A total of 51 people commented on the thread I posted April 19, where I asked about the length of lunch period when you or your kids were in elementary school and the year(s) and location where that was. Thirty-seven of the responses were about schools in the U.S. and included the year or range of years. Here are the results for those responses. I’ve made bold the median for each decade.
Interesting. As you can see, the median length of lunch period in these responses shrunk progressively from 80 min. in 1940s down to 25 in 2010s and 2020s. These are not fully scientific data, of course, as some admitted they were not sure of their memory and the data set is small. Yet, they do illustrate what seems to be undeniable—the amount of time we are giving school kids for lunch has gone down dramatically over decades. It is also worth noting that no lunch periods were below 45 min prior to the 1990s. Then we start getting some of those 20 minute periods that I discussed in Letter #38. These are the periods that cause such distress because, after going to the washroom and waiting online, many kids barely have time to gobble down their food and some have no time at all.
And now I have another question. I’m trying to understand better the changes that occurred in school experience in the United States, at all grade levels, beginning when Common Core took effect, in 2010. I’m interested in the experiences of everyone involved: Kids, parents, teachers, principals, school psychologists, school superintendents. If you have experience with public schooling in the U.S. spanning years before and after 2010, please describe any changes you observed. Or, if things didn’t change in any significant way, please tell me that. And, again, please include the state in which the school is located.
With gratitude and best wishes,
Peter
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I am a speech pathologist and in my first year of working in schools (2013), kindergarten was a half day and common core had not been implemented. I'd go into the kindergarten rooms and the kids would be so curious about me - wondering who I was, showing me how they could leap like a frog, and even giving me hugs. I got to know most of the kids in those classrooms, even if I didn't see them for speech therapy. There were blocks and legos dumped out onto the carpet and classrooms even had dress-up. It was a joyful place and I loved going into those rooms. I then worked in private practice and two years later, I returned to the schools. This time, kindergarten became full day. I'd go into classrooms, and it was silent and all the kids were silently working on...reading sentences. The kids were no longer curious about this new person in their midst. They weren't showing me their coloring or pretending to be frogs. They were all silently working independently at their desks. No more dress-up and I never saw the kids playing with blocks or legos. It was so academic. They actually seemed kind of sad. I wondered if it was because I was working in one of the more affluent neighborhoods in the San Jose, CA - where many tech CEOs live. I asked my co-worker "Is this school especially academic to please the parents?" And she said "Nope. Didn't used to be like this. It's common core." Oooohhhh....
In my training, I learned quite a bit about neurology and reading. The pathway in the brain that translates oral language to written language (called the arcuate fasciculus) does not myelinate until age 7, on average. Teaching kids to read before age 7, can be a pretty hard task for them since their brains usually aren't ready. (Some are, but most aren't). So, the kids can sort of pick up on the concepts, but not easily or quickly. If we were to just wait a bit for the brains to myelinate, they'd learn these concepts in just a few weeks. Teaching kid's concepts, before their brains have matured creates an aversion to learning. Now reading is hard, letters are hard, and the kids might even think they're stupid. It's like expecting a 6-month-old to be able to walk. My point is these standards are not based on biology or appropriate developmental milestones. (And if you haven't listened to the podcast "Sold a Story" you absolutely must).
They started having "college day" at the elementary schools so they could plant the seed in a child's mind that they must go to college. They were always talking about careers, even to little kids. On the door of a classroom, all the kids had written what they wanted to be when they grow up. I'll always remember one poster that said: "When I grow up, I want to be a financial person." Oh honey, a financial person doesn't want to be a financial person. I had two students (one in 4th grade and one in 5th) who were genuinely anxious about not getting into Stanford.
Again, listen to the "Sold a Story" podcast if you haven't already. Best journalism I've ever encountered.
Peter, I too have noticed the dramatic reduction in the amount of recess and lunch time in my daughter's elementary school compared to my own childhood school in the 1990s. She has one 15-min. recess in the morning and then 30 minutes for lunch (to both eat and play). I had an additional afternoon recess when I was a kid, but she doesn't have that.
