My children attended Montessori schools, and it really is a wonderful system.
I would really like to see an extension of this learning method up through high school --- the closest thing I'm aware of was a school I attended in Mississippi for a couple of years --- classes were divided between academic and social, social classes (homeroom, phys ed, social studies, &c.) were attended at one's age, while academic classes (reading, math, science, geography, history, &c.) were by ability (with a limit on no more than 4 grades ahead up to 8th grade) --- after 8th grade that was removed and students were allowed to take any classes.
Some of the faculty were accredited as faculty at a local college, and where warranted, either professors travelled from there to the school, or students travelled to the college for classes --- it wasn't uncommon for students to graduate high school and simultaneously be awarded a college degree.
Apparently, the system was deemed unfair because it accorded a benefit to the students who were able to take advantage of it, with no commensurate compensation for those who were not, so the Miss. State Supreme Court dismantled it.
I had a good impression of "Montessori" from hearing that Larry/Sergey/Bezos went to one. When I put my kid in it at 3 years old, he hated it. As I looked into it more, it seems to me that it is actually very rigid, with kids being able to play with just a small set of toys that don't really exercise their creativity, and with little opportunity for group play. We switched him to a Reggio Emilia school where the kids are constantly doing group projects and art and he enjoys it a lot more. I recommend parents observe what's actually happening in classrooms and think about what's best for their kid in the early years instead of assuming "Montessori" is the best path.
Like anything, there are lower and higher quality implementations of Montessori programs. What you are saying here does not reflect the Montessori program I went through myself, and I think I can credit the Montessori program with a great deal of my later stage curiosity and drive to outperform.
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.
We visited multiple Montessori schools for both my kids and I can confidently say that I met some of the saddest and coldest teachers I have ever seen in my life. I am not sure that is really best environment for small kids.
I myself went to shitty public schools and became an exceptional student later on. I am doubtful about the impact of early education on future success.
Not intending to be rude, but the common denominator here might be the region these schools are based in, vs the particular flavor of education.
A close family member of mine has taught Montessori for 30 years at the same school. The school has changed a lot in those 30 years (for the worse, unfortunately), but it’s nothing to do with the education methods and everything to do with broader trends in the area.
I agree. In Austin, Montessori preschools tend to be more rigid and doctrinaire. I don’t know if this is true everywhere, but they also tend to have disproportionately high representation of immigrant families. My impression, based on 8 years of interactions at two different Montessori schools, is immigrant parents seem more deferential toward the teachers and administrators. And more interested in measurable academic outcomes. So the schools respond by keeping the kids on a more linear path with engaging the various “works” (Montessorispeak for projects or learning kits). That said, I think it’s still a great system.
I grew up attending a public elementary school in Sacramento that implemented Open Education. It had many similarities to Montessori— kids received a weekly “contract” with their personalized learning plan and assignments due. If you wanted to do all your math work on Monday, reading on Tuesday, and spend Wednesday through Friday on science, you could (within reason since some things required group lessons). It was an amazing system and I feel extremely fortunate to have experienced it.
That said, now I kind of wonder how much the California open-minded, seeker mentality was responsible for this.
I never went to Montessori, but did cub scouts at one and those were some odd kids and parents. I felt like I was on an alien planet. Not bad people or anything, just certainly different. Like they took a class on how to act human, but lost something in translation.
I do recall there being a lot of toys and stuff. There was an old Texas Instruments computer that caught my interest as we had computers with Windows 95 at my school. Apparently nobody was allowed to touch it though.
My guess is the best school for your kids is one where they're safe and one with curious and motivated kids and enthusiastic teachers that can help inspire and unlock talent. The method is secondary, but kids should be both challenged and given some amount of freedom to explore. It also helps if the parents care and ensure their kids are functioning members of society.
the best school for your kids is one where they're safe and one with curious and motivated kids and enthusiastic teachers that can help inspire and unlock talent
the montessori method is designed to achieve exactly that. so the method matters because it enables children to become like that.
Agreed. But that is not necessarily the Montessori system. Plus you can kind of do that yourself to your kid and not expect the school system to do that. Unfortunately we live in a real world and teaching is a job just like any. No one else other than you will have the best incentives to see your kids succeed.
That is definitely not my experience. The teachers at my kids’ school are vivacious and friendly. They very clearly love their jobs, and love watching kids grow.
I went to one near me just to check it out. They started to moan about public education system and seemed want to be alternative for the sake of it. Some parents I know there are definitely on a woo-woo spectrum. School system in NZ is already a lot like montessori with heaps of fluidity.
p.s. I’ve been joking that soon you won’t be able to take your kid anywhere without a montessori/waldorf/reggio franchise.
The thing is Montessori doesn't mean anything. Any school can call themselves Montessori. So it all depends on actual accreditation. Some accreditations are also not worth the paper they're printed on (like NAMC). AMI and AMS are considered to be the two most serious accreditation
My son's school is AMI accredited and at least there's not much woo-woo here. Children have to be up to date with vaccination (or they're not admitted), only thing slightly woo-woo (from the local point of view) is that the parents who chose this school chose it because they want their kid to have more of a play-based, child directed education and don't want them to have homework and tuition in kindergarten. This is in HK where a lot of children going to public schools will have homework and will get tuition in order to prepare for the primary school entrance exam (and later to the middle school entrance exam).
On the other hand, Waldorf is fully woo-woo. They claim that children should not be taught to read before they get their first adult teeth and have a bunch of very weird racist myth about reincarnation (read up on anthroposophy)
Sounds like Montessori is healthier than public HK schools but it's more borderline in NZ, as parent said. Nobody has homework in kindergarten there!
Yea Steiner is woo-woo but so what? Most people are woo-woo (religion) and perhaps old Rudolf realized it has some value in human development. The specific details of the woo hardly matter.
As I see it, the main values of Steiner are the close community and the not forcing them to do logical thinking in Piaget's preoperational stage (before 7 years old), which Rudolf seems to have interpreted as play-play-play all day-day-day, but that might be fine.
Yes, public schools in Asian countries tend to be very problematic to say the least. New Zealand, Australia and Europe tend to have vastly better schools when it comes to respecting the child's need to play. I do see the value of things being child-directed versus being play based but directed by the teacher (like I had as a kid in France) and that for me is the benefit of Reggio Emilia and Montessori.
To be fair, I also wouldn't put my kid in a religious school :) But yes, I agree there's some good ideas with waldorf. Personally though if I had been told when I was a kid not read before 7, I would have been rather pissed off.
I don't doubt your experience, but mine was the opposite. I went to a couple of different Montessori schools, from kindergarten through 6th grade. The majority of our day was what I would call "structured free play"; even in 6th grade, I think formal "sit down" lessons were only half the day. Teachers would often do impromptu sort of lessons for a single or small group of children, like if they were playing with map toys they'd come over and talk about different countries and the weather and food and whatever.
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).
There are different “factions” and accreditation organizations in Montessori. Some are more liberal and others are authoritarian and rigid. Not all Montessori schools are like you describe, but some certainly are.
In our market we see lots of the use of the word Montessori for marketing value only, when it practice it often means something like: "we have a bunch of wooden toys and a certain aesthetic in our classroom." I've heard these referred to as "Monte-sorta."
I agree, and sadly this kind of gives the Montessori label pretty limited predictive value. Turns out you just need to find a good school, regardless of label.
It really comes down to the teachers skill and personality- and that often comes down to if the school can afford the best teachers. Often in the USA regular public schools in wealthy communities will have better teachers than you will find at most private Montessori schools.
Part of schools "affording" the best teachers is not money, but the amount of discipline problems they need to deal with. Which correlates to the financial status of the families at that school. For tons of reasons.
Which families tend to win the lottery to go to these schools? The parents that can afford to. Even if the school is free, the transportation is often not. Plus the parents have to have enough free time to be aware of the lottery for their 3 year old.
most improper ones are simply capitalizing on the name recognition, some may have the idealism but fail in the implementation. if you do enough research it is pretty clear that only AMI accredited teachers implement the original method as designed by maria montessori. AMS comes close. and everyone else never received any form of montessori training at all.
Same here. My three-year old loved maps and we always played with them (making map of her room, etc etc)
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
I’m by far not an expert on it (my wife is, she teaches Montessori), but AFAIK what you observed was because it isn’t viewed as play, but as work - as in school work. All of the activities are called “works,” and they’re taken very seriously.
Part of this is, I think, to teach responsibility; for example, if a student gets a work out, they’re expected to put it back exactly how they found it. Montessori classrooms are incredibly well-organized, with everything having its (labeled) place.
Update: I asked my wife, she said that without other context, it sounded like the school may not be “following the child,” a core tenet of Montessori. She said that while they might steer a new student away from that initially, if they’re clearly interested, she’ll bump that lesson up early instead of when it was scheduled.
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.
seems so obviously wrong to me that I would be cautious about the rest of their teachings
that doesn't seem fair. the reality is complicated. i found this paper which talks about this issue: i just briefly skimmed it, but it suggests that the older kids get the better they can make the distinction:
generalizing that into a single statement from which age fantasy is fine is difficult if not impossible. as a parent, i wouldn't worry, but as an educator i need to be more cautious because such recommendations tend to be taken seriously, and therefore it is reasonable to err on avoiding fantasy for younger kids.
That's actually my biggest pet peeve with Montessori and I say that as a father whose son goes to a Montessori school.
Is it true that younger children have a harder time making the distinction than older children? Yes that's true. There's research that shows it. But does that necessarily mean that removing exposure to fantasy in stories is beneficial? And would a child exposed to fantasy not learn to distinguish between make belief and reality earlier? There's actually some research that shows that [1]
So while there's a lot I love about my son's school, the stance on fantasy is something I vehemently disagree with. What's interesting though is that most parents in my son's class will happily read fantasy books with anthropomorphised animals, talk about Santa Claus, etc... and completely disregard the idea that fantasy shouldn't be introduced. Officially, we can't give books with fantasy stories to the school library but last time I went to read to children there, 20-30% of the stories had clear fantasy elements.
If you're interested about the rest of Montessori ideas, it's interesting to read "Montessori: The Science Behind the Genius" by Angeline Lillard. She tries to go through most of the Montessori teachings and justify it with existing studies etc... For most part, she finds studies that are relevant and solid but not for the part of fiction where you can really feel that she struggles to justify her own bias.
I attended one for elementary and middleschool. Early on everything we did was in groups. Take the multiplication flash cards and quiz eachother. Mess with the abacus. Look at the geological periods chart, etc. All the stuff seemed pretty fun to me. Yes, we had outdoor recess everyday, alhough we had a good setup with a big playground and some woods on the property. A lot of montessori setups I see now look really spartan like almost a daycare center.
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 think the idea was to get the kids who probably had ADHD to lock in and do their work more
Wow that sounds terrible. My mother used to have me sit in silence at the dining room table to try to get me to do my homework. My god, so much noise. Libraries are similar. People adjusting on a chair, pages turning, pens dropping, car doors outside, eating.... There are just so many freaking little noises. I'd rather have a wall of noise so I can't pick out the distractions and work on whatever I was working on. (Not that it always worked, but I had a chance).
thank you for that detailed insight. i only had the opportunity to observe ad learn about montessori in kindergarten. what you describe is pretty much what i expected from reading about it, but i haven't seen any stories from actual students who experienced it.
it would seem that some groups in your class could have benefited from more teacher attention. or maybe from mixing up the groups.
There is no signal here whatsoever. Elon and Steve which I considers the best entrepreneurs in our life time did not go to so called Montessori schools. Also let us not clump all alternative schooling systems as Montessori.
It really depends on the teacher (like most school systems) and the support of the parents --- a fellow woodworker and I were enlisted to help make educational aids at one of the schools my daughter attended) --- agree one needs to find the best thing for each child.
We will soon be picking a school for our oldest. (Not in the US.) We're choosing between a Montessori school and a couple others.
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.
If you can, observe the school yards while the kids are playing outside. What's the atmosphere like? How do the kids interact? How do the supervising teachers interact with the children? Would you want your kid to be a part of that? Bonus points if a teacher steps up to kindly ask you what the hell you're doing there! :-)
One factor that has been studied has having a major impact on quality especially in younger years is teacher to student ratio, the less student per teacher, the better the quality. It usually also helps with retention :). I do think that retention is a good element, when looking for my son's school, I read the reviews on Glassdoor and on https://www.internationalschoolsreview.com (paid site) to get a better idea of what teachers thought of the school.
If looking at Montessori, check for certifications. Are they AMI or AMS certified? Those are the two most serious qualifications. If they are not certified, then I think you should be sceptical. Not being certified doesn't mean that the school is necessarily bad but there's a lot of school that trade on Montessori just for marketing purposes and it doesn't bode well for the quality of education when the owner is willing to mislead parents by claiming they're Montessori when they don't try to become certified.
Within alternative schools, Regio Emilia can be good but, from my experience, it's even more dependent on the teacher since there's less structure and it falls on the teacher to take children's input and guide the class toward interesting discussion and group projects. My son went to a Regio Emilia pre-nursery (2 to 3 years old, 2 hours a day) and didn't like it as much as he likes his current Montessori kindergarten. He complains anytime there's a public holiday because he would like to go to school.
I recommend against Waldorf because even though they have some aspects that look good (nature, play based), the underlying philosophy is bat-shit crazy.
Resources if you're interested:
- Montessori: The Science behind the Genius by Angeline S. Lillard. Rather academic discussion on the different elements of Montessori education and what studies and research supports it. It's interesting if you're interested in education. I do think that sometimes the author is a bit biased and tries to stretch the meaning of studies to fit her preconceived notion that everything Montessori related is the best thing since sliced bread. In particular, within Montessori there's a weird belief that fantasy elements (like stories with talking animals, etc) are not suitable for children below 6 because they can't reliably distinguish between fantasy and reality. It's something I personally disagree with and the studies that she tries to use to support that point are not really that convincing.
- Cribsheet by Emily Oster has a chapter on picking pre-schools that can be useful (and I think applies well to Kindergarten). (I don't always agree with that writer but I do feel that she sometimes has useful points of view)
Montessori is just an educational framework, I have no idea where you draw broad conclusion that the one or two things you looked at deemed it be "rigid" or little opportunity... Sounds like a random bad apple. There's a correlation between gifted children and montessori because it allows them to develop at their own pace which is often faster than that of traditional classrooms etc, it's not for everyone.
I had the exact same experience except my child is still there. No free play, very little time outdoors, very little interaction with classmates, no creativity allowed. Unhappy child who regularly doesn't want to go. We try to give her outdoor play with friends after preschool to make up for it.
I’m sorry you’ve had that experience. My kids’ Montessori school has a playground, athletic field, and butts up against woods, which they regularly go into for activities. One of the classes actually spends most of their time outside - weather permitting - because that teacher is getting her Master’s in some form of education that focuses on outdoor learning.
> it is actually very rigid, with kids being able to play with just a small set of toys that don't really exercise their creativity
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.
> 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.
This is very much dependent on the school (and probably age of the students). At the one my kids go to, as soon as they’re in 1st grade, they have multiple teachers: science, music (which doubles as theater - the entire school does an annual play), art, and P.E., in addition to their main teacher.
>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.
This isn't a hardset rule. We had the main teacher but we also had specific teachers as well for stuff like music, art, languages, or gym class. By middleschool there was no more "main" teacher. You were basically in a committee of teachers all specific including science, english, and history by that point. Part of that I'm sure was to prepare you for highschool in a non montessori setting.
Montessori classroom's weakness is that there is only one guide for all subjects as opposed to a traditional school's subject-specific teachers
which tradition is that? in my country subject-specific teachers don't appear until middle school. so that's a rather moot point for kindergarten and primary school.
I’ve been advocating for this for years so I’m glad to hear you had such a good experience.
At the elementary level, up until about 3rd or 4th grade it always made more sense to me to have lots of smaller “neighborhood” level Montessori schools rather than a few large schools from Kindergarten - 6th.
