In D.C., Where Universal Free Preschool Is Becoming the Norm

By LAURA MOSER

Last winter, my husband and I almost moved back to Brooklyn with our only child. We got as far as hiring movers and boxing up our home. Instead, we stayed in Washington, D.C., and achieved my long-nagged-at dream of having child No. 2. A big reason for this turnaround? Universal preschool.

Not just pre-K for 4-year-olds, as in Oklahoma’s widely praised program, or for poor children, as President Obama has proposed. Preschool that is (at least theoretically) for everyone, starting at age 3. That’s what we get in D.C.: five days a week, for nearly 10 months a year, from 8 a.m. to 3:15 p.m., my taxes pay for my toddler’s education.

We live on Capitol Hill, which has one of the greatest concentrations of elementary schools in the District, and I often wonder if my neighbors appreciate our luck. Who else has the luxury of sending a 3-year-old to school free? Still, every spring, when the preschool lottery results come in, the listserv explodes with parents raging about their 3-year-old’s not getting into their top-choice or in-bounds school. God forbid they have to drive 18 blocks to the closest acceptable charter school!

Hello? I want to reply to every “Waitlist Woes” subject heading. Just across the river in Virginia, Loudoun County recently put off implementing full-day kindergarten. And while it’s true that there still aren’t enough spots for every 3-year-old in the District, the summit is certainly in sight. This spring, only about 66 percent of applicants received a spot in District of Columbia Public Schools’ early-childhood program, but there are an additional 65 charter schools with 3-year-old classes. In my empirical experience, if you can drive, and you’re open to a less-competitive program, you can almost always find a spot.

A year later, I still haven’t gotten over how remarkable that is. When you have young children, it’s hard to imagine a time when you won’t spend much of your income on rearing them. There are the diapers and the gear and the batteries for all those educational toys, but mostly there’s the child care. The income-halving, savings-draining, vacation-precluding child care.

But what if the years of shelling out those outrageous sums were three instead of five? Trust me, it’s a big difference. For three months this fall, between my 3-year-old’s move to public school and the birth of my second child, I remembered what the term “disposable” meant when preceded by “income.”

That’s why we did it — to save money. Despite misgivings about uprooting our son from his fancy federal day-care center, we gave the D.C. public school a chance partly because the facilities were nicer, partly because the commute was nonexistent, but mostly because it was free.

Unexpectedly, another big benefit soon emerged: My son was learning much more at preschool than he had at day care. That’s because — surprise, surprise — his public-school teachers are exponentially better educated and (see any causality here?) far better compensated. The average starting salary for a D.C.P.S. elementary-school teacher, even at the early-childhood level, is just over $50,000. The average salary of a day-care provider is $19,300.

I’d cringe through the misspellings and grammatical errors riddling the “My Day” reports from day care, where only one teacher I knew of had a bachelor’s degree. My son’s D.C.P.S. teacher is close to getting her master’s, and she tosses off terms like “phonemic awareness” between reminding the students not to insert live spiders into their nostrils.

The diversity of the school has also been instructive. The 3-year-old classes are about half-African-American, half-white, with some Hispanics and Asians here and there — a solid introduction, for my half-Jewish quarter-Indian offspring, to America in the Age of Obama. Parents are cancer researchers and vet techs and government lawyers and aspiring fireworks-stand operators. Some kids at the school live in million-dollar row houses; some live in homeless shelters.

While these disparities have stirred some tensions among the adults, the kids have taken no notice, or not yet anyway. And though I’d always liked my fellow day-care parents’ high-powered Ivy-burnished résumés, I like even more how comfortably my now-4-year-old can talk about race in a neighborhood that was all but burned to the ground during the 1968 riots.

I know that universal preschool wasn’t started for families like mine. D.C. instituted it for the same reasons President Obama proposed it: to close the so-called achievement gap, and to prepare low-income children to enter kindergarten on the same level as their higher-income counterparts.