I'm not sure how the Common Core has affected lunch/recess (though I don't doubt it has had some impact), but I have seen how the Common Core has negatively impacted kindergarten. I live in Salt Lake City and in all district schools except one (which is in the wealthiest SLC neighborhood), half-day kindergarten is no longer offered. Full-day kindergarten is the norm. I know that part of this is due to parent demand: there are fewer stay-at-home moms these days and people need childcare. But I also think the day is longer because now kids are expected to read by the end of kindergarten. Circle time, play time, songs, stories, getting used to being in a classroom: those are no longer the hallmarks of kindergarten. It's worksheets, worksheets, worksheets, and pressuring the kids to sit still and read whether they're developmentally ready to read or not. I delayed the kindergarten start for my daughter (who has an August birthday) by one year because of the developmentally inappropriate kindergarten offered in my school district. She ended up starting kindergarten during Covid and kindergarten was online. Online school is bad, but one upside of online kindergarten for me (a stay-at-home mom) was that I could choose to shorten her time in "class" and ignore many of the worksheets that were sent home in a packet. My son will start kindergarten in the fall. I've been worried about the potential negative impact of kindergarten on him, but he is on the older side (October birthday), so I hope that will help. I've considered homeschooling and charter schools, but both options have significant downsides for my son and our family. So we're going to try kindergarten and adjust if we need to if school doesn't go well for him. I don't feel like kindergarten should be such a problem. Why is it so difficult to offer kids a warm, playful, gentle introduction to school? We were able to do it in the past. Why not now?
I will also say that this problem is starting to infect preschools. My son's preschool, which is supposed to be play-based, also devotes a lot of time to having the kids learn the alphabet and trace letters on worksheets. It also discourages parents from being too involved at the school (like coming in with the kids at drop-off or volunteering in the classroom) because, they say, the kids won't be ready for kindergarten! It's a difficult situation. I can't help but think this is one of the reasons the fertility rate in the U.S. is so low. We make childhood and parenting so unnecessarily difficult.
In the 1950s 60s 70s many kids were still going home for lunch -- weren't they? That 60-80 minutes gave most kids (certainly in primary school) enough time to walk home, gobble their lunch at home that their stay-at-home moms had prepared, and then walk back to school. Isn't this also a factor? Since the 80s, for sure, way more women were out in the workforce. Surely this is an ingredient that changed school hours & timing.
I got my elementary teaching credential in California in 1990. My training taught me to use child-centered, hands-on techniques like writer’s workshops for teaching writing, and problem-solving based math where we gave students difficult problems and asked them to figure them out their own way, and then to share with one another how they’d solved them. Then we’d have a discussion about the different techniques, and students could choose methods that made sense to them. This sort of learning happened in all subjects. I taught for several years using these methods, and there was a lot of district support for gaining more professional development in these areas.
I left teaching and started homeschooling with my own kids in 1997, so I didn’t see firsthand how schools would change.
However, I’ve since begun volunteering in public school classrooms and have spoken with a lot of teachers and, like others here, have been shocked at how different classrooms look. One day I was helping the writing organization where I volunteer carry out a whole-school epic poetry writing day at a local public school and I was working in a second grade classroom. The second grade teacher thanked me at the end of the day and told me what a delight it was to see her students write poetry. I asked if she didn’t often get to write poetry with her students. She shook her head and said, “It’s not in the curriculum.”
Seven-year-olds not allowed to write poetry! (Not to mention teachers not allowed to have say in what and how their students learn. They are credentialed professionals, usually with a year or more of post-bachelor’s degree training!) A heartbreaking example of how far wrong things have gone systematically.