It's hard to do self paced learning when there's no follow up. I got put into a self-paced learning experiment where we polished off the curriculum in three weeks and played chess the rest of the semester. There was nothing else for us to do. Nobody was ready to fill the remaining months. The whole school has to commit in that direction for that to succeed.
Yeah, as one worked forward, one would arrive in the new class and be handed a stack of work required to catch up to where the class was at (moving forward at the end of a school year was strongly discouraged, but some kids would do it --- if need be, one could take the unfinished assignments home at the end of the year and work on them over the summer, turning them in at the beginning of the year).
I can’t find any record of a Mississippi Supreme Court decision regarding a program like you described. I did find evidence that Mississippi actively permits dual enrollment for secondary and post secondary education. Do you have a source for the decision you referenced?
he didn't say it went to the Supreme Court or even any Mississippi court
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.
> while academic classes (reading, math, science, geography, history, &c.) were by ability
My issue with this is that it just is selection bias, telling you nothing about how good the method is at teaching.
Does placing by ability actually helps student learn and score better? Or it's just that those who are good and bad already get divided up, and we know not why some are good and others are worse?
> Does placing by ability actually helps student learn and score better?
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.
> This means the students in class 1 get undisrupted classes, learning more and raising their grades.
That's pure hypothetical, and some disruptive kids are also good and could make it to the top class and still be a class clown. Unless you propose more splitting kids up by "disruptiveness".
I don't think any of this tells us of the quality of the method for actually teaching. It's like schools that have really hard entrance exams, and than assert they are the best school, yes in terms that they only allowed the smartest to come in, off course they will see that the students at the school is good, but those students would be good regardless.
and the montessori method is effective in lowering disruptive peer-behaviour. it's part of the point. it teaches children to not be disruptive by letting them focus on their activities.
There was a lot of experimentation with education methods in the 1970's, of which I benefited. I miss the way that decade began for the optimism and courage to experiment.
There are a few K-12 Montessori schools, but not many. My wife is a primary (3-5 year olds) at the only one in our state. My kids are in 2nd and 4th grade, and we intend to see it through. They love it.
>> because it accorded a benefit to the students who were able to take advantage of it, with no commensurate compensation for those who were not
I came to comment (without reading it) that the study results are probably not universal. The programs are self selecting because kids not suited for it won't stay. This is not a critique of the program or the kids who dont fit it. Just an observation that its so "extreme" that only kids who benefit will stay.
My biggest skepticism about Mamdani in NYC is that he wants to get rid of gifted programs. Apparently some thing it's wrong to adjust each child's learning experience to their capacity for learning. Which is... Wild.
That’s not what he said. He wants to get rid of kids being tracked into gifted kindergartens because a) it’s ludicrous and b) testing four year olds is just a roundabout way of finding the kids with parents who got them a tutor for kindergarten entrance exams, and the replacement metric of getting pre-k teachers to pick them is not much different. He argues that kids don’t need to be shuffled off to special schools until more like 8 years old, when the 2nd grade testing happens.
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).
That makes complete sense. We live in HK and here most kindergarten will have an interview before starting school either at 3 or 4 years old. We applied to a play-based school and to a Montessori school and our son was admitted to both but that's because those two schools target more play focused parents.
So the interviews for those schools are less strict and competitive than some of the better ranked schools where children are competing against children who have tutored and been coached to ace the kindergarten interviews (!?).
I strongly agree with you that there's absolutely no point in testing for giftedness before 2nd grade. Even testing in 2nd grade is fully ripe for creating an arms race between parents by inciting them to hire tutors.
If this is true then I stand corrected. I understand the bias of "rich kids get training" so if he is not killing gifted programs but merely adjusting them, then fine.
I was blown away when I learned that public schools were testing kids before kindergarten and actually assigning the kids to different schools based on the result. I'd only ever heard of that as a "rich people pressure-cooker dystopia" kind of practice.
Absolutely, how many ghetto kids are in the school? It weeds them out through $ and expulsions.
Thinking the Montessori system is relevant to the public system shows your schooling failed.
Montessori has the ability to chose pedagogy so certainly has facets that are the quite good and should be applied publicly except for liberal arts graduate ideals.
This study is very young children, limited pregnancies and gang bangers, and also not random. It's randomised on kids who enter the lottery.
Discipline is the only thing that matters in schools, $, class sizes, teacher education levels above average, amazing resources all don't matter except how it apply to discipline. We have 100+ years of data. Air-conditioning to control behavior is an example of what helps. Liberal arts graduates destroy anything else that could work so don't interact with them, stay outside their broken world.
> Discipline is the only thing that matters in schools
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.
> Discipline is the only thing that matters in schools, $, class sizes, teacher education levels above average, amazing resources all don't matter except how it apply to discipline.
the montessori method implements discipline. that's one of its features. weeding out ghetto kids is not. that's a problem coming from lack of support from the community/government to pay for a montessori school for those kids. and expulsions should not happen. again, not a feature of montessori education.
I send my child to a private Montessori school. With that said, there's no denying that sending your child to a private Montessori school is similar to parents who buy books in learning to parent are typically better parents not because they read the books but because they care enough to buy the books. If you care enough to send your child to a Montessori school, the parent is invested in the child's success and I think that's way more important.
I spent months doing research for a blog post about One Laptop Per Child last year, and came to a related, but more broad conclusion: it's extremely easy to reach misleading conclusions when studying novel educational methods. No strong conclusion comes without qualifiers related to culture and economics. Moreover, a shocking amount of harm has been done by people trying to apply an educational method outside of the socioeconomic context where its efficacy was proven.
There's a dilemma here, because in order to find ways to improve education, we have to try stuff, right? But how do we remedy the situation when those experiments fail? That's less related to the Montessori thing, but it's interesting to think about.
In OLPC's case, the remedy was a retroactive, panicked attempt at teaching teachers how to use the laptops, an effort that largely failed.
You're exactly right, though. OLPC failed mostly because it didn't think to teach the teachers how to use the laptops as classroom tools (not that they would have succeeded otherwise). Countries that had the infrastructure to do the onboarding themselves were relatively well-set up to teach their kids anyway.
If this is interesting to you, I highly recommend Morgan Ames' The Charisma Machine.
i think the constructivist idealism got in the way here. i believe the expectation was that they wouldn't need to train the teachers because the students should figure out the laptops on their own.
seems they missed that figuring out the laptop and integrating it into the curriculum are two different things.
i read your post btw, one thing i am wondering about is that you wrote that countries didn't improve electricity in schools because OLPC claimed that this wasn't necessary.
my own speculation is that they simply didn't enough research and didn't expect that the situation would be so bad. it is also my understanding that the hand crank was dropped early because the laptop could not handle the physical stress of cranking, it would break apart. but then a separate hand crank charger was eventually produced after all: https://wiki.laptop.org/go/Peripherals/Hand_Crank but if i did the math right then it would still take an hour to charge the battery with that.
since there was no hand crank the need for electricity was already well known before any deployment, and part of the deployment efforts included improving the electricity infrastructure.
I did high school at a prestigious technical school at my hometown, hard to get in, very competitive. The education itself wasn't that much better than my previous school but they had the name recognition and as getting in was very hard, likely the best students around town.
Almost 100% pass rate to college, mostly the best colleges. Did the education provided there affect this? Likely, but it was much more the self selection of having the best students that were doing a SAT like test to get in.
In my hometown there is something like that. There are two schools, one of them had a year with particularly good approval rates. Competitive parents started preferring that school, finding ways to send their kids there. That school has been sustaining better approval rates since then.
Which should make no sense because the teachers themselves work odd years in one school, even years in the other school.
> Which should make no sense because the teachers themselves work odd years in one school, even years in the other school.
Peers make a huge difference. Before university, I split my high school between two schools - one that was near the top academically, and one that was quite poor. The latter did have some smart students intellectually, but almost none did well academically because it wasn't valued by their peers.
Then I went to a very average state university for undergrad, and a top school for graduate studies. The difference wasn't that high in terms of teaching (the average school actually had much better teachers, but offset it by low expectations). The real difference was in the peers.
You like engineering? You like coding? Want to do some cool side project? Very hard to find someone like you in that average university.
Then when I started working, I started tutoring some middle school kids. The kids seemed totally capable mentally, and I was trying to figure out how they can't retain simple facts like number of months in a year. Until finally it hit me. They don't have problems learning things. It's just that no one in their orbit (peers or parents) care if they know these things. When I was a kid, I'd be an idiot amongst my fellow students if I didn't know it. So I did. Everyone did.
But if you're around people who think it's OK not to know how many days are in a year, chances are you won't know it, no matter how intelligent you are.
In middle school, I had good grades but was considered a bit of a teacher's pet and was not well liked (especially since I sucked at sports). So I stopped doing homework, I showed that I didn't make effort to try and be better accepted. I still did any graded homework (less than 20% of the homework given) but didn't bother with anything else. Luckily school was easy for me so I still got good grades but I got very habits from that that I have needed to unlearn after.
I strongly believe that peers are important and choosing school based on the type of peers is a valid choice. As another (more positive) example, we live in HK in a multilingual family (I speak French, my wife speaks Cantonese), my son goes to an international school in English and Mandarin. Most of his classmates speak at least 2 languages, many speak 3. In that environment, it's easy for my son to see value in speaking multiple languages and he's never rejected one language. I have a friend whose daughter is in France in a monolingual school where her peers don't value speaking multiple languages. As a result she's ashamed and refuses to speak Cantonese.
It's even worse than that: in some circles, kids are expected to be ignorant, or expected to be emotionless, or mean to each others, or asocial etc. We became mostly what was expected from us, with little variations. Once you've set the wrong expectations, education is an uphill battle.
It makes perfect sense if we approach it from the stance that parents and peers matter more than the teachers. Anecdotally, kids who have parents who give a crap and peers who share similar goals (seek good grades, entrance to college, not doing drugs, etc) tend to do better in school.
> Which should make no sense because the teachers themselves work odd years in one school, even years in the other school.
The finding here is, competitive parents have an impact on the college approval rates of their children. Get them to all send their kids to the same school, that school gets better approval rates, regardless of the teachers.
Theres also a lot of college prep going on with private schools. We had far higher college adviser to student ratios than any public school. They started working with you earlier than any public school. No grade inflation and college admissions knew that and knew the reputation of the highschool. Academically the schedule, courseload, workload, things like freedom to pick different electives, were all designed to mirror college.
It also had an obvious and unhelpful result. Of course kids who spend all day learning will know that stuff better than kids who don't. What really matters is long term life outcomes.
Rudolf Steiner would say all that early learning is harmful and they should have been playing and imagining spiritual things.
There are studies that show Montessori students tend to have better executive function, better working memory, and no significant difference in creativity. I'm not aware of any that look at lifetime income or anything like that.
I'm not exactly sure, but measuring performance on education tests as a child is just a proxy for the whole point of education and raising children and it could even be backwards.
> If you care enough to send your child to a Montessori school
Think you mean to say that if you are well be enough to send your child to a private school...I try not to pull out the "privilege" card but good grief.
> if you are well be enough to send your child to a private school
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.
My kids went to a free charter school, with similar setup and care from parents. The outcomes were notable and it wasn't really about privilege imho. (Though some activist type folks I know who count "parents who care" as a form a privilege.)
I went to a Montessori school in the Netherlands and feel like it failed me. Just one data point and maybe it was just a bad school.
I have autism and nobody noticed or did anything about it until it was time to start preparing for high school in seventh grade. I had read all the books in the school library but was not able to spell and write. It was just way to easy for me to escape work I did not want to do.
We moved after I started high school and my sisters had to change school because of it. One of the first things they noticed at their new school is how incredibly lazy they where.
I am very happy working as a mailman but I do wonder what I would be doing now if I had learned how to study and learn at a younger age.
I want to offer a different data point. I took my daughter to a Montessori-adjacent school for 3 years. It's not Montessori exactly and they didn't advertise as such but they had a different European name attached to it that is downstream from Montessori. They had multi-age education, stressed in children directed learning and individual growth, they didn't have exams, etc.
I changed my daughter this year and overall I'm disappointed in that school. There were many issues but the most important ones to me where:
- No exams, only individual growth meant there's no guarantee the kid is learning at a good pace. When I worked with her at home I could easily identify many gaps and deficiencies. She's now struggling a bit in her new school because of this but I think it will resolve soon.
- Because they didn't like comparing kids to standards or among each other the feedback I received was useless. It was always "she's doing excellent, we see strong growth" but it wasn't true.
- The school rejected most parent feedback and issues raised with something "maybe this style of education is not for you". For example, I know of a few other kids that had to leave because the school didn't take action against bullying because they didn't believe in punishments, etc.
I have to say there were good things too, in particular my daughter really enjoyed it there and formed strong bonds with other kids. I think in general it was ok for elementary education but I strongly think it's not after that and I now have a perhaps unjust bias against Montessori and derivatives.
No exams, only individual growth meant there's no guarantee the kid is learning at a good pace.
that's not true. it is possible to notice if a kid is learning at a good pace without exams. that is part of what the montessori method is about.
it sounds like this school just picked the things they liked but did not understand the point. the core of the montessori method is intensive observation, to understand what the children need and how they can thrive. it looks like this didn't happen in your daugthers school.
There is definitely a survivor bias. It probably works well for those kids who make it through. The kids who it isn’t working for, leave and there are so many of them.
I wonder sometimes if that kind of school is only good for the high-strung go-getter child prodigy types because they are so hands off. But the very lack of metrics and standardization that purports to help with that kind of mission unfortunately certainly makes the shopping a lot harder for prospective parents. Similar with other private schools later on. Is it a good academically strong place where kids get pushed and excel later? Or is it a party den where rich kids joke around and snort coke all day? Hard to tell. It also depends on the student and parent body itself. Good luck :-)
Another thing that kind of tempers my opinion of this kind of school is anecdotal, some friends were lamenting that in their otherwise excellent public elementary school in an affluent district, some parents are pulling their kids out of _first grade_ and moving to private school because "there is not enough homework." What a sad image.
I attended Montessori in the 80s up to high school level and was part of a "gifted" group who went on to a public school a couple of years younger than typical. I was completely unprepared for student bullying in HS and the generally harsh attitudes of teachers. Also my learning style had to completely change, and I did not adapt well.
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.
Very interesting story. If I may ask, looking back, do you blame Montessori for the “lack of real world preparation” or do you think rather that it was the regular school that had a bad system and you were in a better one and should have stayed there? If you had stayed there until uni do you think you’d adapted well to higher edu?
I think my Montessori teachers did a great job. I don't have much love for the public school model but I was a special case being put up several grades and not being familiar with that teaching style.
I don't think I would recommend putting an 11 year old into high school early. Better to be an A+ student and have peers your age than take on a heavier burden to scrape through with Cs.
I have some friends who went through the entire steiner school model and they seemed fairly happy well adjusted adults. So I think yeah, if the model is working stick with it until uni.
Only one-fifth of parents gave permission to participate in the study, the schools differed in how “authentic” their Montessori approach was, and the measurements only go up to the end of kindergarten. So we do not know whether the differences persist.
If anybody wants to give it a go, my benchmarks are:
1) find reviews of parents, especially no abuse, shouting, kids in the last year should LOVE the place.
2) observe even for few minutes a class in their focus time -- you will feel almost shocked if you haven't seen this before -- like you entered Santa's workshop -- children should be deeply engaged in their activities. If you haven't seen it before you might suspect abuse (that's why point 1 is so important), no way kids love to wipe the floors, lay tables, prepare food and so on, but they actually do.
And all that done in almost complete silence.
Proper Montessori with good, empathetic, dedicated educators is amazing!
Yeah. Certainly if the US regular pre-school system looks anything like the UK one, the difference between non-Montessori and Montessori pre-schools in the sorts of play actually encouraged probably isn't that big. The authors attempt to control for notable differences in the demographics of the treatment group, but they're there (and in this case, the higher incomes of the parents in the treatment group probably not just a wealth effect, but a correlate of other systematic differences with the parents who didn't...)