I also understand that with or without preschool, my son still has long-term educational advantages over his classmate who had never seen the letter “J” before starting school. Will those extra two years in school improve that child’s prospects in life? I’m not such a liberal fantasist to claim preschool will make all the difference. But from what I’ve observed of his progress at pickup, it certainly hasn’t hurt.

It hasn’t hurt my cohort, either. In the day-to-day, paycheck-to-paycheck calculations that we working parents are constantly performing, free school from age 3 makes life a lot easier. Without it, my husband never would’ve consented to child No. 2.

As we push the stroller around the Hill, I point out how many professional families have three children — far more than in any of the other expensive urban centers where we’ve lived. “It’s all because of the free preschool,” I say. “If you’re only paying for child care for three years per child, it’s way more reasonable to consider a third.”

My husband always shakes his head balefully: “Do NOT get any ideas.”

---

Laura Moser is a ghostwriter and the co-author of four young-adult novels. She writes frequently for the Off Duty section of The Wall Street Journal. You can join her scanty followers on Twitter: @lcmoser.

UMass Amherst study finds daytime naps enhance learning in preschool children

Published: Tuesday, September 24, 2013 - 10:34 in Psychology & Sociology

Related images
(click to enlarge)

UMass Amherst

Sleep researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst today offer the first research results showing that classroom naps support learning in preschool children by enhancing memory. Children who napped performed significantly better on a visual-spatial task in the afternoon after a nap and the next day than those who did not nap. Research psychologist Rebecca Spencer, with students Kasey Duclos and Laura Kurdziel, say their results suggest naps are critical for memory consolidation and early learning, based on their study of more than 40 preschool children. "Essentially we are the first to report evidence that naps are important for preschool children," Spencer says. "Our study shows that naps help the kids better remember what they are learning in preschool." Results appear in the current issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

With an increase in publicly funded preschools, parents and administrators have questioned the usefulness of the naps. "There is increased public funding for preschools and increased enrollments in preschools due to a surge of research showing the long-term health and educational benefits of early education. But there was no research on napping so they were a target for elimination in order to make more time for more learning. We offer scientific evidence that the midday naps for preschoolers support the academic goals of early education."

For this study, Spencer and colleagues recruited 40 children from six preschools across western Massachusetts. The researchers taught children a visual-spatial task similar to the game "Memory" in the mornings. In this game, children see a grid of pictures and have to remember where different pictures are located. Each child participated in two conditions.

In one condition, the children were encouraged to nap during their regular classroom nap opportunity. Naps lasted an average of 77 minutes as recorded by observers in the classroom. In the second condition, children were kept awake for the same amount of time. Memory for the game was tested after the nap and wake conditions and again the following day to see whether nighttime sleep affected performance.

Children forgot significantly more item locations on the memory test when they had not taken a nap (65 percent accuracy), compared to when they did nap (75 percent accuracy). Thus following a nap, children recalled 10 percent more of the test locations than when they had been kept awake.

"While the children performed about the same immediately after learning in both the nap and wake conditions, the children performed significantly better when they napped both in the afternoon and the next day," the authors summarize. "That means that when they miss a nap, the child cannot recover this benefit of sleep with their overnight sleep. It seems that there is an additional benefit of having the sleep occur in close proximity to the learning."

To explore the effect of sleep stages and whether memories were actively processed during the nap, the researchers recruited an additional 14 preschoolers who came to a sleep lab and had polysomnography, a record of biophysiological changes, during their average 73-minute naps. Here Spencer and colleagues noted a correlation between sleep spindle density, that is activity associated with integrating new information, and the memory benefit of sleep during the nap.

"Until now, there was nothing to support teachers who feel that naps can really help young children. There had been no concrete science behind that," the neuroscientist says. "We hope these results will be by policy makers and center directors to make educated decisions regarding the nap opportunities in the classrooms. Children should not only be given the opportunity, they should be encouraged to sleep by creating an environment which supports sleep."

The authors call for preschools to develop napping guidelines and further research on how to protect and promote naptime for young children to enhance their learning.

