinated and played around flicking pencils at eachother all day. This was generally possible while the main classroom teacher was busy with some subset of students for a lesson or some other work.
Once we got access to desktop computers we replaced the pencil flicking all day with games. They'd be in the main classroom but we'd just turn the crt monitors to the side to hide it. This was long before IT surveillance tools, we had full internet access too. Gameboys a plenty.
There was a lot of fluid experimentation however. At one point we took all the shelving in the room and turned it in such a way to create sort of cubicles. I think the idea was to get the kids who probably had ADHD to lock in and do their work more vs being tempted to socialize and screw around all day with their friends. Eventually they banned us from turning the CRT monitors as well.
Would a more rigid school structure help other kids? Sure, probably, but I don't think what public school was doing would have helped those kids much. Honestly montessori is a lot like the adult working world now that I am in that and see the parallels. A lot less handholding and you needing to not give into procrastination and ask mentors for individual direction from time to time. Group work and discussion coupled with independent work. Project based education that is more like actual real life work projects vs the dry lecture/memorize/exam patterns. That being said it was more "traditional" and less montessori towards the end as they had to prepare you for a proper highschool setup, so more formally scheduled classes and a lot less free time in the main classroom.
it would seem that some groups in your class could have benefited from more teacher attention. or maybe from mixing up the groups.
understandable, but actually a problem that should to be counteracted. it's not really healthy if the same kids always work together because it leads to building cliques. ad you don't want that in a school. it also causes kids that don't fit in any group to be excluded.
Wow that sounds terrible. My mother used to have me sit in silence at the dining room table to try to get me to do my homework. My god, so much noise. Libraries are similar. People adjusting on a chair, pages turning, pens dropping, car doors outside, eating.... There are just so many freaking little noises. I'd rather have a wall of noise so I can't pick out the distractions and work on whatever I was working on. (Not that it always worked, but I had a chance).
I would say the same of the public high school that I attended. The attitude of the teachers and the other students was fantastic, and it really helped propel me forward in life, gave me a ton of lessons that I don't think most people were able to take from their own public high schools.
In both cases, my parents (Mom especially) were so incredibly stubborn about finding the best school for their kids. We literally moved the whole family to the town that had the best public school where my parents could afford a single family home. Love you Mom, thank you for caring, and to all other parents I would strongly advise against picking a school based on its philosophy. The quality of teacher matters much more than anything else.
I myself went to shitty public schools and became an exceptional student later on. I am doubtful about the impact of early education on future success.
I do recall there being a lot of toys and stuff. There was an old Texas Instruments computer that caught my interest as we had computers with Windows 95 at my school. Apparently nobody was allowed to touch it though.
My guess is the best school for your kids is one where they're safe and one with curious and motivated kids and enthusiastic teachers that can help inspire and unlock talent. The method is secondary, but kids should be both challenged and given some amount of freedom to explore. It also helps if the parents care and ensure their kids are functioning members of society.
the montessori method is designed to achieve exactly that. so the method matters because it enables children to become like that.
Not everyone can afford to have one parent stay at home, but those who can should try it out. Most of the time there’s online curricula that can be followed and the course work can be completed in a fraction of the time vs learning in a public school. This leads to more time for extracurriculars and give more time for social interaction.
p.s. I’ve been joking that soon you won’t be able to take your kid anywhere without a montessori/waldorf/reggio franchise.
My son's school is AMI accredited and at least there's not much woo-woo here. Children have to be up to date with vaccination (or they're not admitted), only thing slightly woo-woo (from the local point of view) is that the parents who chose this school chose it because they want their kid to have more of a play-based, child directed education and don't want them to have homework and tuition in kindergarten. This is in HK where a lot of children going to public schools will have homework and will get tuition in order to prepare for the primary school entrance exam (and later to the middle school entrance exam).
On the other hand, Waldorf is fully woo-woo. They claim that children should not be taught to read before they get their first adult teeth and have a bunch of very weird racist myth about reincarnation (read up on anthroposophy)
Yea Steiner is woo-woo but so what? Most people are woo-woo (religion) and perhaps old Rudolf realized it has some value in human development. The specific details of the woo hardly matter.
As I see it, the main values of Steiner are the close community and the not forcing them to do logical thinking in Piaget's preoperational stage (before 7 years old), which Rudolf seems to have interpreted as play-play-play all day-day-day, but that might be fine.
To be fair, I also wouldn't put my kid in a religious school :) But yes, I agree there's some good ideas with waldorf. Personally though if I had been told when I was a kid not read before 7, I would have been rather pissed off.
A close family member of mine has taught Montessori for 30 years at the same school. The school has changed a lot in those 30 years (for the worse, unfortunately), but it’s nothing to do with the education methods and everything to do with broader trends in the area.
I grew up attending a public elementary school in Sacramento that implemented Open Education. It had many similarities to Montessori— kids received a weekly “contract” with their personalized learning plan and assignments due. If you wanted to do all your math work on Monday, reading on Tuesday, and spend Wednesday through Friday on science, you could (within reason since some things required group lessons). It was an amazing system and I feel extremely fortunate to have experienced it.