Low participation rate shouldn't matter too much for an RCT right? Just makes the sample smaller so finding statistically significant results is harder.
Different levels of Montessori authenticity make the results even more impressive. They do have some inclusion criteria, like 2/3 of the teachers must be AMI/AMS certified but even so I'd expect a lot of these public school montessori programs to be less "true montessori" than what you'd get at a fully certified AMI/AMS school.
I think the risk is that there is some systematic difference between those who chose to participate and the overall population of public Montessori kids. For instance, maybe those with high incomes disproportionately chose to participate, and Montessori strengthens learning for this group, but if we could measure the whole population the result is more mixed. It can't be a fully RCT if there's some kind of opt-in provision (which is not to say that an opt-in provision is bad, or a study that is not fully RCT is irrelevant).
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2506130122
You could have answered your own question by reading the abstract, which makes it clear that the OP's conjecture was correct: the lotteries were random or somewhat random, but the groups which consented to the study were notably different, with the treatment group being richer, more educated and whiter. They did of course attempt to control for this, whether the controls were adequate or omitted other underlying differences is another question.
Given all the money spent on trying different educational models to achieve better outcomes, it's really gratifying to see a result suggesting that improvement is actually possible. I have a lot of teachers in my family and they tend to take the perspective that education is an engineering problem rather than a research problem. That is, any apparent progress is due to extra funding or filtering students or the like.
> "Those costs do not include anticipated savings from improved teacher morale and retention, a dynamic demonstrated in other data."
That seems like some kind of supportive evidence as well. Teachers should logically be happier when working inside a system optimized for teaching efficacy!
Personally: we put our child in a Montessori preschool because we liked its emphasis on self-directed learning (I kind of think all learning has to be self-directed on some level. Even a lecture requires you to listen to and think about the lecture, instead of something else). We later moved him to a Reggio Emilia program for non-pedagogical reasons (there were problems with the building that the Montessori school was in). They're definitely different—in Montessori, he mostly played on his own, and in Reggio we now see him in pairs and groups all the time. I have no idea which is better, but his teachers at the Reggio school seem to like it.
Having been through Montessori, I think it's fantastic for kids that are naturally self-driven. I had a great time when it came to learning science and English (the two subjects I cared the most about).
Howrver, I was also pretty far behind in math for reasons unrelated to ability (standardized testing and secondary educational success indicate that I'm actually pretty good at math). I also left with very underdeveloped time management and study skills.
Could these downsides have been mitigated? Definitely, and my parents largely made sure they were. But in talking to my peers at the time, my parents after the fact, and parents of to hers that went to Montessori schools, I think the general idea holds.
Point being that self driven education is fantastic for a lot of reasons. But it will also let a lot of kids stay far behind their ability if not carefully monitored.
I think there might be a pattern across education with a strong ideology (Montessori, Waldorf, Classical education, etc) that they aren't very good at recognizing when the ideology is failing a kid. The relatively weak and mushy educational philosophy of a normal public school is also a somewhat reasonable way to run a school that has to take kids wherever they are at and wherever they came from.
>that they aren't very good at recognizing when the ideology is failing a kid.
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."
Nope, fully accredited Montessori school and trained Montessori teachers.
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.
the method struggles with students that can't find that internal motivation
it was my impression that this should not be a problem, but i have to admit that my knowledge and experience with montessori is not enough to understand why this would or would not be the case.
if this is really a problem, it needs to be addressed, and i would find it surprising if it hasn't already been solved in the meantime. i don't believe that this is a new problem.
I don't doubt that it's a solvable problem. Basically any educational method claims to work for every kid, and in theory they all do.
I just think that any method of education is a series of tradeoffs. Time management and difficulty working on thing you don't like (and a lot of this is personal experience, both my own and in discussions with others) seems to be the largest tradeoff.
Bottom line is that almost no system gets implemented perfectly, so it's important to understand the common "failure" points. This seems to be the Montessori one.
Thats not to say this is a bad thing! Depending on your beliefs, decreased study skills and/or mediocre time management are way less important than maintaining a natural curiosity. But the skills some kids end up missing are very important in traditional schooling environments like universities and high schools.
any educational method claims to work for every kid
it's not about the claim. we can't afford it not to. at least not for a system that we would like to apply nationwide (which is what i would like to do with montessori) because we don't always have the luxury of multiple schools in one region where kids can switch. maybe not even the luxury of multiple streams in one school, esp. in rural areas where there barely enough students for a single class. (at least by putting multiple years into one class, you need less students from each age group to fill a class, which makes smaller schools possible)
as a specialized school, not being able to handle very kind of student is fine. as a general school that would be a problem.
Time management and difficulty working on thing you don't like
what bothers me is that montessori is supposed to teach exactly that because you have more freedom to manage you time. so i can't accept that this is montessori's failure point. because it should not be. this is to vital a skill to miss out on. i don't know the answer for this. i am not nearly familiar enough with how he montessori method is supposed to work here.
rather it wasn't montessori period. as it has been mentioned multiple times, the name montessori is not protected. anyone can claim to be a montessori teacher even if they didn't get any training. my wife went through AMI training. i have observed it at times. it is rigorous. and i have observed classes with trained teachers. the difference is noticeable
what i am saying is more like: if you didn't learn math in school you didn't have a good teacher. because no good teacher would fail at teaching you math. that's the very definition of what a good teacher is, and it is the definition of what good montessori is. the no true scotsman fallacy does not apply here.
if the expected outcome is not achieved, they were not doing it right.
My son goes to an AMI accredited school with AMI accredited teachers only. In general parents in elementary rave about the school. However, we did talk to a few parents whose kids are in elementary that had the same problem with mathematics. Their kids weren't interested in Math and they didn't do as much as they could do. The teacher did try to push a bit and the kids didn't do no mathematics but they were easily one year below what they should be. One of our close friend who had that specific problem with his daughter solved it easily with tuition but complains that it shouldn't be the case.
In kindergarten (casa), there's a lot of structure with individualised work and a child is unlikely to have gaps in a specific subject. On the other hand, I think that in elementary with the stronger focus on group projects, it's easier for certain subject to fall by the wayside if a student doesn't particularly care for them.
So every good Montessori school has a 100% success rate? Edit: and corollary, I guess, any Montessori school that has less than 100% success rate is not a good Montessori school?
> the no true scotsman fallacy does not apply here.
the no true scotsman fallacy goes like this: no true scotsman would to X, but then you find one that does X.
but the situation here is more like: no true scotsman doesn't have scottisch ancestors or at least live in scotland.
i don't have scottish ancestors, and i have never even been there, so i can't ever be a true scotsman, as much as i'd like to be one.
it doesn't have to be a 100% success rate but being pretty far behind in math is a serious failure that makes me question the qualification of the teacher.
it can't be a failure of the montessori method because the very design and goal of the method is to not let that happen. or at least the chance is very small. and then it is still a failure of the teacher and not the method.
and since anyone can claim to do montessori without any certification, my bet is on that being the case.
it would be like a car without wheels. no true car is missing wheels. it could not fulfill its purpose.
>it can't be a failure of the montessori method because the very design and goal of the method is to not let that happen. or at least the chance is very small. and then it is still a failure of the teacher and not the method.
High intensity interval training (HIIT) is an exercise method that involves very short (think under 5 minutes) intetvals of max effort exercise followed by breaks. This methodology validates very well in scientific literature, both conceptually and in exercise studies that show impressive fitness gains.
It also, by many accounts from researchers and participants, sucks super hard to do correctly. You need to be putting in truly grueling amounts of effort during the intervals to see the advertised benefits. Most people, even when they try to do this, aren't doing it correctly.
I think you could say two things about someone that's not seeing results from HIIT:
1. HIIT is super effective; if you're not getting good results, it's because you're doing it incorrectly.
2. HIIT is not actually a reasonable exercise regimen for most people; this means it's not a great exercise regimen.
Statement 1 is logically true. Statement 2 can be more or less true depending on the theory (walking 20 minutes a day is a lot more reasonable than requiring total exhaustion, whereas a theoretical routine that requires Tasering yourself is less reasonable and makes Statement 2 much more true).
What I've described as my experience in Montessori is definitely Statement 2. I'm sure the method has ways to combat my problems, and if I had gone to a "better" Montessori school it's entirely possible they would have dealt with them. But from what I've seen, these specific problems crop up enough that I think they're a fair criticism.
Sure, there's an element of that. But I think it's fair to say that life involves doing things you don't want to do sometimes and Montessori struggles with that.
That's taken care of in the study design. The population was all kids who applied to the lottery. And the treatment group wasn't those who actually attended the Montessori school, but those who were offered a place due to the lottery.
So I don't see how special needs would bias the results. If the lottery excludes those with special needs (either by design or due to self-selection) then there's no bias between control group and treatment group. If the lottery doesn't exclude but the enrollment decision is biased by special needs, then it doesn't matter because they use ITT and not enrolment.
Schools are not designed to calculate the actual cost on a per student basis.
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.
Yeah, the intention to treat design is a particularly nice touch, not so common outside of biostatistics. They also compare the full cost of Montessori vs. plain ol', not the cost to the state, which could otherwise have given the Montessori schools (which are in wealthier neighborhoods on average) an unfair advantage if they have a lot of parents chipping in with donations and help. I've skimmed through the methods section and it does seem like they've gone to great lengths to allow for a fair comparison.
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.
you might lose that above-average enthusiasm and expertise
yes, but montessori training can be done in one year (if you do it fulltime, my wife did i over multiple years 2 or 3 months each summer)), and it is entirely child focused. very different from traditional teacher training.
if we assume that every teacher starts their training with some amount of enthusiasm then the difference in enthusiasm and even more so in expertise should be minimal.
I've skimmed through the methods section and it does seem like they've gone to great lengths to allow for a fair comparison. That doesn't necessarily mean the result will extrapolate
Yes, I had exactly the same reaction. They appear to be presenting their work honestly, completely and clearly, so that other people have enough information to draw their own conclusions.
Most of public schools over the world struggle with much more basic problems than methods or programs. The most important thing IMHO is a stable environment. You can use the very best methods and programs, but if teachers change frequently, like it become more and more a norm in public schools, all these don't matter much really.
Somehow most of my circle of friends are public school teachers. Sure, there are teachers who forgot their "why" and only still do it for the (not very impressive) paycheck and eventual pension. But most teachers really, REALLY care about seeing kids succeed. The problems they talk about frequently are:
1. Lack of support from parents. Many parents treat school as free daycare and are not invested at all in their kids. They don't care of their kid gets good grades, they don't care if they get bad grades. They don't come to parent-teacher conferences. When their kid gets in trouble, they either insist that their kid didn't do anything wrong. Or literally tell the school, "hey, after that morning bell rings, he's your problem, don't hassle me about it."
2. Lack of funding. Need I say more.
3. Lack of authority. If a kid is being constantly disruptive, the teachers are told they just have to deal with it. They can't eject a kid from the classroom for ANY reason except when physical harm is imminent. My son's class had several students who were pretty much allowed to be on their chromebooks all day every day because the alternative was constant verbal abuse toward the their classmates and teacher. My son thought this was deeply unfair. He wasn't wrong.
4. Many school systems have a kind of twisted version of "no child left behind." All the kids who have special educational, emotional, or behavioral needs get plopped into regular classrooms with regular teachers. This is bad for basically everyone. The kids with special needs aren't getting the specialized teaching they require. If they are disruptive (and they often are when they aren't getting what they need), the whole class falls behind in learning because the teacher has to spend 1/2 their time dealing with 1/30th of the class.
Or even more basic, if the parents don't have the time or temperament to properly participate in parenting, then the teachers or the school aren't really going to matter either.
i believe some countries have a different experience. in a report about participating on online classes from home during covid in germany it was observed that kids with worse conditions at home were disadvantaged the most, which leads to the reverse conclusion that for these kids going to school did matter.
I think that anecdote leads to the same conclusion, no? Children with worse parents have worse outcomes?
All the kids with engaged parents who participated in online classes from home probably did just fine.
I'm not saying going to school doesn't matter, I'm saying that what kind of school you go to is going to matter a lot less if your parents can't do a good job. Or put another way, what kind of parents you have is the dominant influence in your educational outcome.
This matters because when thinking about what kind of policies are needed to influence educational outcomes, they may not need to directly have to do with school.
not quite. your claim was that with a bad situation at home, school does not make a difference. while i understand the opposite. the worse the situation at home, the more of a difference school makes for them.
i see it like this:
good home + good school = good outcome
good home + no school = good outcome
bad home + good school = ok outcome
bad home + no school = bad outcome
so for a good home school does not matter. for a bad home it does. (i am ignoring bad schools, they probably make things worse in either case)
It's much more complicated than that. For example in my experience a school per se doesn't matter much for many kids from problematic homes. What matters is that they get a time away from home. COVID lockdowns killed exactly that – they didn't have to be away from home and it was very bad for their mental health.
Then there is a growing number of parents who are actively working against the school, undermine the child's trust against school and teachers etc. Most of the time a school can't do anything with these and outcome is always bad.
Then there is a growing number of children who don't do well in school no matter what. They can have a good home and good school, but because of some neurodiversity for example do very bad anyway.
I also don't agree that good home alone is enough for good outcome. It really depends from many things.
In short – education, outcome from school and home etc are hyperindividual and there is no hard rules.
That's great! I did Montessori through 2nd grade, it was formative and important for me because I suspect I'm a little on the spectrum. Montessori helped me thrive in a way that was critical for my development at the time. I also suspect that switching to public school was equally important to toughen me up.
Table S34 shows that over 20% of the control group either stayed home or didn't provide info on what they did. (Compared with ~4% of the intent-to-treat group)
So, sadly, they weren't able to directly compare 'public Montessori PK3' with 'public non-Montessori PK3'.
That lowers the statistical power of the experiment. It does not bias it. That's the beauty of intention-to-treat designs: they trade away bias for lower power -- a worthwhile trade every day of the week.
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.
So long as it's a true Montessori and not just in name only.
The number of programs I see touting Montessori, Classical, and other models is wild. Usually it's charter and private schools that say one thing but do another.
Might be due to many other things than the Montessori methodology. Such as peer quality and teacher quality, potentially better and more expensive/healthy lunches or a million other things.
montessori methodology and training (at least as certified by AMI) is a strong selector for teacher quality. trainees have to spend 90 hours in class just observing children and writing reports about their observations as part of their training. they learn to understand what the kids need and how to teach them. i am not aware that traditional teacher education does any of that.
likewise peer quality should not be even a factor because of the way how montessori education works. children are not given the opportunity to disrupt others.
the methodology is all-encompassing. it affects the children from the moment they enter the school, until they leave to go home. most of the potential other factors in the school are eliminated by the methodology itself.
it's hard to envision. you have to observe a class in action to understand why.
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.
Okay, that's an empirical question. I rather doubt it and think that the more adept teachers are more likely to apply there and to get through it. It's a filtering mechanism.
if montessori is adopted as part of a national or state curriculum then there would not be a filter anymore. and i do not think may people would fail the training. from what i saw it is rigorous and intensive, but it is not difficult. certainly not more difficult that traditional teacher education. the only teachers that would struggle would be lazy ones that enter the training with a preconceived idea of what teaching is about and find that idea challenged.
I doubt that you need any of that or it has any use for dealing with kids ages 3-6. Every granny and auntie knew how to do it since time immemorial. Just let them play, go out in the yard, chase the ants, dig some holes in the mud, run around, play with a ball. Eat and take a nap, look at picture books, have the teacher tell a story while the kids sit around her etc.
What matters is to have low-stress, motivated teachers with good personalities, empathy and intelligence. And similarly a filtered peer group. All the rest is window dressing.