Source: University of Massachusetts at Amherst

‘An Education in Equality’

By Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson

An Education in Equality: Filmed over 13 years, this short film presents a coming-of-age story of an African-American boy who attends an elite Manhattan prep school.

By JOE BREWSTER and MICHÈLE STEPHENSON

Published: September 23, 2013 7 Comments

• FACEBOOK
• TWITTER
• GOOGLE+
• SAVE
• E-MAIL
• SHARE
• PRINT
• REPRINTS
• 

When our son Idris was 4 years old, he was accepted to the Dalton School, a prestigious private school in Manhattan. Idris would become one of only a few black boys in a kindergarten class of about 90 students, where tuition rivaled that of private colleges. We decided to document this new world, following Idris over 13 years through graduation. (The story of Idris and one of his close friends became our feature-length documentary “American Promise,” from which this Op-Doc video is adapted.) What began as an exploration of diversity in New York’s elite private-school world grew into a story that touches on larger themes of identity, race and class in American society.

A forum for short, opinionated documentaries, produced with creative latitude by independent filmmakers and artists.

• About Op-Docs | How to Submit »
• View Related Videos »

Connect With Us on Twitter

For Op-Ed, follow@nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow@andyrNYT.

Readers’ Comments

Share your thoughts.

• Post a Comment »
• Read All Comments (2) »

In this Op-Doc video, we have tried to encapsulate the journey of our son — a boy who comes of age with many privileges and many challenges — as well as our own. We sought to protect Idris from the African-American male achievement gap in education, where boys like him, regardless of their socioeconomic status, are confronted with experiences that affect their academic performance, as compared to their white counterparts. Among these are negative perceptions (which some researchers call “implicit bias”) about black boys’ capabilities in the classroom. There are also more direct threats, like the fear of being “stopped and frisked” by the police, or being stared at on the streets of the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Idris also faced our own anxieties, as we worried about his academic performance. And he faced pressure near home in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, an economically and racially diverse neighborhood where children criticized him for “speaking like a white boy” as a result of attending Dalton.

Over time, our son grew more comfortable navigating his two worlds. And we became more comfortable with the above challenges. Dalton evolved as well: in 2013, nearly 50 percent of the entering kindergarten class comes from minority (nonwhite) groups. But numbers alone are not enough. The work continues for all those involved in making sure education remains a tool for greater opportunity and success.

This video is part of a series by independent filmmakers who have received grants from the Ford Foundation and additional support from the nonprofit Sundance Institute.

Joe Brewster, trained as a physician, and Michèle Stephenson, trained as a lawyer, have produced and directed feature documentaries and narrative films. Their forthcoming documentary, “American Promise,” won a Special Jury Award at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and will be broadcast on the PBS series POV in 2014.

HGSE Announces Fall 2013 Askwith Forums

The Harvard Graduate School of Education is pleased to announce its fall 2013 Askwith Forums, a series of public lectures dedicated to discussing challenges facing education, sharing new knowledge, and generating spirited conversation. Highlights this fall will include a discussion about online education with edX President Anant Agarwal; mindfulness in education with Jon Kabat Zinn, founding director of the Stress Reduction Clinic and Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society; and a look at The App Generation with Professor Howard Gardner and Katie Davis, Ed.M.’02, Ed.M.’09, Ed.D.’11, assistant professor at the University of Washington.

The Askwith Forums provide an opportunity for practitioners, policymakers, and researchers to share their work, talk with one another, and advance proven practices that will improve learning opportunities for all children.

The complete fall schedule of events follows. (Please note that events may be changed or added. Please visit www.gse.harvard.edu/calendar/askwith.html for the most up-to-date information.)

September 16: Bringing the Civil Rights Struggle to Life for Today’s Students with Professor Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Harvard Law School and Harvard Graduate School of Arts & Sciences; Tonya Lewis Lee, co-producer, The Watsons Go to Birmingham; Professor Robert Selman; Randy Testa, Ed.M.’79, Ed.D.’90, vice president, Education and Professional Development, Walden Media, LLC. Moderated by Senior Lecturer Joe Blatt. Introduced by Dean James Ryan. 5 – 8 p.m.