Peter, I am a school based SLP in RI and started working in schools around 1999. I remember at that time, school curriculum was starting to change and was not developmentally appropriate, especially for pre-K to 2nd grade. I remember when the expectation of kindergarten started to feel like grade 1 and so on. I think that occurred around 2002 with No Child Left Behind. Around 2010 when Common Core entered the picture, I remember a lot of teachers scratching their heads trying to just figure them out. Although I am not a math teacher, Common Core math is awful. Kids that once struggle with ELA but did well in math, no longer have that, they now struggle in both. I began my career working with younger grades and often advocated that children needed more play. I chose preschool for my own kids that had that focus. I don't think making kids write 5 paragraph essays in 5th grade makes them better writers when they are older. Sadly, common core has turned many kids off to school and is definitely part of the mental health equation. When anyone is forced to acquire a skill that they are developmentally not ready to learn, it will cause stress and anxiety. Social skills along with test score are declining. It is a sad society when we put profits over preserving childhood.
I will ask around to see if I can provide verifiable data, but I suspect a reason for the change in lunch schedules is that children used to go home for lunch. New Jersey still has districts with a “neighborhood school” set up where children attend an elementary school within walking distance of their homes. Most children stay in school for lunch now, but when I was a child in school in the seventies, many children went home. So, ample time was needed for travel to and from home and time to eat. In Ireland, as late as the 1980s, dinner was traditionally served at home at noon so students would go home and I believe they had more than an hour—maybe even two—but then they returned to school afterward and stayed until after 4. Here in the U.S., starting in the 70s, fewer kids could expect to have a parent at home to serve them lunch. Also, I would imagine kids who did go home didn’t like being the only ones who were. As school districts regionalized to cut costs and children (for this and other reasons) began to attend schools farther from home, such long lunch periods were no longer necessary. I don’t know what Ireland is doing now but I can check into it. I can check on some other places too.
Peter - You asked about pre-2010 experiences, so I thought you’d be interested in the Hands-On Science initiative I was part of in 1992-2001. I mention this because the idea was to promote “inquiry based learning”, which if done correctly, mirrors the elements of play that you speak about!
In 1992, the driving national force was “Goals 2000”, an effort to advance K-12 science education. We (HP Corporate Philanthropy) partnered with the Smithsonian’s National Science Resources Center (now called the Science Education Center). They were teaching the nation’s school districts how to implement a hands-on, inquiry-based approach to science education in grades K-6. We engaged dozens of school districts across the country, and I was personally involved for many years with some districts in the SF Bay Area (California).
It was a marvelous time of using kits of science supplies and equipment to engage the curiosity of primary grade students. It was also a huge (positive) shift in how science was taught (if it even was) in primary grades.
This approach lasted in some cases from 10-20 years (a remarkable achievement in itself). What killed it was the recognition that reading and math skills were lagging, and for some students, severely so….and “science” learning was not being measured like math and reading was.
What gets measured gets the attention. Common core, for whatever one might think of it, had very visible test scores.
Rather than build on the science learning that was so exciting and effective, it was abandoned. We all know that science, language literacy, and math literacy can be intertwined to create powerful learning experiences - but it wasn’t to be. Test scores (in reading and math) pressured schools to leave science by the wayside.
Let me know if you’d like to chat in more detail about this!
As a former Deputy Headteacher I’ve noticed several factors contributing to the decrease in play time here in the UK
1. Academic Pressure: Schools are under pressure to meet academic standards and improve test scores, leading to a prioritisation of classroom instruction over playtime .
2. Structured Curriculum: With a focus on structured curriculum and standardised testing, there's less time allocated for unstructured activities like play.
3. Safety Concerns: Schools may limit break time due to concerns about safety, liability, or supervision issues during unstructured play.
4. Budget Constraints: Nearly all schools face budget constraints that limit resources for physical education programmes and outdoor play spaces, resulting in reduced play time.
5. Emphasis on Sedentary Activities: Increased emphasis on technology and sedentary activities have led to less priority given to physical activity and outdoor play.
Overall, a combination of academic, safety, financial, and societal factors has contributed to the decline in play / recess time in schools which is really sad & counterproductive
Peter I wonder if in your research you've come across something arguably worse, which is taking lunch out of the cafeteria and... putting it in front of a TV show. This has become prevalent in my children's school - they are ages 6 and 8. The 8 year old's class started this as a special treat on Fridays and it is now every single day (unless you have made poor behavioral choices in which case you are punished by being made to eat your lunch by yourself in the cafeteria). I am aware of other classrooms at their school where this is also done. Incidentally TV shows and movies are also a common activity in PE, of all things, when there are "too many kids" on a given day for whatever reason, or the weather is not ideal.