The article doesn't really address why Montessori programs performed better at lower costs: these classrooms emphasize self-directed, hands-on learning where children choose activities based on their interests, driving independence and curiosity. Traditional classrooms follow a rigid teacher-led curriculum with structured lessons and uniform pacing for all students.
I went to a Montessori school from pre-K through 6th grade. I totally agree with this article. It is not easy to make this work on a public school-sized scale. The problem in education is not funding. We were a private school, but we made it work on a shoestring.
The biggest problem with public school is school size and class size. The last century of school building built prison-like megaliths, when it should have built a much more distributed system. Class sizes under 20 and schools under 120 at least through middle school would raise a far less pathologically self-centered society. But most people who vote/make decisions would have to care more deeply, so I think it's a non-starter in the US, and more and more some other countries.
Kids stop caring way too young as a self-preservation mechanism. This means many of them also stop trying... It's a spiral that can only be broken by restructuring.
The biggest problem with public school is school size and class size
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.
I have experience with Montessori, and I love the system. But it doesn't work for everybody. The Montessori educators I have known were open about the common situation where about 1 in 20 kids just do not learn with the lack of structure - they never become self-starters. In a public Montessori with large class sizes, there had better be a very clear plan of how to help those kids. We started our kids in Montessori and switched to Waldorf because my eldest really needed more structure, and my wife didn't want to try again.
When we transitioned our charter Waldorf to a public Waldorf, the kids experiencing it for their first year absolutely thrived. I would love to see both systems expand significantly in the public space, and have educators with enough savvy to help kids find their best place.
I think that even a more traditional school system can be totally healthy, and should stay part of the school mix. I have seen it work out relatively well in other countries. It just doesn't work when run like a for-profit prison.
PLEASE do your due diligence before considering Waldorf for your kids.
I'm not saying that kids cannot have a good experience at a Waldorf school, or that all their educational ideas are bad. Just that once you children have been there for a couple of years, you learn some very disturbing truths about the organization. It's not an education institution as much as it is a religious organization - your children WILL be taught hymns about god and angels in class. The teachers will not admit to this. They will be taught from the original lessons of Steiner, who had some rather unconventional pseudo-scientific ideas (even for his day). This is coming from a dad who had his kids at Waldorf for three years, and I'm so glad I finally got them out - even with the difficult academic transition.
There is plenty of information published about their organization online, and growing awareness worldwide.
My kids went to charter/public Waldorf. I personally am Catholic (not Protestant-adjacent like Waldorf tradition) and even though they do have some weird ceremonies that I am happy the charter Waldorfs don't adopt, my decidedly agnostic-to-atheist siblings sent their kids to private and charter Waldorfs and did not seem to find it so much of a problem. A Dragon Pagaent focused on Saint George and the Dragon (which we did have) is not much of a problem for most I would say. There is a chance you had a bad school. There are problems in every school, but none centered around Waldorf curriculum for any of us, and collectively we have over 50 school years of our kids in several different Waldorfs around the US. Any older pedagogy: Waldorf, Montessori, traditional schooling - they all need improvement. Still, there is no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
My kids are at a Waldorf school currently. I would not be surprised by your experience from what I’ve learned. However I’ve also seen a truly incredible environment at my school and zero cult adherence to Steiner. My best explanation is that each Waldorf school is very much its own island - it seems to be a very federated system.
We enrolled our kids in K thinking the same as you - some light eco-minded spirituality never harmed anyone. Until we started to learn more about their actual philosophy.
From my experience, the teachers and admin will actively disclaim any adherence to the Waldorf / Anthroposophy connections, but I can assure you that if this is truly a Waldorf school (not "Waldorf-inspired"), they are 100% absolutely members of the Anthroposophy organization. I saw teachers actually do things like quickly hide away Steiner's books from their desk when parents would drop in. But do dig a bit deeper into your school if you can - you'll find there is a "college of teachers" and other such secretive meetings, religious Christian-inspired songs being taught to the children (speaking of God and angels from heaven), and more such nonsense at your school.
If you are a Anthroposophist, then by all means, send your kids there. But Waldorf has an international track record[1] of hiding covering their tracks and pretending to be secular when they are anything but. They just don't belong to a religion that you've heard much about [2].
"Class sizes under 20 and schools under 120 at least through middle school would raise a far less pathologically self-centered society."
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".
I think you are missing the context of what I said: I didn't say: all countries with large class sizes are self-centered. I said: in a self-centered society, smaller class sizes would be a big help to undo the harm that currently exists. Don't underestimate the influence schools and school communities have on the formation of character. It is huge.
1. It's easier to form friendships in a smaller group. In larger groups it is much easier for it to became a wall of people rather than individual persons. Large groups can be extremely overwhelming for children (they are still overwhelming for many adults).
2. It is much easier for the teacher to see the group dynamics, and jump in to make sure nobody is excluded. If the teacher doesn't do this, many of the benefits of smaller class size will be lost. Teachers need to very vigilant to teach that it's not okay to exclude kids and not play with them, its not ok to bully, etc. If there is nobody in the room to foster healthy relationships, they will never reach even close to their full potential.
I have seen and talked about this in quite a bit of detail with educators who are continually successful, and it is not hard to figure out - it requires devotion rather than advanced pedagogical theory and strategy.
> 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.
to quote @inglor_cz - this is big if… you are arguing against generalization in your first paragraph and then you are proceeding to generalize… I am only child and my daughter is too and neither of us (especially me) have been pampered
I am an only child too. "Tend to be" is quite a soft claim, though, with plenty of room for exceptions.
The Little Emperors phenomenon is still a thing. If a kid has two parents and four grandparents who have no other descendands, it is USUALLY on the receiving end of a lot more attention and resources than if there are six of them.
Costs aren't exactly lower. The study noted that the cost savings came from higher student to teacher ratios in 1st-3rd offsetting higher costs of teacher training and classroom materials over a hypothetical amortization period. This is rational but not indicative of flipping a switch to save x%.
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.
higher costs of teacher training and classroom materials
the current cost of montessori teacher training and materials is a matter of scale.
the training only takes one year. the cost comes from it being done on top of the traditional teacher education that most teachers likely went through.
if montessori training would be included into traditional teacher education, the cost would be absorbed (you could skip a few other redundant classes). likewise, the material produced at scale would be cheaper.
Sure, sometimes short term spending enables long term savings. And on an even longer time scale, how do improved outcomes figure in?
The significant factor is how a change like this is implemented in context. Within a public school system there may or may not be convincible political appetite to increase short term costs for longer term gains.
It seems that the district(s) studied are making those changes and studying the outcomes in order to make prudent choices long term, which is not flipping a switch but is doing more than nothing.
Sounds good. The school systems are messed up, everybody agrees on that. But the article is missing out the underlying cause for the results. What exactly caused the beneficial outcome? Montessori itself is quite a vast term nowadays.
The article is clear — lottery offer of a seat in a school which met inclusion criteria. Inclusion criteria are clearly outlined in the supplemental materials which are a single URL away which also include details on the allocation.
>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?
These were randomised. It sounds like they eliminated this selection bias.
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.
I think it largely depends upon the child. I thrived in a Montessori environment right through sixth grade before transitioning to a standard “prep school” and found myself way ahead of the other kids in a lot of things.
Alternately, my son was much the same as your kid. He struggled in a Montessori school which was very similar to the one I went to (in fact, my lower elementary teacher was the learning specialist at his school while he was there). He couldn’t handle the open structured style of the learning, and just floundered badly. We ended up getting him into a much more structured special ed school where he succeeded and is now off doing well at college.
It absolutely depends on the child. I phrased it too generally. I like the idea of Montessori a lot, but it depends a lot on executive skills: being able to plan, start project, finish projects, etc. My kids both sucked at that, and I'm not great at it either. My oldest son, despite his stellar IQ, completely drowned in projects. No idea what to do, when to start, how to start, how to finish it, and even when he finished it, he forgot to turn it in. He simply needs more guidance.
He's now finally getting better at it, at 16, which is about time, because at the university, you have to be able to do all of this. I sucked at it in university, so maybe it's actually good that he ran into these problems earlier than that, but for him to actually finish school, it was not a good fit.
> My oldest son, despite his stellar IQ, completely drowned in projects. No idea what to do, when to start, how to start, how to finish it, and even when he finished it, he forgot to turn it in. He simply needs more guidance.
> He's now finally getting better at it, at 16, which is about time, because at the university, you have to be able to do all of this.
Struggling with this is exactly why I never quite finished my degree. All the papers where I had to choose what to write about, without having an immediate topic I just had to write about, never even got started. Thesis is an even bigger project. Dropping out and not having to do it anymore felt like a relief.
you may be comparing different countries. not needing to be able to do all of this sounds like a very school like university. the universities i know are not like that, and you most certainly need those skills.
So while it is randomized in the terms of who they chose to participate, the students did attend already existing schools. This could lead to selection bias from the participates, as the schools themselves are located in wealthier areas as that is where their clientèle are.
Lower income families may not have been able to take advantage of the lottery due to distance constrains thus self-opting out.
I have not read the study methodology details, the schools may have been chosen to avoid this problem but just wanted to point out that just because something say "random lottery" it may not be.
Still the ones who got in would be with more other students who opted in, the ones who didn't get in would be with more students who didn't opt-in to the lottery.
You would need to have a second group of those who lost the lottery and were all put into the same non-Montessori school with no others who didn't opt-in maybe.
Yeah but even then teachers that opt in to train in Montessori might just be better teachers, and converting a whole school system to Montessori, training everyone, might not have as good results.
In Manhattan, all the preschools we looked at were either Montessori style or Reggio Emilia approach. I could not detect any meaningful difference between them.
There's a nonprofit Montessori school running in the biggest slum in Bangkok, Thailand which provides free schooling to the slums kids. It seems to work well.
They're always looking for foreign tourists to help teach English, even if it's just for a few days or a week.
My kids went to Montessori school, first private which was good, they learned a lot of life skills, not so much academics tbh, which is why I switched them to public Montessori, which was in name only.
What worked for us better is competence grading which is Summit system that originated in California.
But principles are system are great, if you can make it work. It requires effort from teachers and parents and all. It is not trivial to make it work everywhere.
I compared Montessori and non Montessori labeled daycares/preschools for my 3 and 4 year olds, and was unable to discern a meaningful difference in the course of the day.
Edit: I ended up going with the daycare that had cameras (so that at least management could audit employees), and a livestream for the parents, which was at a non Montessori daycare. Staff turnover also seemed lower. Was more expensive, but have been happy with results.
From the article:
"All 24 public study Montessori schools met basic Montessori criteria (SI Appendix, section 3A), but implementation varied widely. "
"The final implementation criteria for school inclusion were thus:
• 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."
So seems like the criteria for this research is fairly good.
In general though it's hard to tell if a school is Montessori or not. The method is not trademarked and anyone can claim to be a Montessori school ,or Montessori inspired etc...
There are two organizations that certify - AMI, which was created by Maria Montessori's daughter and functions mostly in Europe, and AMS which is an American organization founded by people inspired by the Montessori method.
AMI is stricter while AMS is more modern, but most places that identify as Montessori is neither.
I would say the best way to identify if a school is Montessori is first if they have mixed-age classrooms, the standard is a 3 year class (so 1-3, 4-6, 7-9...).
If all the kids in a class are in the same age, it's not Montessori.
There are two actual standards around this (AMI and AMS), but therm "Montessori" is mainly fungible in the day care market.
The difference between these two, from my experience, is HUGE. Certified AMI schools, while a little more rigid in terms of teaching fine motor skills, generally have been better at making my kid more independent at doing things he likes to do. AMS schools are kind of wishy washy by comparison, and my kid was bored and under-engaged.
Additionally, even schools that label themselves Montessori will have significant differences in how the educational concepts are applied and to what degree. It’s not a regimented approach/program. I only say this to suggest that any parent interested in Montessori schools should definitely visit and ask questions before enrolling your student. Make sure that the experience will align with your expectations.
In my experience, I would say no. Same as similar approaches (e.g. Waldorfschule)
Once I asked some advocate of the method, what was it exactly; the reply was very good and detailed, but then I pointed out institutes that “follow” the method, which were nothing as what he described. From that point, it was a mess. “Well, you must not absolutely do it that way” “there are variations” etc. I was pretty dissatisfied with the description, and was clear that is not very well defined.
My children attended Montessori schools, and it really is a wonderful system.
I would really like to see an extension of this learning method up through high school --- the closest thing I'm aware of was a school I attended in Mississippi for a couple of years --- classes were divided between academic and social, social classes (homeroom, phys ed, social studies, &c.) were attended at one's age, while academic classes (reading, math, science, geography, history, &c.) were by ability (with a limit on no more than 4 grades ahead up to 8th grade) --- after 8th grade that was removed and students were allowed to take any classes.
Some of the faculty were accredited as faculty at a local college, and where warranted, either professors travelled from there to the school, or students travelled to the college for classes --- it wasn't uncommon for students to graduate high school and simultaneously be awarded a college degree.
Apparently, the system was deemed unfair because it accorded a benefit to the students who were able to take advantage of it, with no commensurate compensation for those who were not, so the Miss. State Supreme Court dismantled it.
I had a good impression of "Montessori" from hearing that Larry/Sergey/Bezos went to one. When I put my kid in it at 3 years old, he hated it. As I looked into it more, it seems to me that it is actually very rigid, with kids being able to play with just a small set of toys that don't really exercise their creativity, and with little opportunity for group play. We switched him to a Reggio Emilia school where the kids are constantly doing group projects and art and he enjoys it a lot more. I recommend parents observe what's actually happening in classrooms and think about what's best for their kid in the early years instead of assuming "Montessori" is the best path.
Like anything, there are lower and higher quality implementations of Montessori programs. What you are saying here does not reflect the Montessori program I went through myself, and I think I can credit the Montessori program with a great deal of my later stage curiosity and drive to outperform.
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.
We visited multiple Montessori schools for both my kids and I can confidently say that I met some of the saddest and coldest teachers I have ever seen in my life. I am not sure that is really best environment for small kids.
I myself went to shitty public schools and became an exceptional student later on. I am doubtful about the impact of early education on future success.
Not intending to be rude, but the common denominator here might be the region these schools are based in, vs the particular flavor of education.
A close family member of mine has taught Montessori for 30 years at the same school. The school has changed a lot in those 30 years (for the worse, unfortunately), but it’s nothing to do with the education methods and everything to do with broader trends in the area.
I agree. In Austin, Montessori preschools tend to be more rigid and doctrinaire. I don’t know if this is true everywhere, but they also tend to have disproportionately high representation of immigrant families. My impression, based on 8 years of interactions at two different Montessori schools, is immigrant parents seem more deferential toward the teachers and administrators. And more interested in measurable academic outcomes. So the schools respond by keeping the kids on a more linear path with engaging the various “works” (Montessorispeak for projects or learning kits). That said, I think it’s still a great system.
I grew up attending a public elementary school in Sacramento that implemented Open Education. It had many similarities to Montessori— kids received a weekly “contract” with their personalized learning plan and assignments due. If you wanted to do all your math work on Monday, reading on Tuesday, and spend Wednesday through Friday on science, you could (within reason since some things required group lessons). It was an amazing system and I feel extremely fortunate to have experienced it.
That said, now I kind of wonder how much the California open-minded, seeker mentality was responsible for this.
https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/03/27/520953343/open-sc...
Not rude at all I live in NYC. Education methods mean nothing if they are not executed well. Plus I want my kids to decent human beings above all.
I never went to Montessori, but did cub scouts at one and those were some odd kids and parents. I felt like I was on an alien planet. Not bad people or anything, just certainly different. Like they took a class on how to act human, but lost something in translation.
I do recall there being a lot of toys and stuff. There was an old Texas Instruments computer that caught my interest as we had computers with Windows 95 at my school. Apparently nobody was allowed to touch it though.
