NurtureShock (22 page)

D.A.R.E. is not alone, and it shouldn’t be singled out. Hundreds of drug-prevention programs receive federal grants; the Department
of Health and Human Services looked at 718 of them, and it found that only 41 had a positive effect.

Programs meant to reduce high school dropouts have a similar record. Of the 16 most well known, only one has a positive effect,
even though all of these programs seem to have the details right—a high ratio of counselors to students, and a vocational
bent creating a bridge to future careers.

In our research for this book, we came across dozens of school-based programs that sounded wonderful in theory, but were far
from it in practice.

Among scholars, interventions considered to be really great often have an effect size of something like 15%, which means that
15% of children altered their targeted behavior, and therefore 85% did not alter it. Interventions with an effect size of
only 4% can still be considered quite good, statistically—even though they have no effect on 96% of the students.

Does this mean the bar is too low for scholars? Not really. Instead, what this data indicates is that human behavior is incredibly
stubborn. We’re hard to budge off our habits and proclivities. While it’s possible to inspire a few people to change, it’s
nearly impossible to change a majority of us, in any direction. Interventions for children are even more of a challenge—since
developmentally, kids are by definition a moving target.

I explain all this to set the stage, and provide proper perspective, on something we found that
does
work. This program’s success rate is marvelous on its own, but all the more astonishing in light of how difficult it is to
create something that produces results with a sizeable effect. It’s an emerging curriculum for preschool and kindergarten
classrooms called Tools of the Mind. It requires some training for teachers, but otherwise does not cost a penny more than
a traditional curriculum. The teachers merely teach differently. What’s even more interesting than their results is
why
it seems to work, and what that teaches us about how young children learn.

Ashley visited pre-K and kindergarten Tools classes in two relatively affluent towns that ring Denver; I visited both types
of classes in Neptune, New Jersey, which is a comparatively more-impoverished township about halfway down the Garden State
Parkway between New York and Atlantic City.

Most elements of the school day are negligibly different from a traditional class. There’s recess and lunch and snack time
and nap time. But a typical Tools preschool classroom
looks
different—as much because of what it is missing as what is there. The wall calendar is not a month-by-month grid, but a straight
line of days on a long ribbon of paper. Gone is the traditional alphabet display; instead, children use a sound map, which
has a monkey next to
Mm
and a sun next to
Ss
. These are ordered not from
A
to
Z
but rather in clusters, with consonants on one map and vowels on another.
C, K
, and
Q
are in one cluster, because those are similar sounds, all made with the tongue mid-mouth. Sounds made with the teeth or the
lips are in other clusters.

When class begins, the teacher tells the students they will be playing fire station. The previous week, they learned all about
firemen, so now, the classroom has been decorated in four different areas—in one corner is a fire station, in another a house
that needs saving. The children choose what role they want to take on in the pretend scenario—pump driver, 911 operator, fireman,
or family that needs to be rescued. Before the children begin to play, they each tell the teacher their choice of role.

With the teacher’s help, the children make individual “play plans.” They all draw a picture of themselves in their chosen
role, then they attempt to write it out as a sentence on a blank sheet of paper to the best of their abilities. Even three-year-olds
write daily. For some, the play plan is little more than lines representing each word in the sentence. Still others use their
sound map to figure out the words’ initial consonants. The eldest have memorized how to write “I am going to” and then they
use the sound map to figure out the rest.

Then they go play, sticking to the role designated in their plan. The resulting play continues for a full 45 minutes, with
the children staying in character, self-motivated. If they get distracted or start to fuss, the teacher asks, “Is that in
your play plan?” On different days of the week, children choose other roles in the scenario. During this crucial play hour,
the teacher facilitates their play but does not directly teach them anything at all.

At the end, the teacher puts a CD on to play the “clean-up song.” As soon as the music begins, the kids stop playing and start
cleaning up—without another word from their teacher. Later, they will do what’s called buddy reading. The children are paired
up and sit facing each other; one is given a large paper drawing of lips, while the other holds a drawing of ears. The one
with the lips flips through a book, telling the story he sees in the pictures. The other listens and, at the end, asks a question
about the story. Then they switch roles.

They also commonly play games, like Simon Says, that require restraint. One variation is called graphic practice; the teacher
puts on music, and the children draw spirals and shapes. Intermittently, the teacher pauses the music, and the children learn
to stop their pens whenever the music stops.

The kindergarten program expands on the preschool structure, incorporating academics into a make-believe premise that’s based
on whatever book they’re reading in class. Overall, the Tools classrooms seem a little different, but not strange in any way.
To watch it in action, you would not guess its results would be so superior. In this sense, it’s the opposite kind of program
from D.A.R.E.—which sounded great, but had weak results. Tools has great results, despite nothing about it having intuitive,
visceral appeal.