That said, now I kind of wonder how much the California open-minded, seeker mentality was responsible for this.
https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/03/27/520953343/open-sc...
I see a lot of sentiment along the line of "quality over philosophy" -- how can we evaluate quality? There is limited data available[1]. What do we ask the school when we visit them?[2]
[1]: Unsure if standardised test scores really matter at a young age, so we're grasping for straws with "fraction of parents with tertiary education" (higher means children have more progressive views?) and "fraction of girls in each class" (higher means calmer classrooms?).
[2]: I don't know how to evaluate schools so my best ideas are to ask about staff retention (is it a tolerable environment?), how they evaluate that they get the desired effects out of efforts (do they do things purposefully?), etc.
If looking at Montessori, check for certifications. Are they AMI or AMS certified? Those are the two most serious qualifications. If they are not certified, then I think you should be sceptical. Not being certified doesn't mean that the school is necessarily bad but there's a lot of school that trade on Montessori just for marketing purposes and it doesn't bode well for the quality of education when the owner is willing to mislead parents by claiming they're Montessori when they don't try to become certified.
Within alternative schools, Regio Emilia can be good but, from my experience, it's even more dependent on the teacher since there's less structure and it falls on the teacher to take children's input and guide the class toward interesting discussion and group projects. My son went to a Regio Emilia pre-nursery (2 to 3 years old, 2 hours a day) and didn't like it as much as he likes his current Montessori kindergarten. He complains anytime there's a public holiday because he would like to go to school.
I recommend against Waldorf because even though they have some aspects that look good (nature, play based), the underlying philosophy is bat-shit crazy.
Resources if you're interested: - Montessori: The Science behind the Genius by Angeline S. Lillard. Rather academic discussion on the different elements of Montessori education and what studies and research supports it. It's interesting if you're interested in education. I do think that sometimes the author is a bit biased and tries to stretch the meaning of studies to fit her preconceived notion that everything Montessori related is the best thing since sliced bread. In particular, within Montessori there's a weird belief that fantasy elements (like stories with talking animals, etc) are not suitable for children below 6 because they can't reliably distinguish between fantasy and reality. It's something I personally disagree with and the studies that she tries to use to support that point are not really that convincing. - Cribsheet by Emily Oster has a chapter on picking pre-schools that can be useful (and I think applies well to Kindergarten). (I don't always agree with that writer but I do feel that she sometimes has useful points of view)
We read a lot with our son who is almost 3 now. In the book it is recommended not to introduce fantasy in books until 6 (when apparently children suddenly understand the difference between fantasy and reality). I assume this is an original Montessori teaching.
Anyone who knows childrens books knows they are around 95% fantasy stories containing anthropomorphized animals (and some cars/trains/planes).
As far as i can tell our son knows the difference between what we read in books and the real world, and has done for a while. The things we read in books we discuss while reading. In the real world we discuss real world things. He has never shown behavior that would suggest these are mixed up in his head.
Maybe I misunderstand their point around fantasy/reality. But the seems so obviously wrong to me that I would be cautious about the rest of their teachings. Which does seem to contain some good advice.
Is it true that younger children have a harder time making the distinction than older children? Yes that's true. There's research that shows it. But does that necessarily mean that removing exposure to fantasy in stories is beneficial? And would a child exposed to fantasy not learn to distinguish between make belief and reality earlier? There's actually some research that shows that [1]
So while there's a lot I love about my son's school, the stance on fantasy is something I vehemently disagree with. What's interesting though is that most parents in my son's class will happily read fantasy books with anthropomorphised animals, talk about Santa Claus, etc... and completely disregard the idea that fantasy shouldn't be introduced. Officially, we can't give books with fantasy stories to the school library but last time I went to read to children there, 20-30% of the stories had clear fantasy elements.
If you're interested about the rest of Montessori ideas, it's interesting to read "Montessori: The Science Behind the Genius" by Angeline Lillard. She tries to go through most of the Montessori teachings and justify it with existing studies etc... For most part, she finds studies that are relevant and solid but not for the part of fiction where you can really feel that she struggles to justify her own bias.
[1]
- https://www.alisongopnik.com/Papers_Alison/Walker%20Gopnik%2... for a survey of research on that. It shows that fantasy is both beneficial and that children can start distinguishing between fantasy and reality.
- https://liberalarts.mercer.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/20... Do monsters dream? Young children’s understanding of the fantasy/reality distinction
that doesn't seem fair. the reality is complicated. i found this paper which talks about this issue: i just briefly skimmed it, but it suggests that the older kids get the better they can make the distinction:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3689871/
generalizing that into a single statement from which age fantasy is fine is difficult if not impossible. as a parent, i wouldn't worry, but as an educator i need to be more cautious because such recommendations tend to be taken seriously, and therefore it is reasonable to err on avoiding fantasy for younger kids.
kids thinking they can fly are a risk: https://slate.com/advice/2025/08/parenting-advice-daughter-i...
and therefore such advice is more defensive than to be taken as a hard rule that must not be crossed.
