Beyond Measure Quotes

“Imagine if we taught baseball the way that we teach science,” says UC Berkeley psychologist Alison Gopnik. “We would tell kids about baseball in the first couple of years. By the time they got to be in junior high, maybe we’d give them a drill where they could throw the ball to second base, over and over and over again. In college, they’d get to reproduce great, famous baseball plays, and then they’d never actually get to play the game until they were in graduate school.” High-quality project-based learning is, essentially, playing ball. There”
― Vicki Abeles, Beyond Measure: Rescuing an Overscheduled, Overtested, Underestimated Generation

“According to both scientific and anecdotal research, it is clear that homework should be the exception, not the rule. Even the most inventive or meaningful assignments still infringe on the time that belongs to families.”
― Vicki Abeles, Beyond Measure: Rescuing an Overscheduled, Overtested, Underestimated Generation

“Model balance for your children. We know the keys to well-being are sleep, good nutrition, exercise, play, purposeful work, time outdoors, and time to connect with friends and community. Make wellness a priority for yourself, as well, and explain to your kids what you’re doing and why. •”
― Vicki Abeles, Beyond Measure: Rescuing an Overscheduled, Overtested, Underestimated Generation

“We and our children still must answer to the pressures beyond our own four walls: the hypercompetitive college applications, the mountains of state-mandated curricula, the high-stakes standardized tests and rigid AP exams, the schedules set by club leaders and coaches, the constant well-meaning questions (“Where are you thinking of going to college?”). The crisis our children face calls for a whole movement—a radically altered vision for childhood and education and a groundswell of cultural change. Unless we build that, we’ll just be erecting little storm shelters in a hurricane.”
― Vicki Abeles, Beyond Measure: Rescuing an Overscheduled, Overtested, Underestimated Generation

“Susan Engel, the Williams College psychologist and education expert, encapsulates the breadth of harm done in her new book, The End of the Rainbow: By allowing the pursuit of money to guide our educational practices, we have miseducated everyone. We are so hell-bent on teaching disadvantaged children skills (both academic ones, such as reading, and social ones, such as obeying rules) that will lead to a job that we fail to teach them the pleasure of being part of a literate community, how to make their work meaningful, or how to draw strength from the group—skills that might offer them a satisfying life. Just as bad is that middle-class and privileged children are pushed to view every stage of their schooling as a platform for some future accomplishment ending in wealth. This deprives them of the chance to figure out what they really care about, how to think about complex topics with open minds, and how to find a sense of purpose in life. Blessedly,”
― Vicki Abeles, Beyond Measure: Rescuing an Overscheduled, Overtested, Underestimated Generation

“Cap the number of mandatory hours students must spend on a sports team or school activity each week. Research suggests that the benefits of athletics and activities diminish beyond about ten hours per week, total, for all commitments combined.”
― Vicki Abeles, Beyond Measure: Rescuing an Overscheduled, Overtested, Underestimated Generation

“The way we use our time is the truest expression of our values. That means that, if we pay attention, our schedules can show us whether we’re living our most important values or not. We need to constantly consider our children’s school-to-life ratio and strive to help them keep it in balance. As the writer Annie Dillard famously said, “How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.” Your child only gets one childhood. Actions”
― Vicki Abeles, Beyond Measure: Rescuing an Overscheduled, Overtested, Underestimated Generation

“So let me make this clear: protecting kids from excessive test pressure is not coddling. It’s not the equivalent of insisting that every child needs to get a trophy. It is a critical mission to preserve our children’s health and provide a kind of education that truly nurtures their minds. And it’s a call to arms that’s backed by research, which consistently tells us that testing does a very poor job of measuring or encouraging the learning that matters most. The”
― Vicki Abeles, Beyond Measure: Rescuing an Overscheduled, Overtested, Underestimated Generation

“When OECD researchers looked at average homework loads for fifteen-year-olds in each country, they concluded that “after around four hours of homework per week, the additional time invested in homework has a negligible impact on performance.”
― Vicki Abeles, Beyond Measure: Rescuing an Overscheduled, Overtested, Underestimated Generation

“The conclusion: homework was found to have little to no benefit before high school and diminishing returns for high school students as the hours spent doing it increased. Another study in 2011 reinforced this finding. In that experiment, a pair of economists crunched numbers from 25,000 eighth graders and found that a little extra math homework (amounting to about fifteen minutes per weekday) did boost students’ math scores slightly (just over 3 percent). But piling on an extra weekly hour of English, science, or history assignments, beyond average levels, made no impact whatsoever on scores in those subjects.”
― Vicki Abeles, Beyond Measure: Rescuing an Overscheduled, Overtested, Underestimated Generation

“that education is not a race. That busyness does not equal betterment. That a perfect transcript is not worth the cost of a lost childhood. And that no battery of tests can assess what most matters in life: Integrity. Determination. Empathy. Resourcefulness. Connectedness. A thirst for knowledge. Passion. Creativity. Adaptability. The aptitude to read not just books but also faces. Confidence and kindness. Respect. These are the qualities that adults who are truly prepared and engaged possess. They are beyond measure. And they are what we must actively cultivate in our children.”
― Vicki Abeles, Beyond Measure: Rescuing an Overscheduled, Overtested, Underestimated Generation