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Restoring Play

Child-initiated imaginative play is losing out to academic training and programmed activities in young children's lives, in part because many adults are unaware of the direct links between children's play and their healthy emotional, social, and intellectual development. The Alliance has issued statements and calls to action on the education of young children, calling on educators and policymakers to pay more attention to this issue. We also sponsor research on the current state of child-initiated play in early education and on ways that educators can encourage and restore play. We are now preparing to launch a national campaign to raise public consciousness about the importance of play and its current endangered status.

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Computers and Children

Computers are reshaping children's lives at home and at school, in profound and unexpected ways. Common sense suggests that we consider the potential harm, as well as the promised benefits, of this change.

The Alliance for Childhood and dozens of leading health, education and child development experts are challenging the increasing emphasis on computers in early childhood and elementary schools. Please visit the Projects/Computers section of this web site to learn more about the Alliance computer project and to read our report, Fool's Gold: A Critical Look at Computers in Childhood and Tech Tonic: Towards a New Literacy of Technology.

You will also want to read Children and Computers: A Call to Action, a position statement signed by dozens of experts in child development, education, health, and technology.

Order Alliance Reports on technology and children.

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High Stakes Testing Project

Political leaders throughout America, including President Bush, are calling for a dramatic increase in standardized testing in public schools. The new tests invariably carry high stakes -- that is, the test results are linked to serious consequences for students, teachers, and schools.

Yet there is little evidence that using such tests to force schools to improve has the intended result. Indeed, the most recent comprehensive research shows that it has the opposite effect -- worsening academic performance and increasing drop-out rates, according to a December 28, 2002 report in the New York Times. [Note: You will need to register in order to see the article.]

High-stakes tests threaten not only children's education but also their health. Health-care professionals and parents report that test-related stress is literally making many children sick. The Alliance for Childhood has called for a rethinking of the current emphasis on standardized testing in a statement signed by, among others, four of the country's leading child psychiatrists -- Robert Coles and Alvin Poussaint of Harvard Medical School; Marilyn Benoit of Howard University Hospital and president of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry; and Stanley Greenspan, author of "Playground Politics: Understanding the Emotional Life of the School-Age Child."

Harvard Professor Howard Gardner, another signer of the Alliance statement, says that "what started as a well motivated process to improve student learning has become an increasingly irrational high stakes endeavor. Politicians may show short term gains, but students, teachers, and the learning process are becoming casualties." The Alliance calls on Congress not to impose new testing requirements until the health effects of such policies have been studied.