BY STEVE NUZUM
I taught sixth grade for two years in Southeast Richland County. During that time, I only saw my kids get to spend time outside a handful of times, during school-wide events like field day.
On every “normal” day of the school year, those sixth graders left class with their teachers in the late morning, marched down to the lunchroom in lines, cued up to get their lunches on Styrofoam trays, and then sat at crowded lunch tables with built-in plastic seats, beneath harsh fluorescent lights, until it was time to march back to class.
I imagine Sisyphus could relate.
I don’t remember if we ever received an official explanation for the decision to completely forgo regular recess/ outside time, but I seem to remember hearing that either a kid getting injured in a previous year while at recess, or the overall “bad behavior” of the students was the culprit.
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and Centers for Disease Control (CDC) both formally recommend recess time during the day, with the AAP calling for a total of “60 minutes of moderate to vigorous activity per day,” including recess time and the CDC calling for at least 20 minutes of recess time per day.
Because I taught in a school with no recess, I am not surprised by research showing, as the AAP puts it, “a trend toward reducing recess to accommodate additional time for academic subjects in addition to its withdrawal for punitive or behavioral reasons.” At the time-- the immediate aftermath of the mid-2000s Great Recession, and just a few years away from the absurd No Child Left Behind requirement that all students score “proficient or advanced” on state testing, the school was frankly obsessed to an unhealthy degree with bringing up test scores.
Ironically, like many decisions in education policy, eliminating recess seems to be not only bad for students in itself, but is actually counterproductive even if your goal is to improve behavior or test scores. Research shows a connection between recess and improved academic performance, improved focus in class, better executive function and “classroom behavior,” and improved social-emotional learning.
And in my own experience, the lack of recess time just seemed to lead to more behavior issues in class, in the hallway, and in all the places kids had to be when they should have been outside playing and socializing.
As researchers wrote, in an article published by the journal Preventive Medicine Reports,
…evidence suggests that students have had persistent unequal access to this important developmental time. First, students living in certain communities have had historically less recess. Barros, Silver and Stein (2009) analyzed data from the 1998–99 cohort of the Early Longitudinal Childhood Survey and found that while 77 % of White children had some recess, just 41 % of Black children and 62 % of Hispanic children had some recess.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t surprise me, either. Early in my career, I moved schools frequently, teaching in three different counties in South Carolina, and getting a pretty good cross section of the state’s semi-rural, urban, and suburban districts.
The only school without some kind of free lunch period/ recess was the one in Southeast Columbia, where about 99% of the student body consisted of children of color. Having come up through K-12 schools as a student in the same district, I was honestly shocked that there was no built-in recess. At every school I had attended in that same district, we had recess or outside time every day. And based on the research, it does not seem coincidental that I had attended much more racially diverse schools, with more White students.
I often wondered as a middle school teacher whether we weren’t creating self-fulfilling prophecies by labeling our kids as “bad” (something many of us tried hard not to do) and then took away activities that might have given them the opportunity to learn some of the social and emotional skills we believed they weren’t displaying by being “bad”.
Supporting all of the research about the value of recess is the growing feeling that American schools have gotten the balance wrong. While there are ongoing debates about how best to address student mental health issues along with meeting academic goals and figure out how much, if any, rigorous standardization is appropriate for developing children with diverse needs, it’s clear that a few minutes of recess a day are more than worth the time and resources required.
It’s important that educators and educational leaders find ways to make recess time work in a safe and healthy way. Often, this may mean that state and local governments need to invest in facilities like play equipment or even just safely-fenced areas for kids to be outside together. Some of the research also cited a lack of supervision as a concern for schools that ultimately chose to reduce or eliminate recess. This is a difficult issue to confront in South Carolina, where our teacher retention and recruitment crisis intensifies each year, and yet another reason why we need strong educational advocacy in the state that informs the public about exactly what happens when we defund and mistreat public schools.