I melted sugar on a hot plate in elementary school and used a Bunsen burner in early middle school....my own kids throughout their entire schooling never played with fire! Canada!
I graduated from K-12 public school in 2013. We were the last grade in my school they decided not to implement common core for, thankfully. It's strange that test scores have decreased since it was implemented, I wonder why that is.
I am a speech pathologist and in my first year of working in schools (2013), kindergarten was a half day and common core had not been implemented. I'd go into the kindergarten rooms and the kids would be so curious about me - wondering who I was, showing me how they could leap like a frog, and even giving me hugs. I got to know most of the kids in those classrooms, even if I didn't see them for speech therapy. There were blocks and legos dumped out onto the carpet and classrooms even had dress-up. It was a joyful place and I loved going into those rooms. I then worked in private practice and two years later, I returned to the schools. This time, kindergarten became full day. I'd go into classrooms, and it was silent and all the kids were silently working on...reading sentences. The kids were no longer curious about this new person in their midst. They weren't showing me their coloring or pretending to be frogs. They were all silently working independently at their desks. No more dress-up and I never saw the kids playing with blocks or legos. It was so academic. They actually seemed kind of sad. I wondered if it was because I was working in one of the more affluent neighborhoods in the San Jose, CA - where many tech CEOs live. I asked my co-worker "Is this school especially academic to please the parents?" And she said "Nope. Didn't used to be like this. It's common core." Oooohhhh....
In my training, I learned quite a bit about neurology and reading. The pathway in the brain that translates oral language to written language (called the arcuate fasciculus) does not myelinate until age 7, on average. Teaching kids to read before age 7, can be a pretty hard task for them since their brains usually aren't ready. (Some are, but most aren't). So, the kids can sort of pick up on the concepts, but not easily or quickly. If we were to just wait a bit for the brains to myelinate, they'd learn these concepts in just a few weeks. Teaching kid's concepts, before their brains have matured creates an aversion to learning. Now reading is hard, letters are hard, and the kids might even think they're stupid. It's like expecting a 6-month-old to be able to walk. My point is these standards are not based on biology or appropriate developmental milestones. (And if you haven't listened to the podcast "Sold a Story" you absolutely must).
They started having "college day" at the elementary schools so they could plant the seed in a child's mind that they must go to college. They were always talking about careers, even to little kids. On the door of a classroom, all the kids had written what they wanted to be when they grow up. I'll always remember one poster that said: "When I grow up, I want to be a financial person." Oh honey, a financial person doesn't want to be a financial person. I had two students (one in 4th grade and one in 5th) who were genuinely anxious about not getting into Stanford.
Again, listen to the "Sold a Story" podcast if you haven't already. Best journalism I've ever encountered.
Peter, I too have noticed the dramatic reduction in the amount of recess and lunch time in my daughter's elementary school compared to my own childhood school in the 1990s. She has one 15-min. recess in the morning and then 30 minutes for lunch (to both eat and play). I had an additional afternoon recess when I was a kid, but she doesn't have that.