My guess is the best school for your kids is one where they're safe and one with curious and motivated kids and enthusiastic teachers that can help inspire and unlock talent. The method is secondary, but kids should be both challenged and given some amount of freedom to explore. It also helps if the parents care and ensure their kids are functioning members of society.
the best school for your kids is one where they're safe and one with curious and motivated kids and enthusiastic teachers that can help inspire and unlock talent
the montessori method is designed to achieve exactly that. so the method matters because it enables children to become like that.
Agreed. But that is not necessarily the Montessori system. Plus you can kind of do that yourself to your kid and not expect the school system to do that. Unfortunately we live in a real world and teaching is a job just like any. No one else other than you will have the best incentives to see your kids succeed.
Yeah. In general I also don't like much about the vibe of Montessori parents.
[flagged]
That is definitely not my experience. The teachers at my kids’ school are vivacious and friendly. They very clearly love their jobs, and love watching kids grow.
I went to one near me just to check it out. They started to moan about public education system and seemed want to be alternative for the sake of it. Some parents I know there are definitely on a woo-woo spectrum. School system in NZ is already a lot like montessori with heaps of fluidity.
p.s. I’ve been joking that soon you won’t be able to take your kid anywhere without a montessori/waldorf/reggio franchise.
The thing is Montessori doesn't mean anything. Any school can call themselves Montessori. So it all depends on actual accreditation. Some accreditations are also not worth the paper they're printed on (like NAMC). AMI and AMS are considered to be the two most serious accreditation
My son's school is AMI accredited and at least there's not much woo-woo here. Children have to be up to date with vaccination (or they're not admitted), only thing slightly woo-woo (from the local point of view) is that the parents who chose this school chose it because they want their kid to have more of a play-based, child directed education and don't want them to have homework and tuition in kindergarten. This is in HK where a lot of children going to public schools will have homework and will get tuition in order to prepare for the primary school entrance exam (and later to the middle school entrance exam).
On the other hand, Waldorf is fully woo-woo. They claim that children should not be taught to read before they get their first adult teeth and have a bunch of very weird racist myth about reincarnation (read up on anthroposophy)
NZ primary schools have no homework and are play based too, hence why it made little sense to me.
Sounds like Montessori is healthier than public HK schools but it's more borderline in NZ, as parent said. Nobody has homework in kindergarten there!
Yea Steiner is woo-woo but so what? Most people are woo-woo (religion) and perhaps old Rudolf realized it has some value in human development. The specific details of the woo hardly matter.
As I see it, the main values of Steiner are the close community and the not forcing them to do logical thinking in Piaget's preoperational stage (before 7 years old), which Rudolf seems to have interpreted as play-play-play all day-day-day, but that might be fine.
Yes, public schools in Asian countries tend to be very problematic to say the least. New Zealand, Australia and Europe tend to have vastly better schools when it comes to respecting the child's need to play. I do see the value of things being child-directed versus being play based but directed by the teacher (like I had as a kid in France) and that for me is the benefit of Reggio Emilia and Montessori.
To be fair, I also wouldn't put my kid in a religious school :) But yes, I agree there's some good ideas with waldorf. Personally though if I had been told when I was a kid not read before 7, I would have been rather pissed off.
I don't doubt your experience, but mine was the opposite. I went to a couple of different Montessori schools, from kindergarten through 6th grade. The majority of our day was what I would call "structured free play"; even in 6th grade, I think formal "sit down" lessons were only half the day. Teachers would often do impromptu sort of lessons for a single or small group of children, like if they were playing with map toys they'd come over and talk about different countries and the weather and food and whatever.
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).
There are different “factions” and accreditation organizations in Montessori. Some are more liberal and others are authoritarian and rigid. Not all Montessori schools are like you describe, but some certainly are.
In our market we see lots of the use of the word Montessori for marketing value only, when it practice it often means something like: "we have a bunch of wooden toys and a certain aesthetic in our classroom." I've heard these referred to as "Monte-sorta."
I agree, and sadly this kind of gives the Montessori label pretty limited predictive value. Turns out you just need to find a good school, regardless of label.
It really comes down to the teachers skill and personality- and that often comes down to if the school can afford the best teachers. Often in the USA regular public schools in wealthy communities will have better teachers than you will find at most private Montessori schools.
Part of schools "affording" the best teachers is not money, but the amount of discipline problems they need to deal with. Which correlates to the financial status of the families at that school. For tons of reasons.
Which families tend to win the lottery to go to these schools? The parents that can afford to. Even if the school is free, the transportation is often not. Plus the parents have to have enough free time to be aware of the lottery for their 3 year old.
I suppose this means that Montessori is not a single movement, but multiple movements all claiming to be the proper one.
most improper ones are simply capitalizing on the name recognition, some may have the idealism but fail in the implementation. if you do enough research it is pretty clear that only AMI accredited teachers implement the original method as designed by maria montessori. AMS comes close. and everyone else never received any form of montessori training at all.
(disclaimer: my wife got accredited by AMI)
Same here. My three-year old loved maps and we always played with them (making map of her room, etc etc)
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
I’m by far not an expert on it (my wife is, she teaches Montessori), but AFAIK what you observed was because it isn’t viewed as play, but as work - as in school work. All of the activities are called “works,” and they’re taken very seriously.
Part of this is, I think, to teach responsibility; for example, if a student gets a work out, they’re expected to put it back exactly how they found it. Montessori classrooms are incredibly well-organized, with everything having its (labeled) place.
Update: I asked my wife, she said that without other context, it sounded like the school may not be “following the child,” a core tenet of Montessori. She said that while they might steer a new student away from that initially, if they’re clearly interested, she’ll bump that lesson up early instead of when it was scheduled.
Can you share where your wife learned the Montessori method from?
Center for Montessori Teacher Education/North Carolina. They don’t have the greatest website, but they’re MACTE-accredited, and AMS-affiliated.
I have a book "The Montessori Toddler".
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.
seems so obviously wrong to me that I would be cautious about the rest of their teachings
that doesn't seem fair. the reality is complicated. i found this paper which talks about this issue: i just briefly skimmed it, but it suggests that the older kids get the better they can make the distinction:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3689871/
generalizing that into a single statement from which age fantasy is fine is difficult if not impossible. as a parent, i wouldn't worry, but as an educator i need to be more cautious because such recommendations tend to be taken seriously, and therefore it is reasonable to err on avoiding fantasy for younger kids.
kids thinking they can fly are a risk: https://slate.com/advice/2025/08/parenting-advice-daughter-i...
and therefore such advice is more defensive than to be taken as a hard rule that must not be crossed.
That's actually my biggest pet peeve with Montessori and I say that as a father whose son goes to a Montessori school.
Is it true that younger children have a harder time making the distinction than older children? Yes that's true. There's research that shows it. But does that necessarily mean that removing exposure to fantasy in stories is beneficial? And would a child exposed to fantasy not learn to distinguish between make belief and reality earlier? There's actually some research that shows that [1]
So while there's a lot I love about my son's school, the stance on fantasy is something I vehemently disagree with. What's interesting though is that most parents in my son's class will happily read fantasy books with anthropomorphised animals, talk about Santa Claus, etc... and completely disregard the idea that fantasy shouldn't be introduced. Officially, we can't give books with fantasy stories to the school library but last time I went to read to children there, 20-30% of the stories had clear fantasy elements.
If you're interested about the rest of Montessori ideas, it's interesting to read "Montessori: The Science Behind the Genius" by Angeline Lillard. She tries to go through most of the Montessori teachings and justify it with existing studies etc... For most part, she finds studies that are relevant and solid but not for the part of fiction where you can really feel that she struggles to justify her own bias.
[1]
- https://www.alisongopnik.com/Papers_Alison/Walker%20Gopnik%2... for a survey of research on that. It shows that fantasy is both beneficial and that children can start distinguishing between fantasy and reality.
- https://liberalarts.mercer.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/20... Do monsters dream? Young children’s understanding of the fantasy/reality distinction
Thanks for the recommendations.
I attended one for elementary and middleschool. Early on everything we did was in groups. Take the multiplication flash cards and quiz eachother. Mess with the abacus. Look at the geological periods chart, etc. All the stuff seemed pretty fun to me. Yes, we had outdoor recess everyday, alhough we had a good setup with a big playground and some woods on the property. A lot of montessori setups I see now look really spartan like almost a daycare center.
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 think the idea was to get the kids who probably had ADHD to lock in and do their work more
Wow that sounds terrible. My mother used to have me sit in silence at the dining room table to try to get me to do my homework. My god, so much noise. Libraries are similar. People adjusting on a chair, pages turning, pens dropping, car doors outside, eating.... There are just so many freaking little noises. I'd rather have a wall of noise so I can't pick out the distractions and work on whatever I was working on. (Not that it always worked, but I had a chance).
thank you for that detailed insight. i only had the opportunity to observe ad learn about montessori in kindergarten. what you describe is pretty much what i expected from reading about it, but i haven't seen any stories from actual students who experienced it.
it would seem that some groups in your class could have benefited from more teacher attention. or maybe from mixing up the groups.
> had a good impression of "Montessori" from hearing that Larry/Sergey/Bezos went to one.
Oh man… survivorship bias thinking is dangerous.
At last for me, the last thing I wanted to my son would be for him to become Jeff Bezos.
Well said, see my post above. People think that becoming a rich psycho is somehow great. Montessori schools I visited were depressing AF.
Agree that they are rich psychos.
Disagree that this means the probabilistic signal is negative. They did become especially capable psychos.
There is no signal here whatsoever. Elon and Steve which I considers the best entrepreneurs in our life time did not go to so called Montessori schools. Also let us not clump all alternative schooling systems as Montessori.
It really depends on the teacher (like most school systems) and the support of the parents --- a fellow woodworker and I were enlisted to help make educational aids at one of the schools my daughter attended) --- agree one needs to find the best thing for each child.
This comment and the whole conversation is a great argument for the value of science like this study vs a biased sample of anecdata.
We will soon be picking a school for our oldest. (Not in the US.) We're choosing between a Montessori school and a couple others.
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.
If you can, observe the school yards while the kids are playing outside. What's the atmosphere like? How do the kids interact? How do the supervising teachers interact with the children? Would you want your kid to be a part of that? Bonus points if a teacher steps up to kindly ask you what the hell you're doing there! :-)
One factor that has been studied has having a major impact on quality especially in younger years is teacher to student ratio, the less student per teacher, the better the quality. It usually also helps with retention :). I do think that retention is a good element, when looking for my son's school, I read the reviews on Glassdoor and on https://www.internationalschoolsreview.com (paid site) to get a better idea of what teachers thought of the school.
If looking at Montessori, check for certifications. Are they AMI or AMS certified? Those are the two most serious qualifications. If they are not certified, then I think you should be sceptical. Not being certified doesn't mean that the school is necessarily bad but there's a lot of school that trade on Montessori just for marketing purposes and it doesn't bode well for the quality of education when the owner is willing to mislead parents by claiming they're Montessori when they don't try to become certified.
Within alternative schools, Regio Emilia can be good but, from my experience, it's even more dependent on the teacher since there's less structure and it falls on the teacher to take children's input and guide the class toward interesting discussion and group projects. My son went to a Regio Emilia pre-nursery (2 to 3 years old, 2 hours a day) and didn't like it as much as he likes his current Montessori kindergarten. He complains anytime there's a public holiday because he would like to go to school.
I recommend against Waldorf because even though they have some aspects that look good (nature, play based), the underlying philosophy is bat-shit crazy.
Resources if you're interested: - Montessori: The Science behind the Genius by Angeline S. Lillard. Rather academic discussion on the different elements of Montessori education and what studies and research supports it. It's interesting if you're interested in education. I do think that sometimes the author is a bit biased and tries to stretch the meaning of studies to fit her preconceived notion that everything Montessori related is the best thing since sliced bread. In particular, within Montessori there's a weird belief that fantasy elements (like stories with talking animals, etc) are not suitable for children below 6 because they can't reliably distinguish between fantasy and reality. It's something I personally disagree with and the studies that she tries to use to support that point are not really that convincing. - Cribsheet by Emily Oster has a chapter on picking pre-schools that can be useful (and I think applies well to Kindergarten). (I don't always agree with that writer but I do feel that she sometimes has useful points of view)
Montessori is just an educational framework, I have no idea where you draw broad conclusion that the one or two things you looked at deemed it be "rigid" or little opportunity... Sounds like a random bad apple. There's a correlation between gifted children and montessori because it allows them to develop at their own pace which is often faster than that of traditional classrooms etc, it's not for everyone.
I had the exact same experience except my child is still there. No free play, very little time outdoors, very little interaction with classmates, no creativity allowed. Unhappy child who regularly doesn't want to go. We try to give her outdoor play with friends after preschool to make up for it.
I’m sorry you’ve had that experience. My kids’ Montessori school has a playground, athletic field, and butts up against woods, which they regularly go into for activities. One of the classes actually spends most of their time outside - weather permitting - because that teacher is getting her Master’s in some form of education that focuses on outdoor learning.
> it is actually very rigid, with kids being able to play with just a small set of toys that don't really exercise their creativity
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...
> 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.
This is very much dependent on the school (and probably age of the students). At the one my kids go to, as soon as they’re in 1st grade, they have multiple teachers: science, music (which doubles as theater - the entire school does an annual play), art, and P.E., in addition to their main teacher.
For sure, my kids' school was AMI and still had a few ancillary adults. It can still be a bummer most of the day.
>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.
This isn't a hardset rule. We had the main teacher but we also had specific teachers as well for stuff like music, art, languages, or gym class. By middleschool there was no more "main" teacher. You were basically in a committee of teachers all specific including science, english, and history by that point. Part of that I'm sure was to prepare you for highschool in a non montessori setting.
Montessori classroom's weakness is that there is only one guide for all subjects as opposed to a traditional school's subject-specific teachers
which tradition is that? in my country subject-specific teachers don't appear until middle school. so that's a rather moot point for kindergarten and primary school.
Reggio is way better than the other weirdly controlling, Waldorf-like Montessori
I’ve been advocating for this for years so I’m glad to hear you had such a good experience.
At the elementary level, up until about 3rd or 4th grade it always made more sense to me to have lots of smaller “neighborhood” level Montessori schools rather than a few large schools from Kindergarten - 6th.
It's hard to do self paced learning when there's no follow up. I got put into a self-paced learning experiment where we polished off the curriculum in three weeks and played chess the rest of the semester. There was nothing else for us to do. Nobody was ready to fill the remaining months. The whole school has to commit in that direction for that to succeed.
Yeah, as one worked forward, one would arrive in the new class and be handed a stack of work required to catch up to where the class was at (moving forward at the end of a school year was strongly discouraged, but some kids would do it --- if need be, one could take the unfinished assignments home at the end of the year and work on them over the summer, turning them in at the beginning of the year).
I can’t find any record of a Mississippi Supreme Court decision regarding a program like you described. I did find evidence that Mississippi actively permits dual enrollment for secondary and post secondary education. Do you have a source for the decision you referenced?
https://law.justia.com/codes/mississippi/title-37/chapter-15...
he didn't say it went to the Supreme Court or even any Mississippi court
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.
No, after I left the school it was all second/third-hand from letters to my folks from other parents whose children were still attending.
> while academic classes (reading, math, science, geography, history, &c.) were by ability
My issue with this is that it just is selection bias, telling you nothing about how good the method is at teaching.
Does placing by ability actually helps student learn and score better? Or it's just that those who are good and bad already get divided up, and we know not why some are good and others are worse?
> Does placing by ability actually helps student learn and score better?
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.
> This means the students in class 1 get undisrupted classes, learning more and raising their grades.
That's pure hypothetical, and some disruptive kids are also good and could make it to the top class and still be a class clown. Unless you propose more splitting kids up by "disruptiveness".
I don't think any of this tells us of the quality of the method for actually teaching. It's like schools that have really hard entrance exams, and than assert they are the best school, yes in terms that they only allowed the smartest to come in, off course they will see that the students at the school is good, but those students would be good regardless.