October 1: edX: Reinventing Education with edX President Anant Agarwal, professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Introduced by Dean James Ryan. 5:30 – 7 p.m.

October 8: Innovations in Teaching with Professor Robert Kegan and Associate Professor Meira Levinson. Introduced by Dean James Ryan. 5:30 – 7 p.m. This event is part of Teaching and Learning Week at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

October 16: Jon Kabat Zinn: Mindfulness in Education with Jon Kabat Zinn, professor of medicine emeritus at University of Massachusetts Medical School and founding director of the Stress Reduction Clinic and Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society and the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Clinic. Welcome by Professor Jerry Murphy. Introduced by Metta McGarvey, Ed.D.’10. 5:30 – 7 p.m.

October 21: The App Generation with Professor Howard Gardner and Katie Davis, Ed.M.’02, Ed.M.’09, Ed.D.’11, assistant professor at the University of Washington. 7 – 8:30 p.m.

October 23: Transformative Change in American Schools with Michele Cahill, vice president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York national programs. Introduced by Professor Paul Reville. 5:30 – 7 p.m.

October 29: Harvard’s Crimson Summer Academy – A Path to College for Low-Income Students with Clayton Spencer, president of Bates College and founder of the Crimson Summer Academy. 5:30 – 7 p.m.

November 13: School Reform from the Outside In with Professor Paul Reville; Wendy Puriefoy, director of education of Barr Foundation; and Dan Challener, president of the Public Education Foundation. 5:30 – 7 p.m.

All forums are held in Askwith Hall at the Longfellow building on Appian Way in Cambridge, Mass. Forums are free and open to the public unless otherwise noted on the calendar description. Askwith Forums also will be live streamed on the HGSE website and archived events can be viewed on the Harvard Education YouTube channel. For an opportunity to win reserved seating tickets to Askwith Forums, please like HarvardEducation on Facebook or follow HGSE on Twitter.

The Askwith Forums were established in 1998 by the children and grandchildren of New York City public-relations consultant, writer, and publishing executive Herbert Askwith A.B.’(19)07.

Prominent speakers have included U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, historian Noam Chomsky, Children Defense Fund Founder Marian Wright Edelman, former U.S. Secretary of Defense Colin Powell, pop singer Lady Gaga, media mogul Oprah Winfrey, and Khan Academy Founder and Director Sal Khan.

Read more: http://www.gse.harvard.edu/news-impact/2013/09/hgse-announces-fall-2013-askwith-forums/#ixzz2flnDi2a3

Poverty Report by the Center for American Progress

The Top 3 Things You Need to Know About the New Poverty and Income Data

SOURCE: AP/Robert Ray

In this September 16, 2011 photo, Kris Fallon holds her 4-month-old daughter Addison, in Palatine, Illinois, as her 15-year-old son Gared looks on. The Fallon family has been living in poverty for nearly two years.

By Melissa Boteach | September 17, 2013

As Congress prepares for yet another fiscal showdown, new data released today by the U.S. Census Bureau should be a wake-up call that it is time to move away from a wrong-headed austerity agenda and pivot to a focus on creating jobs, boosting wages, and investing in family economic security.

The new data on poverty and income show that despite economic growth, there was no statistically significant improvement in the poverty rate or median household income in 2012.

Behind these topline numbers are data that contain real warning signs for American families and the overall economy if Congress continues down its current path.

Here are three things you need to know about the new data and how they affect the budget and policy choices before us:

1. Income inequality has widened since the end of the Great Recession.
2. Our safety net is working overtime to compensate for rising income inequality and the proliferation of low-wage work.
3. High poverty rates among young children of color have long-term implications for our economic competitiveness.

Let’s examine each trend and its implications for timely fiscal debates.

