Visualizing Recess Time Across America
Measure — How does a map of recess time speak to health and happiness in the Empirical era?
With the internet, we can persistently and precisely track progress on social issues. For example, let’s look at how we could track children’s school recess time to provide students with more exercise and play time.
Getting exercise is critical to student well being and academic success. However, due to the pressure of standardized testing and budget cuts, many schools provide limited access to recess. Millions of students are being deprived of the recess time they need to be healthy and happy. Students who are deprived exercise then suffer from a range of problem, from attention deficit to obesity. How do you expect a child to sit still in a chair for eight hours and pay attention the entire time without being given time to play?
Schools, however, are cutting recess time because they are only being measured on test scores. Schools want what’s best for their students, but if the school is at risk of shutting down, things like recess become luxuries. However, if you could measure recess time, you could then institute it
Imagine a map of the United States, with 100,000 dots representing every school in the United States. These dots would be either red or green to indicate the students are receiving enough recess time or they are not receiving sufficient recess time. This map enables us to pinpoint exactly which students are being harmed through limited access to recess time, and it enables a social movement to rectify these imbalances.
To be clear, the point of this article is not to detail a map of recess time (though the author strongly endorses the idea). Instead, I aim to illustrate how, in the digital era, truth can now be tracked persistently. In a world in which truth is tracked on paper, it’s extremely difficult to see how much time students are getting for recess across the country and where deficiencies exist. Journalists, the arbiters of truth, aim to rectify harms by writing gut wrenching pieces that detail social harms.
Under the current truth dissemination paradigm, articles on recess time would be publishing citing statistics on why exercise is important and calling out a couple bad actors exist. The article would be read, people would fret, but then the issue would die under the weight of the 24 hour news cycle. In absence of a legal mandate, the same testing pressures still exist, the same resources are still lacking, and the same students are still being deprived.
How do you push the needle?
Let’s imagine a map with every single elements school in the United States on it. In total, there are over 100,000 schools. Each school is given a green or red dot, depending on whether the school provides at least 30 minutes of recess per day. This data is gathered because of the power of technology. Parents crowd source the data on their children’s recess time, and patriotic citizens investigate to fill in the gaps.
With transparency into this issue, we can first gauge exactly the extent of the problem. We can then work together to solve this problem, by working with schools and stakeholders to devise solutions. However, without any public sense of the extent of the problem, it’s extremely difficult to push for a resolution or know when the battle has been won.
With Empirical, truth gets tracked persistently. We can collectively define the values we aspire to hold and track the progress made on living up to these values.
Recess Time Per School Per Day
This is a mock up of what the recess map will look like. All of these data values are made up and do not reflect actual recess time provided.
Green dots represent elementary schools that provide at least 30 minutes of exercise, the recommended daily minimum. The eleven red dots represent eleven elementary schools that do not provide enough recess time to their students.
There is no technical reason why this engine cannot be made and truth brought to light. To build this engine you must:
- Create profiles to credit those that contribute.
- Create a system in which multiple data points, provided by separate people, validate the legitimacy of the data.
- Update the data over time to reflect new changes and visualize the age of the data.
- Translate these data points into stories about what is happening at each of these schools — why the data point is at the value it is, and what could be done to change it.
I’m excited — the future is coming, this map is coming, and there’s a way we can fight to ensure that every child is given recess, a chance to run around in the sun and laugh with friends.
But this article is much more than just recess — it’s about how tracking truth persistently over time will completely change how society determined its value, how truth is determined and understood. It’s not just recess time that will be tracked persistently, it’s the well being of endangered monarch butterflies, the levels of privatization of the water supply, the level of carbon produced by each person, and every instance of an egregious punishment. Truth will be known collectively and tracked persistently.
How does this relate to Quill? This mosaic of data point points doesn’t magically appear. It is built, point by point, because a citizen tells a story. Quill is a literacy tool that gives students the ability to think critically and write persuasively. By giving people the ability to write about the world, and we enable ourselves to paint a picture of the world we live in now and the world we aspire to live in in the future.
Why Recess?
Recess is most children’s favorite period, and parents and teachers should encourage that trend, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). Recess can be a critical time for development and social interaction, and in a new policy statement published in the journal Pediatrics, pediatricians from the AAP support the importance of having a scheduled break in the school day. “Children need to have downtime between complex cognitive challenges,” says Dr. Robert Murray, a pediatrician and professor of human nutrition at the Ohio State University who is a co-author of the statement. “They tend to be less able to process information the longer they are held to a task. It’s not enough to just switch from math to English. You actually have to take a break.”
The AAP committee that developed the statement began its research in 2007, expecting to discover that recess is important as a physical outlet for children. What they found, however, was that playtime’s benefits extend beyond the physical. “We came to the realization that it really affects social, emotional and cognitive development in a much deeper way than we’d expected,” she says. “It helps children practice conflict resolution if we allow them unstructured play, and it lets them come back to class more ready to learn and less fidgety.”
The policy could be a lifeline for the dwindling role recess plays in the school day as districts trim budgets and hours of instruction, and squeeze more academic subjects into existing or even fewer school days, often sacrificing recess in the process. A year ago, a national survey found that just six states — Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, Illinois and Iowa — adhere to standards from the National Association for Sports and Physical Education that schoolchildren participate in 150 minutes a week of physical education. And just three states — Delaware, Virginia and Nebraska — have 20 minutes of mandatory elementary-school recess a day, according to research published in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.
Since the 1990s, 73% of elementary school students through sixth grade have some form of daily recess, though it can vary widely between districts and even from school to school. That inconsistency could have serious implications for children’s health, says Catherine Ramstetter, Murray’s co-author and a health educator at Cincinnati’s Christ College of Nursing and Health Sciences. As recess started to disappear, for example, researchers noticed a spike in childhood-obesity rates.
Yay for Recess: Pediatricians Say It’s as Important as Math or Reading