It isn't hypothetical, lower disruptive peer-behaviour in a class is associated with better outcomes for the class, across the world.
That's not what was proposed though, what was proposed was to have kids move up as their ability develops.
It's pure hypothesis that this would coincide with less disruption in classes, even more that it would be causative.
I also find it purely hypothetical that it does anything to make kids better.
You said lack of disruptiveness is associated with better outcomes, have any research or data about it? Otherwise it too is pure hypothetical.
A hypothesis isn't bad, but since we're on the topic of ability, let's not devolve into cargo cults.
and the montessori method is effective in lowering disruptive peer-behaviour. it's part of the point. it teaches children to not be disruptive by letting them focus on their activities.
From my limited observations it must; at least in cumulative subjects like math.
Too many kids are just completely lost because they were moved up to the next math class despite not understanding the previous math class.
There was a lot of experimentation with education methods in the 1970's, of which I benefited. I miss the way that decade began for the optimism and courage to experiment.
There are a few K-12 Montessori schools, but not many. My wife is a primary (3-5 year olds) at the only one in our state. My kids are in 2nd and 4th grade, and we intend to see it through. They love it.
>> because it accorded a benefit to the students who were able to take advantage of it, with no commensurate compensation for those who were not
I came to comment (without reading it) that the study results are probably not universal. The programs are self selecting because kids not suited for it won't stay. This is not a critique of the program or the kids who dont fit it. Just an observation that its so "extreme" that only kids who benefit will stay.
My biggest skepticism about Mamdani in NYC is that he wants to get rid of gifted programs. Apparently some thing it's wrong to adjust each child's learning experience to their capacity for learning. Which is... Wild.
If an 8 year old can do algebra, let them cook.
That’s not what he said. He wants to get rid of kids being tracked into gifted kindergartens because a) it’s ludicrous and b) testing four year olds is just a roundabout way of finding the kids with parents who got them a tutor for kindergarten entrance exams, and the replacement metric of getting pre-k teachers to pick them is not much different. He argues that kids don’t need to be shuffled off to special schools until more like 8 years old, when the 2nd grade testing happens.
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).
That makes complete sense. We live in HK and here most kindergarten will have an interview before starting school either at 3 or 4 years old. We applied to a play-based school and to a Montessori school and our son was admitted to both but that's because those two schools target more play focused parents.
So the interviews for those schools are less strict and competitive than some of the better ranked schools where children are competing against children who have tutored and been coached to ace the kindergarten interviews (!?).
I strongly agree with you that there's absolutely no point in testing for giftedness before 2nd grade. Even testing in 2nd grade is fully ripe for creating an arms race between parents by inciting them to hire tutors.
If this is true then I stand corrected. I understand the bias of "rich kids get training" so if he is not killing gifted programs but merely adjusting them, then fine.
I was blown away when I learned that public schools were testing kids before kindergarten and actually assigning the kids to different schools based on the result. I'd only ever heard of that as a "rich people pressure-cooker dystopia" kind of practice.
https://www.chalkbeat.org/newyork/2025/10/02/zohran-mamdani-...
> (with a limit on no more than 4 grades ahead up to 8th grade) --- after 8th grade that was removed and students were allowed to take any classes.
Unless this school had more than 12 grades, why would you describe that as "the limit being removed"?
> and it really is a wonderful system.
Absolutely, how many ghetto kids are in the school? It weeds them out through $ and expulsions.
Thinking the Montessori system is relevant to the public system shows your schooling failed.
Montessori has the ability to chose pedagogy so certainly has facets that are the quite good and should be applied publicly except for liberal arts graduate ideals.
This study is very young children, limited pregnancies and gang bangers, and also not random. It's randomised on kids who enter the lottery.
Discipline is the only thing that matters in schools, $, class sizes, teacher education levels above average, amazing resources all don't matter except how it apply to discipline. We have 100+ years of data. Air-conditioning to control behavior is an example of what helps. Liberal arts graduates destroy anything else that could work so don't interact with them, stay outside their broken world.
> Discipline is the only thing that matters in schools
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/
> Discipline is the only thing that matters in schools, $, class sizes, teacher education levels above average, amazing resources all don't matter except how it apply to discipline.
Got a citation/link?
the montessori method implements discipline. that's one of its features. weeding out ghetto kids is not. that's a problem coming from lack of support from the community/government to pay for a montessori school for those kids. and expulsions should not happen. again, not a feature of montessori education.
I send my child to a private Montessori school. With that said, there's no denying that sending your child to a private Montessori school is similar to parents who buy books in learning to parent are typically better parents not because they read the books but because they care enough to buy the books. If you care enough to send your child to a Montessori school, the parent is invested in the child's success and I think that's way more important.
I spent months doing research for a blog post about One Laptop Per Child last year, and came to a related, but more broad conclusion: it's extremely easy to reach misleading conclusions when studying novel educational methods. No strong conclusion comes without qualifiers related to culture and economics. Moreover, a shocking amount of harm has been done by people trying to apply an educational method outside of the socioeconomic context where its efficacy was proven.
There's a dilemma here, because in order to find ways to improve education, we have to try stuff, right? But how do we remedy the situation when those experiments fail? That's less related to the Montessori thing, but it's interesting to think about.
> But how do we remedy the situation when those experiments fail?
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
In OLPC's case, the remedy was a retroactive, panicked attempt at teaching teachers how to use the laptops, an effort that largely failed.
You're exactly right, though. OLPC failed mostly because it didn't think to teach the teachers how to use the laptops as classroom tools (not that they would have succeeded otherwise). Countries that had the infrastructure to do the onboarding themselves were relatively well-set up to teach their kids anyway.
If this is interesting to you, I highly recommend Morgan Ames' The Charisma Machine.
i think the constructivist idealism got in the way here. i believe the expectation was that they wouldn't need to train the teachers because the students should figure out the laptops on their own.
seems they missed that figuring out the laptop and integrating it into the curriculum are two different things.
i read your post btw, one thing i am wondering about is that you wrote that countries didn't improve electricity in schools because OLPC claimed that this wasn't necessary.
my own speculation is that they simply didn't enough research and didn't expect that the situation would be so bad. it is also my understanding that the hand crank was dropped early because the laptop could not handle the physical stress of cranking, it would break apart. but then a separate hand crank charger was eventually produced after all: https://wiki.laptop.org/go/Peripherals/Hand_Crank but if i did the math right then it would still take an hour to charge the battery with that.
since there was no hand crank the need for electricity was already well known before any deployment, and part of the deployment efforts included improving the electricity infrastructure.
I did high school at a prestigious technical school at my hometown, hard to get in, very competitive. The education itself wasn't that much better than my previous school but they had the name recognition and as getting in was very hard, likely the best students around town.
Almost 100% pass rate to college, mostly the best colleges. Did the education provided there affect this? Likely, but it was much more the self selection of having the best students that were doing a SAT like test to get in.
In my hometown there is something like that. There are two schools, one of them had a year with particularly good approval rates. Competitive parents started preferring that school, finding ways to send their kids there. That school has been sustaining better approval rates since then.
Which should make no sense because the teachers themselves work odd years in one school, even years in the other school.
> Which should make no sense because the teachers themselves work odd years in one school, even years in the other school.
Peers make a huge difference. Before university, I split my high school between two schools - one that was near the top academically, and one that was quite poor. The latter did have some smart students intellectually, but almost none did well academically because it wasn't valued by their peers.
Then I went to a very average state university for undergrad, and a top school for graduate studies. The difference wasn't that high in terms of teaching (the average school actually had much better teachers, but offset it by low expectations). The real difference was in the peers.
You like engineering? You like coding? Want to do some cool side project? Very hard to find someone like you in that average university.
Then when I started working, I started tutoring some middle school kids. The kids seemed totally capable mentally, and I was trying to figure out how they can't retain simple facts like number of months in a year. Until finally it hit me. They don't have problems learning things. It's just that no one in their orbit (peers or parents) care if they know these things. When I was a kid, I'd be an idiot amongst my fellow students if I didn't know it. So I did. Everyone did.
But if you're around people who think it's OK not to know how many days are in a year, chances are you won't know it, no matter how intelligent you are.
In middle school, I had good grades but was considered a bit of a teacher's pet and was not well liked (especially since I sucked at sports). So I stopped doing homework, I showed that I didn't make effort to try and be better accepted. I still did any graded homework (less than 20% of the homework given) but didn't bother with anything else. Luckily school was easy for me so I still got good grades but I got very habits from that that I have needed to unlearn after.
I strongly believe that peers are important and choosing school based on the type of peers is a valid choice. As another (more positive) example, we live in HK in a multilingual family (I speak French, my wife speaks Cantonese), my son goes to an international school in English and Mandarin. Most of his classmates speak at least 2 languages, many speak 3. In that environment, it's easy for my son to see value in speaking multiple languages and he's never rejected one language. I have a friend whose daughter is in France in a monolingual school where her peers don't value speaking multiple languages. As a result she's ashamed and refuses to speak Cantonese.
It's even worse than that: in some circles, kids are expected to be ignorant, or expected to be emotionless, or mean to each others, or asocial etc. We became mostly what was expected from us, with little variations. Once you've set the wrong expectations, education is an uphill battle.
It makes perfect sense if we approach it from the stance that parents and peers matter more than the teachers. Anecdotally, kids who have parents who give a crap and peers who share similar goals (seek good grades, entrance to college, not doing drugs, etc) tend to do better in school.
Goes to show the students are more important than the teachers.
> Which should make no sense because the teachers themselves work odd years in one school, even years in the other school.
The finding here is, competitive parents have an impact on the college approval rates of their children. Get them to all send their kids to the same school, that school gets better approval rates, regardless of the teachers.
Theres also a lot of college prep going on with private schools. We had far higher college adviser to student ratios than any public school. They started working with you earlier than any public school. No grade inflation and college admissions knew that and knew the reputation of the highschool. Academically the schedule, courseload, workload, things like freedom to pick different electives, were all designed to mirror college.
Ok, but this was an RCT, so enrollment was randomized after people self selected into this experiment.
It also had an obvious and unhelpful result. Of course kids who spend all day learning will know that stuff better than kids who don't. What really matters is long term life outcomes.
Rudolf Steiner would say all that early learning is harmful and they should have been playing and imagining spiritual things.
"What really matters is long term life outcomes."
What would those be and how do we measure them?
There are studies that show Montessori students tend to have better executive function, better working memory, and no significant difference in creativity. I'm not aware of any that look at lifetime income or anything like that.
I'm not exactly sure, but measuring performance on education tests as a child is just a proxy for the whole point of education and raising children and it could even be backwards.
> If you care enough to send your child to a Montessori school
Think you mean to say that if you are well be enough to send your child to a private school...I try not to pull out the "privilege" card but good grief.
> if you are well be enough to send your child to a private school
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.
I grew up quite poor.
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.
I have friends who have a kid in one of those schools on financial aid
In my experience in private schooling only about half the kids come from money. The rest are on financial aid.
It's both.
My kids went to a free charter school, with similar setup and care from parents. The outcomes were notable and it wasn't really about privilege imho. (Though some activist type folks I know who count "parents who care" as a form a privilege.)
Which it is? From the child's pov obviously, not from the parent's.
I went to a Montessori school in the Netherlands and feel like it failed me. Just one data point and maybe it was just a bad school.
I have autism and nobody noticed or did anything about it until it was time to start preparing for high school in seventh grade. I had read all the books in the school library but was not able to spell and write. It was just way to easy for me to escape work I did not want to do.
We moved after I started high school and my sisters had to change school because of it. One of the first things they noticed at their new school is how incredibly lazy they where.
I am very happy working as a mailman but I do wonder what I would be doing now if I had learned how to study and learn at a younger age.
you definitely had a bad school. a trained montessori teacher would have noticed your challenges.
The study is about preschool (ages 3-6).
I want to offer a different data point. I took my daughter to a Montessori-adjacent school for 3 years. It's not Montessori exactly and they didn't advertise as such but they had a different European name attached to it that is downstream from Montessori. They had multi-age education, stressed in children directed learning and individual growth, they didn't have exams, etc.
I changed my daughter this year and overall I'm disappointed in that school. There were many issues but the most important ones to me where:
- No exams, only individual growth meant there's no guarantee the kid is learning at a good pace. When I worked with her at home I could easily identify many gaps and deficiencies. She's now struggling a bit in her new school because of this but I think it will resolve soon.
- Because they didn't like comparing kids to standards or among each other the feedback I received was useless. It was always "she's doing excellent, we see strong growth" but it wasn't true.
- The school rejected most parent feedback and issues raised with something "maybe this style of education is not for you". For example, I know of a few other kids that had to leave because the school didn't take action against bullying because they didn't believe in punishments, etc.
I have to say there were good things too, in particular my daughter really enjoyed it there and formed strong bonds with other kids. I think in general it was ok for elementary education but I strongly think it's not after that and I now have a perhaps unjust bias against Montessori and derivatives.
No exams, only individual growth meant there's no guarantee the kid is learning at a good pace.
that's not true. it is possible to notice if a kid is learning at a good pace without exams. that is part of what the montessori method is about.
it sounds like this school just picked the things they liked but did not understand the point. the core of the montessori method is intensive observation, to understand what the children need and how they can thrive. it looks like this didn't happen in your daugthers school.
There is definitely a survivor bias. It probably works well for those kids who make it through. The kids who it isn’t working for, leave and there are so many of them.
I wonder sometimes if that kind of school is only good for the high-strung go-getter child prodigy types because they are so hands off. But the very lack of metrics and standardization that purports to help with that kind of mission unfortunately certainly makes the shopping a lot harder for prospective parents. Similar with other private schools later on. Is it a good academically strong place where kids get pushed and excel later? Or is it a party den where rich kids joke around and snort coke all day? Hard to tell. It also depends on the student and parent body itself. Good luck :-)
Another thing that kind of tempers my opinion of this kind of school is anecdotal, some friends were lamenting that in their otherwise excellent public elementary school in an affluent district, some parents are pulling their kids out of _first grade_ and moving to private school because "there is not enough homework." What a sad image.
I attended Montessori in the 80s up to high school level and was part of a "gifted" group who went on to a public school a couple of years younger than typical. I was completely unprepared for student bullying in HS and the generally harsh attitudes of teachers. Also my learning style had to completely change, and I did not adapt well.
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.
Very interesting story. If I may ask, looking back, do you blame Montessori for the “lack of real world preparation” or do you think rather that it was the regular school that had a bad system and you were in a better one and should have stayed there? If you had stayed there until uni do you think you’d adapted well to higher edu?
I think my Montessori teachers did a great job. I don't have much love for the public school model but I was a special case being put up several grades and not being familiar with that teaching style.
I don't think I would recommend putting an 11 year old into high school early. Better to be an A+ student and have peers your age than take on a heavier burden to scrape through with Cs.
I have some friends who went through the entire steiner school model and they seemed fairly happy well adjusted adults. So I think yeah, if the model is working stick with it until uni.
Only one-fifth of parents gave permission to participate in the study, the schools differed in how “authentic” their Montessori approach was, and the measurements only go up to the end of kindergarten. So we do not know whether the differences persist.
>. authentic” their Montessori approach was.
Indeed there's all kinds of Montessori.
I can vouch for my daughter's .
If anybody wants to give it a go, my benchmarks are:
1) find reviews of parents, especially no abuse, shouting, kids in the last year should LOVE the place.
2) observe even for few minutes a class in their focus time -- you will feel almost shocked if you haven't seen this before -- like you entered Santa's workshop -- children should be deeply engaged in their activities. If you haven't seen it before you might suspect abuse (that's why point 1 is so important), no way kids love to wipe the floors, lay tables, prepare food and so on, but they actually do.
And all that done in almost complete silence.
Proper Montessori with good, empathetic, dedicated educators is amazing!
