Public Montessori programs strengthen learning outcomes at lower costs: study

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.

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.

Ok, but this was an RCT, so enrollment was randomized after people self selected into this experiment.

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.

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.

> 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.

>. 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!

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.

> It is not easy to make this work on a public school-sized scale.

Why not? Costs are lower, etc.

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.

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 underlying cause is that only well to do parents choose Montessori. None of the pesky low income folks to throw off the test score.

Sorry, I have no idea what to conclude from this. Can you explain?

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.

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.