I'm not sure how the Common Core has affected lunch/recess (though I don't doubt it has had some impact), but I have seen how the Common Core has negatively impacted kindergarten. I live in Salt Lake City and in all district schools except one (which is in the wealthiest SLC neighborhood), half-day kindergarten is no longer offered. Full-day kindergarten is the norm. I know that part of this is due to parent demand: there are fewer stay-at-home moms these days and people need childcare. But I also think the day is longer because now kids are expected to read by the end of kindergarten. Circle time, play time, songs, stories, getting used to being in a classroom: those are no longer the hallmarks of kindergarten. It's worksheets, worksheets, worksheets, and pressuring the kids to sit still and read whether they're developmentally ready to read or not. I delayed the kindergarten start for my daughter (who has an August birthday) by one year because of the developmentally inappropriate kindergarten offered in my school district. She ended up starting kindergarten during Covid and kindergarten was online. Online school is bad, but one upside of online kindergarten for me (a stay-at-home mom) was that I could choose to shorten her time in "class" and ignore many of the worksheets that were sent home in a packet. My son will start kindergarten in the fall. I've been worried about the potential negative impact of kindergarten on him, but he is on the older side (October birthday), so I hope that will help. I've considered homeschooling and charter schools, but both options have significant downsides for my son and our family. So we're going to try kindergarten and adjust if we need to if school doesn't go well for him. I don't feel like kindergarten should be such a problem. Why is it so difficult to offer kids a warm, playful, gentle introduction to school? We were able to do it in the past. Why not now?
I will also say that this problem is starting to infect preschools. My son's preschool, which is supposed to be play-based, also devotes a lot of time to having the kids learn the alphabet and trace letters on worksheets. It also discourages parents from being too involved at the school (like coming in with the kids at drop-off or volunteering in the classroom) because, they say, the kids won't be ready for kindergarten! It's a difficult situation. I can't help but think this is one of the reasons the fertility rate in the U.S. is so low. We make childhood and parenting so unnecessarily difficult.
In the 1950s 60s 70s many kids were still going home for lunch -- weren't they? That 60-80 minutes gave most kids (certainly in primary school) enough time to walk home, gobble their lunch at home that their stay-at-home moms had prepared, and then walk back to school. Isn't this also a factor? Since the 80s, for sure, way more women were out in the workforce. Surely this is an ingredient that changed school hours & timing.
I got my elementary teaching credential in California in 1990. My training taught me to use child-centered, hands-on techniques like writer’s workshops for teaching writing, and problem-solving based math where we gave students difficult problems and asked them to figure them out their own way, and then to share with one another how they’d solved them. Then we’d have a discussion about the different techniques, and students could choose methods that made sense to them. This sort of learning happened in all subjects. I taught for several years using these methods, and there was a lot of district support for gaining more professional development in these areas.
I left teaching and started homeschooling with my own kids in 1997, so I didn’t see firsthand how schools would change.
However, I’ve since begun volunteering in public school classrooms and have spoken with a lot of teachers and, like others here, have been shocked at how different classrooms look. One day I was helping the writing organization where I volunteer carry out a whole-school epic poetry writing day at a local public school and I was working in a second grade classroom. The second grade teacher thanked me at the end of the day and told me what a delight it was to see her students write poetry. I asked if she didn’t often get to write poetry with her students. She shook her head and said, “It’s not in the curriculum.”
Seven-year-olds not allowed to write poetry! (Not to mention teachers not allowed to have say in what and how their students learn. They are credentialed professionals, usually with a year or more of post-bachelor’s degree training!) A heartbreaking example of how far wrong things have gone systematically.
Peter, I am a school based SLP in RI and started working in schools around 1999. I remember at that time, school curriculum was starting to change and was not developmentally appropriate, especially for pre-K to 2nd grade. I remember when the expectation of kindergarten started to feel like grade 1 and so on. I think that occurred around 2002 with No Child Left Behind. Around 2010 when Common Core entered the picture, I remember a lot of teachers scratching their heads trying to just figure them out. Although I am not a math teacher, Common Core math is awful. Kids that once struggle with ELA but did well in math, no longer have that, they now struggle in both. I began my career working with younger grades and often advocated that children needed more play. I chose preschool for my own kids that had that focus. I don't think making kids write 5 paragraph essays in 5th grade makes them better writers when they are older. Sadly, common core has turned many kids off to school and is definitely part of the mental health equation. When anyone is forced to acquire a skill that they are developmentally not ready to learn, it will cause stress and anxiety. Social skills along with test score are declining. It is a sad society when we put profits over preserving childhood.