Yeah. Certainly if the US regular pre-school system looks anything like the UK one, the difference between non-Montessori and Montessori pre-schools in the sorts of play actually encouraged probably isn't that big. The authors attempt to control for notable differences in the demographics of the treatment group, but they're there (and in this case, the higher incomes of the parents in the treatment group probably not just a wealth effect, but a correlate of other systematic differences with the parents who didn't...)
Low participation rate shouldn't matter too much for an RCT right? Just makes the sample smaller so finding statistically significant results is harder.
Different levels of Montessori authenticity make the results even more impressive. They do have some inclusion criteria, like 2/3 of the teachers must be AMI/AMS certified but even so I'd expect a lot of these public school montessori programs to be less "true montessori" than what you'd get at a fully certified AMI/AMS school.
I think the risk is that there is some systematic difference between those who chose to participate and the overall population of public Montessori kids. For instance, maybe those with high incomes disproportionately chose to participate, and Montessori strengthens learning for this group, but if we could measure the whole population the result is more mixed. It can't be a fully RCT if there's some kind of opt-in provision (which is not to say that an opt-in provision is bad, or a study that is not fully RCT is irrelevant).
This is a speculative criticism about a hypothetical problem. How random was the study?
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2506130122 You could have answered your own question by reading the abstract, which makes it clear that the OP's conjecture was correct: the lotteries were random or somewhat random, but the groups which consented to the study were notably different, with the treatment group being richer, more educated and whiter. They did of course attempt to control for this, whether the controls were adequate or omitted other underlying differences is another question.
> You could have answered your own question by ...
Who cares? It's not about me or someone else (or you), it's about the issues at hand. If the commenter wants to make a claim, they are welcome to.
People on HN can't read a study without finding one of the few methodological flaws they are aware of - as if that's some form of serious analysis.
Given all the money spent on trying different educational models to achieve better outcomes, it's really gratifying to see a result suggesting that improvement is actually possible. I have a lot of teachers in my family and they tend to take the perspective that education is an engineering problem rather than a research problem. That is, any apparent progress is due to extra funding or filtering students or the like.
> "Those costs do not include anticipated savings from improved teacher morale and retention, a dynamic demonstrated in other data."
That seems like some kind of supportive evidence as well. Teachers should logically be happier when working inside a system optimized for teaching efficacy!
Personally: we put our child in a Montessori preschool because we liked its emphasis on self-directed learning (I kind of think all learning has to be self-directed on some level. Even a lecture requires you to listen to and think about the lecture, instead of something else). We later moved him to a Reggio Emilia program for non-pedagogical reasons (there were problems with the building that the Montessori school was in). They're definitely different—in Montessori, he mostly played on his own, and in Reggio we now see him in pairs and groups all the time. I have no idea which is better, but his teachers at the Reggio school seem to like it.
Having been through Montessori, I think it's fantastic for kids that are naturally self-driven. I had a great time when it came to learning science and English (the two subjects I cared the most about).
Howrver, I was also pretty far behind in math for reasons unrelated to ability (standardized testing and secondary educational success indicate that I'm actually pretty good at math). I also left with very underdeveloped time management and study skills.
Could these downsides have been mitigated? Definitely, and my parents largely made sure they were. But in talking to my peers at the time, my parents after the fact, and parents of to hers that went to Montessori schools, I think the general idea holds.
Point being that self driven education is fantastic for a lot of reasons. But it will also let a lot of kids stay far behind their ability if not carefully monitored.
I think there might be a pattern across education with a strong ideology (Montessori, Waldorf, Classical education, etc) that they aren't very good at recognizing when the ideology is failing a kid. The relatively weak and mushy educational philosophy of a normal public school is also a somewhat reasonable way to run a school that has to take kids wherever they are at and wherever they came from.
>that they aren't very good at recognizing when the ideology is failing a kid.
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."
I was also pretty far behind in math for reasons unrelated to ability. I also left with very underdeveloped time management and study skills.
if that is the case you didn't experience a good montessori program, because that should have taken care of that.
Nope, fully accredited Montessori school and trained Montessori teachers.
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.
the method struggles with students that can't find that internal motivation
it was my impression that this should not be a problem, but i have to admit that my knowledge and experience with montessori is not enough to understand why this would or would not be the case.
if this is really a problem, it needs to be addressed, and i would find it surprising if it hasn't already been solved in the meantime. i don't believe that this is a new problem.
I don't doubt that it's a solvable problem. Basically any educational method claims to work for every kid, and in theory they all do.
I just think that any method of education is a series of tradeoffs. Time management and difficulty working on thing you don't like (and a lot of this is personal experience, both my own and in discussions with others) seems to be the largest tradeoff.
Bottom line is that almost no system gets implemented perfectly, so it's important to understand the common "failure" points. This seems to be the Montessori one.
Thats not to say this is a bad thing! Depending on your beliefs, decreased study skills and/or mediocre time management are way less important than maintaining a natural curiosity. But the skills some kids end up missing are very important in traditional schooling environments like universities and high schools.
any educational method claims to work for every kid
it's not about the claim. we can't afford it not to. at least not for a system that we would like to apply nationwide (which is what i would like to do with montessori) because we don't always have the luxury of multiple schools in one region where kids can switch. maybe not even the luxury of multiple streams in one school, esp. in rural areas where there barely enough students for a single class. (at least by putting multiple years into one class, you need less students from each age group to fill a class, which makes smaller schools possible)
as a specialized school, not being able to handle very kind of student is fine. as a general school that would be a problem.
Time management and difficulty working on thing you don't like
what bothers me is that montessori is supposed to teach exactly that because you have more freedom to manage you time. so i can't accept that this is montessori's failure point. because it should not be. this is to vital a skill to miss out on. i don't know the answer for this. i am not nearly familiar enough with how he montessori method is supposed to work here.
Sounds like a no true Scotsman: "If it didn't work, it wasn't good Montessori."
rather it wasn't montessori period. as it has been mentioned multiple times, the name montessori is not protected. anyone can claim to be a montessori teacher even if they didn't get any training. my wife went through AMI training. i have observed it at times. it is rigorous. and i have observed classes with trained teachers. the difference is noticeable
what i am saying is more like: if you didn't learn math in school you didn't have a good teacher. because no good teacher would fail at teaching you math. that's the very definition of what a good teacher is, and it is the definition of what good montessori is. the no true scotsman fallacy does not apply here.
if the expected outcome is not achieved, they were not doing it right.
My son goes to an AMI accredited school with AMI accredited teachers only. In general parents in elementary rave about the school. However, we did talk to a few parents whose kids are in elementary that had the same problem with mathematics. Their kids weren't interested in Math and they didn't do as much as they could do. The teacher did try to push a bit and the kids didn't do no mathematics but they were easily one year below what they should be. One of our close friend who had that specific problem with his daughter solved it easily with tuition but complains that it shouldn't be the case.
In kindergarten (casa), there's a lot of structure with individualised work and a child is unlikely to have gaps in a specific subject. On the other hand, I think that in elementary with the stronger focus on group projects, it's easier for certain subject to fall by the wayside if a student doesn't particularly care for them.
So every good Montessori school has a 100% success rate? Edit: and corollary, I guess, any Montessori school that has less than 100% success rate is not a good Montessori school?
> the no true scotsman fallacy does not apply here.
I don't buy this at all.
the no true scotsman fallacy goes like this: no true scotsman would to X, but then you find one that does X.
but the situation here is more like: no true scotsman doesn't have scottisch ancestors or at least live in scotland.
i don't have scottish ancestors, and i have never even been there, so i can't ever be a true scotsman, as much as i'd like to be one.
it doesn't have to be a 100% success rate but being pretty far behind in math is a serious failure that makes me question the qualification of the teacher.
it can't be a failure of the montessori method because the very design and goal of the method is to not let that happen. or at least the chance is very small. and then it is still a failure of the teacher and not the method.
and since anyone can claim to do montessori without any certification, my bet is on that being the case.
it would be like a car without wheels. no true car is missing wheels. it could not fulfill its purpose.
>it can't be a failure of the montessori method because the very design and goal of the method is to not let that happen. or at least the chance is very small. and then it is still a failure of the teacher and not the method.
High intensity interval training (HIIT) is an exercise method that involves very short (think under 5 minutes) intetvals of max effort exercise followed by breaks. This methodology validates very well in scientific literature, both conceptually and in exercise studies that show impressive fitness gains.
It also, by many accounts from researchers and participants, sucks super hard to do correctly. You need to be putting in truly grueling amounts of effort during the intervals to see the advertised benefits. Most people, even when they try to do this, aren't doing it correctly.
I think you could say two things about someone that's not seeing results from HIIT:
1. HIIT is super effective; if you're not getting good results, it's because you're doing it incorrectly. 2. HIIT is not actually a reasonable exercise regimen for most people; this means it's not a great exercise regimen.
Statement 1 is logically true. Statement 2 can be more or less true depending on the theory (walking 20 minutes a day is a lot more reasonable than requiring total exhaustion, whereas a theoretical routine that requires Tasering yourself is less reasonable and makes Statement 2 much more true).
What I've described as my experience in Montessori is definitely Statement 2. I'm sure the method has ways to combat my problems, and if I had gone to a "better" Montessori school it's entirely possible they would have dealt with them. But from what I've seen, these specific problems crop up enough that I think they're a fair criticism.
Intervening when they are merely far behind their ability!? Sounds like imposing adult anxieties onto the natural development path of a child!
Sure, there's an element of that. But I think it's fair to say that life involves doing things you don't want to do sometimes and Montessori struggles with that.
Any alternative school system is lower-cost than public schools if they don't have to support the needs of students with severe disabilities.
That's taken care of in the study design. The population was all kids who applied to the lottery. And the treatment group wasn't those who actually attended the Montessori school, but those who were offered a place due to the lottery.
So I don't see how special needs would bias the results. If the lottery excludes those with special needs (either by design or due to self-selection) then there's no bias between control group and treatment group. If the lottery doesn't exclude but the enrollment decision is biased by special needs, then it doesn't matter because they use ITT and not enrolment.
Schools are not designed to calculate the actual cost on a per student basis.
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.
You are correct.
I only read up on the 'impact' part of the study's claim, not the 'lower cost' part. I thought you were talking about the impact part.
The cost part is obviously suspect, for the reason you stated. It is so obviously suspect that I had subconsciously 'tuned it out'!
Yeah, the intention to treat design is a particularly nice touch, not so common outside of biostatistics. They also compare the full cost of Montessori vs. plain ol', not the cost to the state, which could otherwise have given the Montessori schools (which are in wealthier neighborhoods on average) an unfair advantage if they have a lot of parents chipping in with donations and help. I've skimmed through the methods section and it does seem like they've gone to great lengths to allow for a fair comparison.
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.
you might lose that above-average enthusiasm and expertise
yes, but montessori training can be done in one year (if you do it fulltime, my wife did i over multiple years 2 or 3 months each summer)), and it is entirely child focused. very different from traditional teacher training.
if we assume that every teacher starts their training with some amount of enthusiasm then the difference in enthusiasm and even more so in expertise should be minimal.
Therefore no one should study alternatives to the public schools...?
We accept that different colleges (and other post-secondary training) at different cost points serve different populations.
We somehow do not accept the same idea for secondary or primary education. Why not improve educational outcomes for some of the population?
Most of public schools over the world struggle with much more basic problems than methods or programs. The most important thing IMHO is a stable environment. You can use the very best methods and programs, but if teachers change frequently, like it become more and more a norm in public schools, all these don't matter much really.
Somehow most of my circle of friends are public school teachers. Sure, there are teachers who forgot their "why" and only still do it for the (not very impressive) paycheck and eventual pension. But most teachers really, REALLY care about seeing kids succeed. The problems they talk about frequently are:
1. Lack of support from parents. Many parents treat school as free daycare and are not invested at all in their kids. They don't care of their kid gets good grades, they don't care if they get bad grades. They don't come to parent-teacher conferences. When their kid gets in trouble, they either insist that their kid didn't do anything wrong. Or literally tell the school, "hey, after that morning bell rings, he's your problem, don't hassle me about it."
2. Lack of funding. Need I say more.
3. Lack of authority. If a kid is being constantly disruptive, the teachers are told they just have to deal with it. They can't eject a kid from the classroom for ANY reason except when physical harm is imminent. My son's class had several students who were pretty much allowed to be on their chromebooks all day every day because the alternative was constant verbal abuse toward the their classmates and teacher. My son thought this was deeply unfair. He wasn't wrong.
4. Many school systems have a kind of twisted version of "no child left behind." All the kids who have special educational, emotional, or behavioral needs get plopped into regular classrooms with regular teachers. This is bad for basically everyone. The kids with special needs aren't getting the specialized teaching they require. If they are disruptive (and they often are when they aren't getting what they need), the whole class falls behind in learning because the teacher has to spend 1/2 their time dealing with 1/30th of the class.
Or even more basic, if the parents don't have the time or temperament to properly participate in parenting, then the teachers or the school aren't really going to matter either.
i believe some countries have a different experience. in a report about participating on online classes from home during covid in germany it was observed that kids with worse conditions at home were disadvantaged the most, which leads to the reverse conclusion that for these kids going to school did matter.
I think that anecdote leads to the same conclusion, no? Children with worse parents have worse outcomes?
All the kids with engaged parents who participated in online classes from home probably did just fine.
I'm not saying going to school doesn't matter, I'm saying that what kind of school you go to is going to matter a lot less if your parents can't do a good job. Or put another way, what kind of parents you have is the dominant influence in your educational outcome.
This matters because when thinking about what kind of policies are needed to influence educational outcomes, they may not need to directly have to do with school.
that anecdote leads to the same conclusion
not quite. your claim was that with a bad situation at home, school does not make a difference. while i understand the opposite. the worse the situation at home, the more of a difference school makes for them.
i see it like this:
so for a good home school does not matter. for a bad home it does. (i am ignoring bad schools, they probably make things worse in either case)It's much more complicated than that. For example in my experience a school per se doesn't matter much for many kids from problematic homes. What matters is that they get a time away from home. COVID lockdowns killed exactly that – they didn't have to be away from home and it was very bad for their mental health.
Then there is a growing number of parents who are actively working against the school, undermine the child's trust against school and teachers etc. Most of the time a school can't do anything with these and outcome is always bad.
Then there is a growing number of children who don't do well in school no matter what. They can have a good home and good school, but because of some neurodiversity for example do very bad anyway.
I also don't agree that good home alone is enough for good outcome. It really depends from many things.
In short – education, outcome from school and home etc are hyperindividual and there is no hard rules.
My children could read at 4 and we were told that the Montessori school would not let them read because it was age-inappropriate. We did not enroll.
My Montessori school enabled and encouraged me to read Judy Bloom books (age 8-10 appropriate) when I was 5. yMMV.
My regular public school enabled and encouraged me to read books beyond my age for my entire school career.
That's great! I did Montessori through 2nd grade, it was formative and important for me because I suspect I'm a little on the spectrum. Montessori helped me thrive in a way that was critical for my development at the time. I also suspect that switching to public school was equally important to toughen me up.
Table S34 shows that over 20% of the control group either stayed home or didn't provide info on what they did. (Compared with ~4% of the intent-to-treat group)
So, sadly, they weren't able to directly compare 'public Montessori PK3' with 'public non-Montessori PK3'.
That lowers the statistical power of the experiment. It does not bias it. That's the beauty of intention-to-treat designs: they trade away bias for lower power -- a worthwhile trade every day of the week.
It's a worthwhile trade for sure.
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.
As a product of public montessori, I couldn't agree more
Most of my fondest childhood memories are from a short time I attended a Montessori preschool.
So long as it's a true Montessori and not just in name only. The number of programs I see touting Montessori, Classical, and other models is wild. Usually it's charter and private schools that say one thing but do another.