The rest of the time had loose guidelines on what to do (like you should read X pages of any book in the library) or you were free to do/play with what you wanted once that stuff was done.
We were largely encouraged to do things in a group. I think the only place to even sit alone if you wanted was the book nook, everything else was communal tables.
I really enjoyed it, and was ahead to the point of being bored when I switched to public schools. I tried for like a week in 5th grade and they were covering geographic features I'd already done back in 2nd or 3rd grade (archipelagos and islets and what not).
https://law.justia.com/codes/mississippi/title-37/chapter-15...
he said it was dismantled. teacher's unions and their political allies and pliant schoolboards are always vehemently opposed to any programs like this. something that shows some students excelling and or makes some teachers look good just makes other teachers look bad, and that raises questions and increases scrutiny from outside, and they can't allow that.
My issue with this is that it just is selection bias, telling you nothing about how good the method is at teaching.
Does placing by ability actually helps student learn and score better? Or it's just that those who are good and bad already get divided up, and we know not why some are good and others are worse?
Yes, you shunt all the disruptive/obstinate kids into class 2 and they can spend 4 hours of math lessons every week rehashing arguments about how they have a phone so they don't need to know what 7x12 is.
This means the students in class 1 get undisrupted classes, learning more and raising their grades.
Because of the way these things are done, it does have the unfortunate side effect that the kid who struggles with math because he's dyslexic gets put in a class with the kid who doesn't give a shit about math. But they'd be in the same even if the school didn't place by ability, so they're not that much worse off.
That's pure hypothetical, and some disruptive kids are also good and could make it to the top class and still be a class clown. Unless you propose more splitting kids up by "disruptiveness".
I don't think any of this tells us of the quality of the method for actually teaching. It's like schools that have really hard entrance exams, and than assert they are the best school, yes in terms that they only allowed the smartest to come in, off course they will see that the students at the school is good, but those students would be good regardless.
It's pure hypothesis that this would coincide with less disruption in classes, even more that it would be causative.
I also find it purely hypothetical that it does anything to make kids better.
You said lack of disruptiveness is associated with better outcomes, have any research or data about it? Otherwise it too is pure hypothetical.
A hypothesis isn't bad, but since we're on the topic of ability, let's not devolve into cargo cults.
You could spend 2 minutes googling to see it's a well known / understood phenomenon. I would also argue it's common sense. Ask a teacher.
https://docs.iza.org/dp17539.pdf
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02727...
https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/33186/...
https://anjalipverma.github.io/files/Disruptive%20Interactio...
https://ideas.repec.org/r/wil/wilehe/52.html
I'm not going to say being in a class where you are trying to pay attention and others are being very disruptive, and interrupt the lesson is enjoyable, it's annoying, but if you take even the studies you link, say the second link, it finds a 2% correlated effect, that is peers had scores 0.02 times lower than the standard deviation.
So if we were to change and group kids based on disruptiveness, instead of a 80% test core, your kid would have a 79.7% test score...
Now before you respond to this, I want to reiterate the point of my argument, that none of these ideas focus on actual teaching method improvements. How do you take a child at any level, and more effectively teach them so they learn faster and improve their intelligence and knowledge.
These alternatives, grouped by disruptiveness, grouped by current abilities, etc. they don't really change the pedagogy, just the environment. It seems their known effects are really small, and the effect on the average are not known.
So I'm not against them, as just from a pure setup they seem more appropriate, but it seems unlilely to result in much improvement learning wise, the kind that I'd be interested in.
Too many kids are just completely lost because they were moved up to the next math class despite not understanding the previous math class.
Absolutely, how many ghetto kids are in the school? It weeds them out through $ and expulsions.
Thinking the Montessori system is relevant to the public system shows your schooling failed.
Montessori has the ability to chose pedagogy so certainly has facets that are the quite good and should be applied publicly except for liberal arts graduate ideals.
This study is very young children, limited pregnancies and gang bangers, and also not random. It's randomised on kids who enter the lottery.
Discipline is the only thing that matters in schools, $, class sizes, teacher education levels above average, amazing resources all don't matter except how it apply to discipline. We have 100+ years of data. Air-conditioning to control behavior is an example of what helps. Liberal arts graduates destroy anything else that could work so don't interact with them, stay outside their broken world.
I thought it was parenting? This study claims that "parental involvement is a more significant factor in a child’s academic performance than the qualities of the school itself." [0]
I couldn't find better sources on my phone but this is a theme I've heard repeated over and over throughout my life. Parenting makes the difference.
[0] https://news.ncsu.edu/2012/10/wms-parcel-parents/
Got a citation/link?
I came to comment (without reading it) that the study results are probably not universal. The programs are self selecting because kids not suited for it won't stay. This is not a critique of the program or the kids who dont fit it. Just an observation that its so "extreme" that only kids who benefit will stay.
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