1. Income inequality has widened since the end of the Great Recession.

Since the end of the Great Recession, the wealthiest households have fully recovered—and even shown income gains—while middle-class and low-income families are still suffering from the lingering effects of the downturn with little to no improvement in their incomes.

While household incomes for the top 5 percent have grown 5.2 percent in the past three years, incomes for workers in the bottom fifth have seen their incomes fall by 0.8 percent, while middle-class incomes have fallen even more.

These latest data are consistent with a new analysis by inequality scholars Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, showing that the top 10 percent of earners in the United States brought in more than 50 percent of all income in 2012, the largest amount in nearly 100 years. In fact, in the first three years of the recovery, from 2009 to 2012, the top 1 percent captured 95 percent of income gains.

As the wealthiest households have captured a rising share of income, the share of Americans struggling to make ends meet has risen.

The poverty line does not adequately capture the number of Americans struggling to get by, and a threshold of two times the poverty line is more closely aligned with the estimated amount necessary for people to make ends meet. Using this measure, the share of people living in low-income households with incomes below twice the poverty line has risen by 12.1 percent from 30.5 percent in 2007 to 34.2 percent in 2012.

This disturbing trend is related in part to the explosion of low-wage and part-time work. In 2012, more than 40 percent of job growth took place in low-wage sectors such as hospitality, retail, and health and education services.[1] In addition, while the number of people who are involuntarily working part time decreased from 2011 to 2012, last year there were still 8.1 million people working part time even though they wanted full-time work.[2]

In this context, conservatives have taken the prospect of any additional revenue from the wealthiest Americans off the table even as they are proposing cuts to the very services that help struggling families scrape by as they navigate an economy that is not producing enough living-wage jobs. In the meantime, a national movement to raise the minimum wage is emerging, with fast-food workers mobilizing to demand a living wage to pull their families out of poverty.

2. Our safety net is working overtime to compensate for rising income inequality and the proliferation of low-wage work.

The good news in the data is that our safety net is making a difference in lifting families out of poverty and helping them meet basic needs.

If not for unemployment insurance, 1.7 million additional people would have been in poverty last year, and absent Social Security, nearly 15.3 million additional seniors would have lived in poverty, nearly quadrupling the senior poverty rate. While the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program is not taken into account in calculating the poverty rate, if it were counted as income, it would have lifted 4 million people out of poverty last year.[3]

The bad news is that our safety net is working harder than it should. Though a full employment economy and rising wages are the surest pathways out of poverty, our system of work and income supports provide vital assistance to help families make ends meet.

It is in this environment that conservatives are debating a Farm Bill that would kick 4 million to 6 million people off of nutrition aid and cost our economy 55,000 jobs as people cut back on their food spending.

3. We’re shortchanging our future workforce.

Low- and middle-income families have been slammed across age and demographic groups, but three years into the recovery, children are facing crisis levels of poverty—particularly very young children of color under the age of 5. In 2012, 42.5 percent of African American children under age 5 and 37.1 percent of Latino children under age 5,  lived in poverty.

Research into early childhood development has shown that this is a crucial time for cognitive development. The deprivation and toxic stress associated with persistent poverty can leave a lasting imprint on children’s brains and affect future educational and health outcomes, as well as worker productivity.

This is not only a moral issue; it represents a threat to our future economic competitiveness.Given that half of all births are now children of color, these high rates of poverty among our nation’s future workforce should spur us to invest in our nation’s children and end racial and ethnic disparities.

Unfortunately, our policy priorities are going in the opposite direction. First Focus’s annual “Children’s Budget” report finds that in 2013 alone, sequestration will cut $4.2 billion of funding for children concentrated in the areas of education, early learning, and housing, and Congress is considering a budget plan that would lock in or deepen these cuts for next year. This November, 22 million children will see a cut in their family’s nutrition assistance, and House Republicans are considering cuts to food aid that would drop more than 200,000 children from free school meals.