Might be due to many other things than the Montessori methodology. Such as peer quality and teacher quality, potentially better and more expensive/healthy lunches or a million other things.
montessori methodology and training (at least as certified by AMI) is a strong selector for teacher quality. trainees have to spend 90 hours in class just observing children and writing reports about their observations as part of their training. they learn to understand what the kids need and how to teach them. i am not aware that traditional teacher education does any of that.
likewise peer quality should not be even a factor because of the way how montessori education works. children are not given the opportunity to disrupt others.
the methodology is all-encompassing. it affects the children from the moment they enter the school, until they leave to go home. most of the potential other factors in the school are eliminated by the methodology itself.
it's hard to envision. you have to observe a class in action to understand why.
You aren't contradicting me.
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.
my point is that if we give every teacher montessori training, the teacher quality would rise.
Okay, that's an empirical question. I rather doubt it and think that the more adept teachers are more likely to apply there and to get through it. It's a filtering mechanism.
if montessori is adopted as part of a national or state curriculum then there would not be a filter anymore. and i do not think may people would fail the training. from what i saw it is rigorous and intensive, but it is not difficult. certainly not more difficult that traditional teacher education. the only teachers that would struggle would be lazy ones that enter the training with a preconceived idea of what teaching is about and find that idea challenged.
Ok, and I'm saying that in that case you wouldn't see an effect, precisely because there would be no filtering.
but there should be an effect, namely better teachers, because they receive better training.
I doubt that you need any of that or it has any use for dealing with kids ages 3-6. Every granny and auntie knew how to do it since time immemorial. Just let them play, go out in the yard, chase the ants, dig some holes in the mud, run around, play with a ball. Eat and take a nap, look at picture books, have the teacher tell a story while the kids sit around her etc.
What matters is to have low-stress, motivated teachers with good personalities, empathy and intelligence. And similarly a filtered peer group. All the rest is window dressing.
The article doesn't really address why Montessori programs performed better at lower costs: these classrooms emphasize self-directed, hands-on learning where children choose activities based on their interests, driving independence and curiosity. Traditional classrooms follow a rigid teacher-led curriculum with structured lessons and uniform pacing for all students.
I went to a Montessori school from pre-K through 6th grade. I totally agree with this article. It is not easy to make this work on a public school-sized scale. The problem in education is not funding. We were a private school, but we made it work on a shoestring.
The biggest problem with public school is school size and class size. The last century of school building built prison-like megaliths, when it should have built a much more distributed system. Class sizes under 20 and schools under 120 at least through middle school would raise a far less pathologically self-centered society. But most people who vote/make decisions would have to care more deeply, so I think it's a non-starter in the US, and more and more some other countries.
Kids stop caring way too young as a self-preservation mechanism. This means many of them also stop trying... It's a spiral that can only be broken by restructuring.
The biggest problem with public school is school size and class size
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.
I have experience with Montessori, and I love the system. But it doesn't work for everybody. The Montessori educators I have known were open about the common situation where about 1 in 20 kids just do not learn with the lack of structure - they never become self-starters. In a public Montessori with large class sizes, there had better be a very clear plan of how to help those kids. We started our kids in Montessori and switched to Waldorf because my eldest really needed more structure, and my wife didn't want to try again.
When we transitioned our charter Waldorf to a public Waldorf, the kids experiencing it for their first year absolutely thrived. I would love to see both systems expand significantly in the public space, and have educators with enough savvy to help kids find their best place.
I think that even a more traditional school system can be totally healthy, and should stay part of the school mix. I have seen it work out relatively well in other countries. It just doesn't work when run like a for-profit prison.
PLEASE do your due diligence before considering Waldorf for your kids.
I'm not saying that kids cannot have a good experience at a Waldorf school, or that all their educational ideas are bad. Just that once you children have been there for a couple of years, you learn some very disturbing truths about the organization. It's not an education institution as much as it is a religious organization - your children WILL be taught hymns about god and angels in class. The teachers will not admit to this. They will be taught from the original lessons of Steiner, who had some rather unconventional pseudo-scientific ideas (even for his day). This is coming from a dad who had his kids at Waldorf for three years, and I'm so glad I finally got them out - even with the difficult academic transition.
There is plenty of information published about their organization online, and growing awareness worldwide.
My kids went to charter/public Waldorf. I personally am Catholic (not Protestant-adjacent like Waldorf tradition) and even though they do have some weird ceremonies that I am happy the charter Waldorfs don't adopt, my decidedly agnostic-to-atheist siblings sent their kids to private and charter Waldorfs and did not seem to find it so much of a problem. A Dragon Pagaent focused on Saint George and the Dragon (which we did have) is not much of a problem for most I would say. There is a chance you had a bad school. There are problems in every school, but none centered around Waldorf curriculum for any of us, and collectively we have over 50 school years of our kids in several different Waldorfs around the US. Any older pedagogy: Waldorf, Montessori, traditional schooling - they all need improvement. Still, there is no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
My kids are at a Waldorf school currently. I would not be surprised by your experience from what I’ve learned. However I’ve also seen a truly incredible environment at my school and zero cult adherence to Steiner. My best explanation is that each Waldorf school is very much its own island - it seems to be a very federated system.
We enrolled our kids in K thinking the same as you - some light eco-minded spirituality never harmed anyone. Until we started to learn more about their actual philosophy.
From my experience, the teachers and admin will actively disclaim any adherence to the Waldorf / Anthroposophy connections, but I can assure you that if this is truly a Waldorf school (not "Waldorf-inspired"), they are 100% absolutely members of the Anthroposophy organization. I saw teachers actually do things like quickly hide away Steiner's books from their desk when parents would drop in. But do dig a bit deeper into your school if you can - you'll find there is a "college of teachers" and other such secretive meetings, religious Christian-inspired songs being taught to the children (speaking of God and angels from heaven), and more such nonsense at your school.
If you are a Anthroposophist, then by all means, send your kids there. But Waldorf has an international track record[1] of hiding covering their tracks and pretending to be secular when they are anything but. They just don't belong to a religion that you've heard much about [2].
[1] https://waldorfcritics.org/concerns/ [2] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-cult-of-waldorf-sc...
"Class sizes under 20 and schools under 120 at least through middle school would raise a far less pathologically self-centered society."
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".
I think you are missing the context of what I said: I didn't say: all countries with large class sizes are self-centered. I said: in a self-centered society, smaller class sizes would be a big help to undo the harm that currently exists. Don't underestimate the influence schools and school communities have on the formation of character. It is huge.
that sounds more reasonable, even though i don't see why that would work, but i too did not read that in you previous message.
how would small class sizes help make children less self centered?
more attention from the teacher? why would that help?
i have to admit i have no clue what factors help kids be less self centered.
Two main reasons:
1. It's easier to form friendships in a smaller group. In larger groups it is much easier for it to became a wall of people rather than individual persons. Large groups can be extremely overwhelming for children (they are still overwhelming for many adults).
2. It is much easier for the teacher to see the group dynamics, and jump in to make sure nobody is excluded. If the teacher doesn't do this, many of the benefits of smaller class size will be lost. Teachers need to very vigilant to teach that it's not okay to exclude kids and not play with them, its not ok to bully, etc. If there is nobody in the room to foster healthy relationships, they will never reach even close to their full potential.
I have seen and talked about this in quite a bit of detail with educators who are continually successful, and it is not hard to figure out - it requires devotion rather than advanced pedagogical theory and strategy.
This is indeed a more nuanced context, but it was absolutely unreadable to me from your original comment. Thanks for chiming in and explaining it.
> 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.
to quote @inglor_cz - this is big if… you are arguing against generalization in your first paragraph and then you are proceeding to generalize… I am only child and my daughter is too and neither of us (especially me) have been pampered
I am an only child too. "Tend to be" is quite a soft claim, though, with plenty of room for exceptions.
The Little Emperors phenomenon is still a thing. If a kid has two parents and four grandparents who have no other descendands, it is USUALLY on the receiving end of a lot more attention and resources than if there are six of them.
> It is not easy to make this work on a public school-sized scale.
Why not? Costs are lower, etc.
Costs aren't exactly lower. The study noted that the cost savings came from higher student to teacher ratios in 1st-3rd offsetting higher costs of teacher training and classroom materials over a hypothetical amortization period. This is rational but not indicative of flipping a switch to save x%.
0. https://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2506130122higher costs of teacher training and classroom materials
the current cost of montessori teacher training and materials is a matter of scale.
the training only takes one year. the cost comes from it being done on top of the traditional teacher education that most teachers likely went through.
if montessori training would be included into traditional teacher education, the cost would be absorbed (you could skip a few other redundant classes). likewise, the material produced at scale would be cheaper.
> not indicative of flipping a switch to save x%
If that's our standard, then nothing is worth doing. Lower costs seem like a good possibility.
Sure, sometimes short term spending enables long term savings. And on an even longer time scale, how do improved outcomes figure in?
The significant factor is how a change like this is implemented in context. Within a public school system there may or may not be convincible political appetite to increase short term costs for longer term gains.
It seems that the district(s) studied are making those changes and studying the outcomes in order to make prudent choices long term, which is not flipping a switch but is doing more than nothing.
They make it work as a public schooling system in Amsterdam. About 10% of the public schools are Montessori.
Sounds good. The school systems are messed up, everybody agrees on that. But the article is missing out the underlying cause for the results. What exactly caused the beneficial outcome? Montessori itself is quite a vast term nowadays.
The article is clear — lottery offer of a seat in a school which met inclusion criteria. Inclusion criteria are clearly outlined in the supplemental materials which are a single URL away which also include details on the allocation.
https://www.pnas.org/action/downloadSupplement?doi=10.1073%2...
Talk of causation anywhere other than the unit of randomization is speculation.
the definition in your linked paper is quite self referential
The definition is holistic:
>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?
The underlying cause is that only well to do parents choose Montessori. None of the pesky low income folks to throw off the test score.
These were randomised. It sounds like they eliminated this selection bias.
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.
I think it largely depends upon the child. I thrived in a Montessori environment right through sixth grade before transitioning to a standard “prep school” and found myself way ahead of the other kids in a lot of things.
It absolutely depends on the child. I phrased it too generally. I like the idea of Montessori a lot, but it depends a lot on executive skills: being able to plan, start project, finish projects, etc. My kids both sucked at that, and I'm not great at it either. My oldest son, despite his stellar IQ, completely drowned in projects. No idea what to do, when to start, how to start, how to finish it, and even when he finished it, he forgot to turn it in. He simply needs more guidance.
He's now finally getting better at it, at 16, which is about time, because at the university, you have to be able to do all of this. I sucked at it in university, so maybe it's actually good that he ran into these problems earlier than that, but for him to actually finish school, it was not a good fit.
> My oldest son, despite his stellar IQ, completely drowned in projects. No idea what to do, when to start, how to start, how to finish it, and even when he finished it, he forgot to turn it in. He simply needs more guidance.
> He's now finally getting better at it, at 16, which is about time, because at the university, you have to be able to do all of this.
You definitely don't.
Struggling with this is exactly why I never quite finished my degree. All the papers where I had to choose what to write about, without having an immediate topic I just had to write about, never even got started. Thesis is an even bigger project. Dropping out and not having to do it anymore felt like a relief.
At my university, a thesis was one option. You could substitute a middling GRE score.
American universities are pretty keen to graduate you if that's plausible at all. See also: remedial classes.
you may be comparing different countries. not needing to be able to do all of this sounds like a very school like university. the universities i know are not like that, and you most certainly need those skills.
So while it is randomized in the terms of who they chose to participate, the students did attend already existing schools. This could lead to selection bias from the participates, as the schools themselves are located in wealthier areas as that is where their clientèle are.
Lower income families may not have been able to take advantage of the lottery due to distance constrains thus self-opting out.
I have not read the study methodology details, the schools may have been chosen to avoid this problem but just wanted to point out that just because something say "random lottery" it may not be.
But the control group was families who did opt in and who lost the lottery.
Still the ones who got in would be with more other students who opted in, the ones who didn't get in would be with more students who didn't opt-in to the lottery.
You would need to have a second group of those who lost the lottery and were all put into the same non-Montessori school with no others who didn't opt-in maybe.
Oh you mean it could all be peer group effects?
Yeah but even then teachers that opt in to train in Montessori might just be better teachers, and converting a whole school system to Montessori, training everyone, might not have as good results.
In Manhattan, all the preschools we looked at were either Montessori style or Reggio Emilia approach. I could not detect any meaningful difference between them.
There's a nonprofit Montessori school running in the biggest slum in Bangkok, Thailand which provides free schooling to the slums kids. It seems to work well.
They're always looking for foreign tourists to help teach English, even if it's just for a few days or a week.
My kids went to Montessori school, first private which was good, they learned a lot of life skills, not so much academics tbh, which is why I switched them to public Montessori, which was in name only.
What worked for us better is competence grading which is Summit system that originated in California.
But principles are system are great, if you can make it work. It requires effort from teachers and parents and all. It is not trivial to make it work everywhere.
As someone who has worked in education for about a decade now, I use this quote a lot:
You can’t understand Google unless you know that both Larry and Sergey were Montessori kids. — Marissa Mayer
Sorry, I have no idea what to conclude from this. Can you explain?
There's a lot of luck in Larry and Sergey history.
It is not like they were Abel and Gauss as impressionable tech workers seem to think.
Is “Montessori” sufficiently defined?
I compared Montessori and non Montessori labeled daycares/preschools for my 3 and 4 year olds, and was unable to discern a meaningful difference in the course of the day.
Edit: I ended up going with the daycare that had cameras (so that at least management could audit employees), and a livestream for the parents, which was at a non Montessori daycare. Staff turnover also seemed lower. Was more expensive, but have been happy with results.
From the article: "All 24 public study Montessori schools met basic Montessori criteria (SI Appendix, section 3A), but implementation varied widely. "
"The final implementation criteria for school inclusion were thus:
• 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."
So seems like the criteria for this research is fairly good.
In general though it's hard to tell if a school is Montessori or not. The method is not trademarked and anyone can claim to be a Montessori school ,or Montessori inspired etc...
There are two organizations that certify - AMI, which was created by Maria Montessori's daughter and functions mostly in Europe, and AMS which is an American organization founded by people inspired by the Montessori method.
AMI is stricter while AMS is more modern, but most places that identify as Montessori is neither.
I would say the best way to identify if a school is Montessori is first if they have mixed-age classrooms, the standard is a 3 year class (so 1-3, 4-6, 7-9...).
If all the kids in a class are in the same age, it's not Montessori.
Second, for preschool, you expect the class to be very organized with intermittent shelves and work areas, and very neat (no mountain of toys etc...) - https://www.google.com/search?udm=2&q=montessori+classroom
There are two actual standards around this (AMI and AMS), but therm "Montessori" is mainly fungible in the day care market.
The difference between these two, from my experience, is HUGE. Certified AMI schools, while a little more rigid in terms of teaching fine motor skills, generally have been better at making my kid more independent at doing things he likes to do. AMS schools are kind of wishy washy by comparison, and my kid was bored and under-engaged.
How many schools of each standard has your kid been to? For how many years?
I've had similar experiences too, it's almost like trying to get a room full of software engineers to agree on a definition of "Agile".
Additionally, even schools that label themselves Montessori will have significant differences in how the educational concepts are applied and to what degree. It’s not a regimented approach/program. I only say this to suggest that any parent interested in Montessori schools should definitely visit and ask questions before enrolling your student. Make sure that the experience will align with your expectations.
In my experience, I would say no. Same as similar approaches (e.g. Waldorfschule)
Once I asked some advocate of the method, what was it exactly; the reply was very good and detailed, but then I pointed out institutes that “follow” the method, which were nothing as what he described. From that point, it was a mess. “Well, you must not absolutely do it that way” “there are variations” etc. I was pretty dissatisfied with the description, and was clear that is not very well defined.
Unfortunately, Maria Montessori lost control over her name, and now literally any daycare or school can label themselves "Montessori."
Look for a school/teachers with AMI (Association Montessori Internationale) certification.