The Tools techniques were developed during the 1990s by two scholars at Metropolitan State College of Denver, Drs. Elena Bodrova
and Deborah Leong. After pilot-testing the program in a few classrooms and Head Start centers, they put it to a true test
in 1997, in cooperation with Denver Public Schools. Ten kindergarten teachers were randomly assigned, to teach either Tools
or the regular district curriculum. In these classrooms one-third to one-half of the children were poor Hispanic students
who began the year classified as having limited English-language proficiency: they were starting kindergarten effectively
a grade-level behind.

The following spring, all the children took national standardized tests. The results were jaw-dropping. The children from
the Tools classes were now almost a full grade-level
ahead
of the national standard. In the district, only half the kindergartners score as proficient at their grade-level. Of the
Tools children, 97% scored as proficient.

Reports of the program’s success began to spread within the research community. In 2001, two scholars from the National Institute
for Early Education Research at Rutgers, Dr. Ellen Frede and Amy Hornbeck, visited the Tools classrooms. New Jersey was implementing
free, public preschools in the neediest zones of the state. Impressed by what they saw, Frede and Hornbeck decided to test
Tools in a preschool during its first year of operations, so that Hornbeck could compare the program’s efficacy to that of
a traditional program.

The researchers chose a site in Passaic, New Jersey, that served children from low-income families; 70% of the students came
from homes where English is not the primary language. The new preschool, created in an old bank building in downtown Passaic,
had eighteen classrooms. Seven on one floor were set aside as a Tools preschool; as a control, the other eleven would teach
the district’s regular preschool plan. Both teachers and students were randomly assigned to classrooms, and the teachers were
instructed not to exchange ideas about curriculum between the two programs. At the end of the first year, the Tools scores
were markedly higher on seven out of eight measures, including vocabulary and IQ.

But it was the kids’ behavior ratings that really sold the school’s principal on the program. From the teachers in the regular
classrooms, the principal got reports of extremely disruptive behavior almost every day—preschool students kicking a teacher,
biting another student, cursing, or throwing a chair. But those kinds of reports never came from the Tools classes.

The controlled experiment was supposed to last two years, but at the end of the first year the principal insisted all the
classrooms switch to Tools. She decided it was unethical to deprive half the school of a curriculum that was obviously superior.

This wasn’t the only time that Tools was a victim of its own success. Testing of the Tools program ended early in two other
places as well: Elgin, Illinois, and Midland, Texas. The grant money funding the research was available to study children
at-risk; after a year, the children no longer scored low enough to be deemed “at-risk,” so the grant money to continue the
analysis was no longer available. Bodrova is quick to credit the work of those schools’ faculty, but added, “When it keeps
happening enough times, you start to think that it may be our program that makes the difference. It’s the irony of doing interventions
in the real world: being too successful to study if it’s successful.”

Word about Tools continued to spread, and once teachers actually saw the program in action they became believers. Rutgers’
Hornbeck was eventually so convinced by her own findings that she signed on to be part of the Tools team, regularly training
teachers in the program. After two teachers from Neptune, New Jersey, visited the Passaic school, they were so excited that
they, too, implemented Tools techniques in a new preschool they were creating in Neptune.

Sally Millaway was the principal of that Neptune school. After success with the program on the preschool level, she convinced
the superintendent to try it in one class at her next post, an elementary school. When word leaked out that Millaway’s school
would be instituting a Tools kindergarten, the school district began getting letters from parents who wanted their children
to be allowed to switch into the Tools program.

During that first year of kindergarten, Millaway had the sense it was working. But the true test would come in the standardized
achievement exams all New Jersey kindergartners would take in April. A month later, Millaway got the first set of results
over the fax machine. “It was unbelievable,” she said. “When I saw the numbers, I laughed out loud. It was ridiculous, beyond
our imaginings.”

The average reading scores for the school district translated into the 65th percentile on the national spectrum. The Tools
kindergartners (on average) had jumped more than 20 ticks higher, to the 86th percentile. The kids who tested as gifted almost
all came from the Tools classes.

So why does this curriculum work so well? There are many interrelated factors, but let’s start with the most distinctive element
of Tools—the written play plans and the lengthy play period that ensues.

In every preschool in the country, kids have played firehouse. But usually, after ten minutes, the scenario breaks down. Holding
a pretend fire hose on a pretend fire is a singular activity, and it grows old; needing stimulation, children are distracted
by what other kids are doing and peel off into new games. Play has a joyful randomness, but it’s not
sustained.
In Tools classrooms, by staging different areas of the room as the variety of settings, and by asking kids to commit to their
role for the hour, the play is far more complicated and interactive. The children in the house call 911; the operator rings
a bell; the firefighters leap from their bunks; the trucks arrive to rescue the family. This is considered mature, multidimensional,
sustained play.

This notion of being able to sustain one’s own interest is considered a core building block in Tools. Parents usually think
of urging their child to pay attention, to be obedient to a teacher. They recognize that a child can’t learn unless she has
the ability to avoid distractions. Tools emphasizes the flip-side—kids won’t be distracted because they’re so consumed in
the activities they’ve chosen. By acting the roles they’ve adopted in their play plans, the kids are thoroughly in the moment.