I will ask around to see if I can provide verifiable data, but I suspect a reason for the change in lunch schedules is that children used to go home for lunch. New Jersey still has districts with a “neighborhood school” set up where children attend an elementary school within walking distance of their homes. Most children stay in school for lunch now, but when I was a child in school in the seventies, many children went home. So, ample time was needed for travel to and from home and time to eat. In Ireland, as late as the 1980s, dinner was traditionally served at home at noon so students would go home and I believe they had more than an hour—maybe even two—but then they returned to school afterward and stayed until after 4. Here in the U.S., starting in the 70s, fewer kids could expect to have a parent at home to serve them lunch. Also, I would imagine kids who did go home didn’t like being the only ones who were. As school districts regionalized to cut costs and children (for this and other reasons) began to attend schools farther from home, such long lunch periods were no longer necessary. I don’t know what Ireland is doing now but I can check into it. I can check on some other places too.
Peter - You asked about pre-2010 experiences, so I thought you’d be interested in the Hands-On Science initiative I was part of in 1992-2001. I mention this because the idea was to promote “inquiry based learning”, which if done correctly, mirrors the elements of play that you speak about!
In 1992, the driving national force was “Goals 2000”, an effort to advance K-12 science education. We (HP Corporate Philanthropy) partnered with the Smithsonian’s National Science Resources Center (now called the Science Education Center). They were teaching the nation’s school districts how to implement a hands-on, inquiry-based approach to science education in grades K-6. We engaged dozens of school districts across the country, and I was personally involved for many years with some districts in the SF Bay Area (California).
It was a marvelous time of using kits of science supplies and equipment to engage the curiosity of primary grade students. It was also a huge (positive) shift in how science was taught (if it even was) in primary grades.
This approach lasted in some cases from 10-20 years (a remarkable achievement in itself). What killed it was the recognition that reading and math skills were lagging, and for some students, severely so….and “science” learning was not being measured like math and reading was.
What gets measured gets the attention. Common core, for whatever one might think of it, had very visible test scores.
Rather than build on the science learning that was so exciting and effective, it was abandoned. We all know that science, language literacy, and math literacy can be intertwined to create powerful learning experiences - but it wasn’t to be. Test scores (in reading and math) pressured schools to leave science by the wayside.
Let me know if you’d like to chat in more detail about this!
Jim Vanides
As a former Deputy Headteacher I’ve noticed several factors contributing to the decrease in play time here in the UK
1. Academic Pressure: Schools are under pressure to meet academic standards and improve test scores, leading to a prioritisation of classroom instruction over playtime .
2. Structured Curriculum: With a focus on structured curriculum and standardised testing, there's less time allocated for unstructured activities like play.
3. Safety Concerns: Schools may limit break time due to concerns about safety, liability, or supervision issues during unstructured play.
4. Budget Constraints: Nearly all schools face budget constraints that limit resources for physical education programmes and outdoor play spaces, resulting in reduced play time.
5. Emphasis on Sedentary Activities: Increased emphasis on technology and sedentary activities have led to less priority given to physical activity and outdoor play.
Overall, a combination of academic, safety, financial, and societal factors has contributed to the decline in play / recess time in schools which is really sad & counterproductive
Peter I wonder if in your research you've come across something arguably worse, which is taking lunch out of the cafeteria and... putting it in front of a TV show. This has become prevalent in my children's school - they are ages 6 and 8. The 8 year old's class started this as a special treat on Fridays and it is now every single day (unless you have made poor behavioral choices in which case you are punished by being made to eat your lunch by yourself in the cafeteria). I am aware of other classrooms at their school where this is also done. Incidentally TV shows and movies are also a common activity in PE, of all things, when there are "too many kids" on a given day for whatever reason, or the weather is not ideal.
I melted sugar on a hot plate in elementary school and used a Bunsen burner in early middle school....my own kids throughout their entire schooling never played with fire! Canada!
I graduated from K-12 public school in 2013. We were the last grade in my school they decided not to implement common core for, thankfully. It's strange that test scores have decreased since it was implemented, I wonder why that is.
plus school follows kids home-the level of homework today is obscene.