Conclusion

These data could not be timelier. They reveal an economy where the gains of economic growth are not reaching low- and middle-income families. They show structural threats to our economic competitiveness owing to high rates of poverty among young children of color—who would be badly hurt by Congress locking in or deepening the sequester cuts. And they show the effectiveness of programs such as nutrition assistance, even as House Republicans propose deep cuts to food aid.

It is time to reset the national debate. Austerity that exacerbates poverty and inequality is not the answer; we must focus on creating jobs, investing in family economic security, and promoting shared economic growth.

Melissa Boteach is the Director of the Poverty to Prosperity Program and Half in Ten at American Progress

Endnotes

[1] Author’s calculations based on Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Employment Statistics(U.S. Department of Labor, 2013), available at http://www.bls.gov/ces/.

[2] Author’s calculations based on Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey (U.S. Department of Labor, 2013), available at http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/surveymost?ln.

[3] Carmen DeNavas-Walt, Bernadette D. Proctor, and Jessica C. Smith, “Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2012” (Washington: U.S. Department of Commerce, 2013), available at http://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/p60-245.pdf.

To speak with our experts on this topic, please contact:

Print: Katie Peters (economy, education, health care, gun-violence prevention)
202.741.6285 or kpeters1@americanprogress.org

Print: Anne Shoup (foreign policy and national security, energy, LGBT issues)
202.481.7146 or ashoup@americanprogress.org

Print: Crystal Patterson (immigration)
202.478.6350 or cpatterson@americanprogress.org

Print: Madeline Meth (women's issues, poverty, Legal Progress)
202.741.6277 or mmeth@americanprogress.org

Print: Tanya Arditi (Spanish language and ethnic media)
202.741.6258 or tarditi@americanprogress.org

TV: Lindsay Hamilton
202.483.2675 or lhamilton@americanprogress.org

Radio: Madeline Meth
202.741.6277 or mmeth@americanprogress.org

PHYS ED SEPTEMBER 18, 2013, 12:01 AM

How Physical Fitness May Promote School Success

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS

Librado Romero/The New York TimesStudents exercise during physical education class at P.S. 457 in the Bronx.

• TWITTER
• GOOGLE+
• SAVE
• E-MAIL
• SHARE
• PRINT

PHYS ED

Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.

Children who are physically fit absorb and retain new information more effectively than children who are out of shape, a new study finds, raising timely questions about the wisdom of slashing physical education programs at schools.

Parents and exercise scientists (who, not infrequently, are the same people) have known for a long time that physical activity helps young people to settle and pay attention in school or at home, with salutary effects on academic performance. A representative study, presented in May at the American College of Sports Medicine, found that fourth- and fifth-grade students who ran around and otherwise exercised vigorously for at least 10 minutes before a math test scored higher than children who had sat quietly before the exam.

More generally, in a large-scale study of almost 12,000 Nebraska schoolchildren published in August in The Journal of Pediatrics, researchers compiled each child’s physical fitness, as measured by a timed run, body mass index and academic achievement in English and math, based on the state’s standardized test scores. Better fitness proved to be linked to significantly higher achievement scores, while, interestingly, body size had almost no role. Students who were overweight but relatively fit had higher test scores than lighter, less-fit children.

To date, however, no study specifically had examined whether and in what ways physical fitness might affect how children learn. So researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign recently stepped into that breach, recruiting a group of local 9- and 10-year-old boys and girls, testing their aerobic fitness on a treadmill, and then asking 24 of the most fit and 24 of the least fit to come into the exercise physiology lab and work on some difficult memorization tasks.

Learning is, of course, a complex process, involving not only the taking in and storing of new information in the form of memories, a process known as encoding, but also recalling that information later. Information that cannot be recalled has not really been learned.

Earlier studies of children’s learning styles have shown that most learn more readily if they are tested on material while they are in the process of learning it. In effect, if they are quizzed while memorizing, they remember more easily. Straight memorization, without intermittent reinforcement during the process, is tougher, although it is also how most children study.

