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The authors discuss an urban public school districts efforts to reinsert play after its mandated disappearance for fourteen years under a scripted curriculum imposed to meet the goals of the No Child LeftBehind law. The authors analyze field notes, teacher and administrator interviews, coaching records, and surveys to chart the impact on teachers of the efforts to revive play in their classrooms. The study suggests that these attempts increased the teachers' understandings of child development and the connections between play and social-emotional development. The authors note the role of teachers in arranging play-friendly classrooms and the problems teachers faced including the lack of any district curriculum; the complexities of public-private partnerships; the lack of understanding about play by parents, principals, and administrators; and children's challenging behavior and volent play themes. Finally, the authors consider the sociopolitical factors influencing the sustainability of play in large urban classrooms. Keywords: Common Core State Standards; No Child LeftBehind; Open Court; play-based learning; socialemotional development; transitional kindergarten; trauma-informed instruction
Introduction
T H E IMPLEMENTATION of the 2001 federal No Child LeftBehind (NCLB) Act imposed a number of new procedures on public school districts throughout the country: the introduction of "teacher-proof," scripted curricula; continuous monitoring of student performance; high-stakes testing; and the punishment of teachers, administrators, and students if they did not meet external standards.1 Because of these new practices, many school districts were rated "low performing" in the implementation of rigorous academic curriculum at earlier ages. This caused kindergarten and early elementary public school administrators throughout the country to reduce the amount of time students were allowed to play and to resist any attempts to integrate play into their curricula.2 In the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study analyzed by researchers Jill Bowdon and Laura Desimone, data from 1998-1999 and 2010-2011 documented the disappearance of play, showing that NCLB led to more work and less play time for children in kindergarten.3 In fact, by comparing teaching and learning activities in kindergarten classrooms before the implementation of NCLB and after, Bowdon and Desimone showed that, over the last fifteen years, kindergarten classrooms steadily became more academically focused. The study concluded that the implementation of NCLB led to children having fewer opportunities to choose their activities for at least one hour each...