Public Montessori programs strengthen learning outcomes at lower costs: study

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...

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

Oh man… survivorship bias thinking is dangerous.

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.

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 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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

Too many kids are just completely lost because they were moved up to the next math class despite not understanding the previous math class.

Got a citation/link?

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/

He also obviously doesn’t believe it’s wrong to adjust learning to capacity. He just has the less popular view that this can be done without tagging kids at four years old and changing their lives. (He probably also understands that there’s plenty a brilliant math kid who belongs in a standard English class, or even in remedial classes to deal with a concurrent learning disability).

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.

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.

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

Which should make no sense because the teachers themselves work odd years in one school, even years in the other school.

Rudolf Steiner would say all that early learning is harmful and they should have been playing and imagining spiritual things.

My Montessori persona was to be competitive about "finishing my weeks work first" usually on Monday or Tuesday, so I could enjoy working with other students on their work lists, and getting a crack at the highschool algebra book when the teacher would let our group at it. I had some strengths in English, math and computing, but weaknesses in foreign language and science where there were fewer opportunities for social learning. Obviously there were no opportunities for that in HS.

In addition to terrible grades, the transition to public school completely destroyed my social confidence and I had to stop playing sports due to my small stature. My dad noted this year (in my 40s now) later that I was unrecognisable after just a few months but he lost the argument to pull me out. It wasn't until my late 20s that I started to find my original confidence.

I'm actually a huge fan of Montessori schools, including the one I went to. It was a great experience.

But in my experience and the experience of a lot of others I've talked to, Montessori schools aren't perfect. The method does really well fostering natural curiosity and harnessing it for learning. Essentially, it develops internal motivation super successfully.

But, as I've seen and heard from plenty of parents and at least one teacher, the method struggles with students that can't find that internal motivation. The sort of freedom a Montessori classroom gives you is not ideal for everyone. I think it's okay to admit that.

I would amend this somewhat to say that most ideologies have aspects that are much less effective in practice than they are in theory. I think this matches your sentiment, but addresses the likely rebuttal of "But X method has this specific element designed to address the shortcoming."

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.

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.

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.

Teachers who pass the tests required for this probably are from the top of their teacher cohort regarding intelligence, consciousness, empathy, motivation etc and they are likely better paid, so less stressed from life stuff like bills or whatever.

The peers all come from non-random families who generally have good life outcomes either way. These kids will model good behavioral norms. If kids can interact, they will influence each other. It's not only disruption or no disruption, but likely more subtle.

The effects were only shown here up to end of kindergarten. It likely disappears later.

My default assumption remains that these fashionable methodologies do very little actually. The correction is probable almost entirely due to who the people involved are. I know that the study participants were randomized to Montessori or not, but the rest of peers and the teachers are not random.

The real test would be for a Montessori kindergarten to drop the methodology while keeping the same people.

  The upfront costs of teacher training and Montessori materials were amortized 
  over their expected lifespan of 25 y. Total costs for Montessori and 
  traditional programs were divided by the average number of children in each 
  type of classroom at the PK3, PK4, and kindergarten years, then summed to 
  yield the cost difference of Montessori and traditional programming over 
  three years of public preschool.

This is a big if. Until the 1990s, class sizes routinely exceeded 30 and school sizes 500 in former Czechoslovakia, but I wouldn't call us "pathologically self-centered society".

As for self-centeredness, shrinking family size might be the true reason. Only children tend to be a lot more pampered than kids who were born into a family of six. In China, they are called "Little Emperors".

the montessori method can handle larger class sizes specifically because of the way it is designed. in other words, large class sized are an even better argument for why the montessori method should be used.

>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.