In this case, the researchers opted to use both approaches to learning, by providing their young volunteers with iPads onto which several maps of imaginary lands had been loaded. The maps were demarcated into regions, each with a four-letter name. During one learning session, the children were shown these names in place for six seconds. The names then appeared on the map in their correct position six additional times while children stared at and tried to memorize them.

In a separate learning session, region names appeared on a different map in their proper location, then moved to the margins of the map. The children were asked to tap on a name and match it with the correct region, providing in-session testing as they memorized.

A day later, all of the children returned to the lab and were asked to correctly label the various maps’ regions.

The results, published last week in PLoS One, show that, over all, the children performed similarly when they were asked to recall names for the map when their memorization was reinforced by testing.

But when the recall involved the more difficult type of learning — memorizing without intermittent testing — the children who were in better aerobic condition significantly outperformed the less-fit group, remembering about 40 percent of the regions’ names accurately, compared with barely 25 percent accuracy for the out-of-shape kids.

This finding suggests that “higher levels of fitness have their greatest impact in the most challenging situations” that children face intellectually, the study’s authors write. The more difficult something is to learn, the more physical fitness may aid children in learning it.

Of course, this study did not focus specifically on the kind of active exercise typical of recess, but on longer-term, overall physical fitness in young children. But in doing so, it subtly reinforces the importance of recess and similar physical activity programs in schools, its authors believe.

If children are to develop and maintain the kind of aerobic fitness that amplifies their ability to learn, said co-author Charles Hillman, a professor of kinesiology at the University of Illinois and a fellow at the university’s Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, they should engage in “at least an hour a day” of vigorous physical activity. Schools, where children spend so many of their waking hours, provide the most logical and logistically plausible place for them to get such exercise, he said.

Or as he and his co-authors dryly note in the study: “Reducing or eliminating physical education in schools, as is often done in tight financial times, may not be the best way to ensure educational success among our young people.”

Tay Gavin Erickson Lecture Series

The American Dream Is Not Dreamt in English Only: Latin@s and Linguistic Intolerance in the USA

Presenters:

Ana Celia Zentella, Professor Emerita in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego

Event Dates(s):Tue 1st, October 2013

Time:4:00pm

Location:Cape Cod Lounge, Student Union

Ana Celia Zentella (Ph.D., U. of Pennsylvania), Professor Emerita (Hunter College- CUNY and the University of California, San Diego/Ethnic Studies), is an anthro-political linguist internationally recognized for her research on U.S. Latino languages, language socialization, "Spanglish", and "English-only" laws. Her community ethnography, Growing up Bilingual: Puerto Rican Children in NY (Blackwell, 1997), won awards from the British Ass’n. of Applied Linguistics and the American Ass’n. of Latina and Latino Anthropologists.  She has also edited three volumes, Building on Strength: Language and Literacy in Latino Families and Communities  (2005), Multilingual San Diego: Portraits of Language Loss and Revitalization (2009), and Multilingual Philadelphia: Portraits of Language and Social Change (2010). Her latest book, co-authored with Ricardo Otheguy, is a comprehensive sociolinguistic study, Spanish in New York: Language contact, dialectal leveling, and structural continuity (Oxford UP, 2012).

As the proud New York born daughter of a Mexican father and Puerto Rican mother, she was honored when Manhattan's Borough President, Ruth Messinger, declared October 30, 1996  “Doctor Ana Celia Zentella Day", for “her leading role in building appreciation for language diversity and respect for language rights.”

Professor Zentella chaired the Language and Social Justice Committee of the American Anthropology Association from 2010-12.

This lecture is sponsored by the Five College Lecture Fund and co-sponsored by UMass Amherst Center for Research on Families’ Tay Gavin Erickson Lecture Series, College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, and Department of Anthropology, and the Department of Spanish at Amherst College, the Department of Sociology and American Studies at Hampshire College, the Department of Spanish, Latina/o, and Latin American Studies at Mount Holyoke College, and Latin American and Latino/a Studies and Department of Sociology at Smith College.

Fees:

FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC