My children attended Montessori schools, and it really is a wonderful system.
I would really like to see an extension of this learning method up through high school --- the closest thing I'm aware of was a school I attended in Mississippi for a couple of years --- classes were divided between academic and social, social classes (homeroom, phys ed, social studies, &c.) were attended at one's age, while academic classes (reading, math, science, geography, history, &c.) were by ability (with a limit on no more than 4 grades ahead up to 8th grade) --- after 8th grade that was removed and students were allowed to take any classes.
Some of the faculty were accredited as faculty at a local college, and where warranted, either professors travelled from there to the school, or students travelled to the college for classes --- it wasn't uncommon for students to graduate high school and simultaneously be awarded a college degree.
Apparently, the system was deemed unfair because it accorded a benefit to the students who were able to take advantage of it, with no commensurate compensation for those who were not, so the Miss. State Supreme Court dismantled it.
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.
Like anything, there are lower and higher quality implementations of Montessori programs. What you are saying here does not reflect the Montessori program I went through myself, and I think I can credit the Montessori program with a great deal of my later stage curiosity and drive to outperform.
I would say the same of the public high school that I attended. The attitude of the teachers and the other students was fantastic, and it really helped propel me forward in life, gave me a ton of lessons that I don't think most people were able to take from their own public high schools.
In both cases, my parents (Mom especially) were so incredibly stubborn about finding the best school for their kids. We literally moved the whole family to the town that had the best public school where my parents could afford a single family home. Love you Mom, thank you for caring, and to all other parents I would strongly advise against picking a school based on its philosophy. The quality of teacher matters much more than anything else.
We visited multiple Montessori schools for both my kids and I can confidently say that I met some of the saddest and coldest teachers I have ever seen in my life. I am not sure that is really best environment for small kids.
I myself went to shitty public schools and became an exceptional student later on. I am doubtful about the impact of early education on future success.
I never went to Montessori, but did cub scouts at one and those were some odd kids and parents. I felt like I was on an alien planet. Not bad people or anything, just certainly different. Like they took a class on how to act human, but lost something in translation.
I do recall there being a lot of toys and stuff. There was an old Texas Instruments computer that caught my interest as we had computers with Windows 95 at my school. Apparently nobody was allowed to touch it though.
My guess is the best school for your kids is one where they're safe and one with curious and motivated kids and enthusiastic teachers that can help inspire and unlock talent. The method is secondary, but kids should be both challenged and given some amount of freedom to explore. It also helps if the parents care and ensure their kids are functioning members of society.
That is definitely not my experience. The teachers at my kids’ school are vivacious and friendly. They very clearly love their jobs, and love watching kids grow.
There are different “factions” and accreditation organizations in Montessori. Some are more liberal and others are authoritarian and rigid. Not all Montessori schools are like you describe, but some certainly are.
In our market we see lots of the use of the word Montessori for marketing value only, when it practice it often means something like: "we have a bunch of wooden toys and a certain aesthetic in our classroom." I've heard these referred to as "Monte-sorta."
I agree, and sadly this kind of gives the Montessori label pretty limited predictive value. Turns out you just need to find a good school, regardless of label.
It really comes down to the teachers skill and personality- and that often comes down to if the school can afford the best teachers. Often in the USA regular public schools in wealthy communities will have better teachers than you will find at most private Montessori schools.
Part of schools "affording" the best teachers is not money, but the amount of discipline problems they need to deal with. Which correlates to the financial status of the families at that school. For tons of reasons.
Which families tend to win the lottery to go to these schools? The parents that can afford to. Even if the school is free, the transportation is often not. Plus the parents have to have enough free time to be aware of the lottery for their 3 year old.
most improper ones are simply capitalizing on the name recognition, some may have the idealism but fail in the implementation. if you do enough research it is pretty clear that only AMI accredited teachers implement the original method as designed by maria montessori. AMS comes close. and everyone else never received any form of montessori training at all.
Same here. My three-year old loved maps and we always played with them (making map of her room, etc etc)
We enrolled her at the local Montessori and she rushed to the map section but was told she is forbidden from using it until she takes the lesson on that or whatever is called. That lesson was 2-3 months away, and meanwhile all other kids were able to play with the maps.
This, combined with other rigidities and a crazy schedule totally unsuited for working parents (9-1pm wtf) made it impossible. After struggling a lot for two months, she went back to her old daycare and was very happy there, and is now at her elementary school now
I’m by far not an expert on it (my wife is, she teaches Montessori), but AFAIK what you observed was because it isn’t viewed as play, but as work - as in school work. All of the activities are called “works,” and they’re taken very seriously.
Part of this is, I think, to teach responsibility; for example, if a student gets a work out, they’re expected to put it back exactly how they found it. Montessori classrooms are incredibly well-organized, with everything having its (labeled) place.
We will soon be picking a school for our oldest. (Not in the US.) We're choosing between a Montessori school and a couple others.
I see a lot of sentiment along the line of "quality over philosophy" -- how can we evaluate quality? There is limited data available[1]. What do we ask the school when we visit them?[2]
[1]: Unsure if standardised test scores really matter at a young age, so we're grasping for straws with "fraction of parents with tertiary education" (higher means children have more progressive views?) and "fraction of girls in each class" (higher means calmer classrooms?).
[2]: I don't know how to evaluate schools so my best ideas are to ask about staff retention (is it a tolerable environment?), how they evaluate that they get the desired effects out of efforts (do they do things purposefully?), etc.
I attended one for elementary and middleschool. Early on everything we did was in groups. Take the multiplication flash cards and quiz eachother. Mess with the abacus. Look at the geological periods chart, etc. All the stuff seemed pretty fun to me. Yes, we had outdoor recess everyday, alhough we had a good setup with a big playground and some woods on the property. A lot of montessori setups I see now look really spartan like almost a daycare center.
But in hindsight I could tell it depends heavily on the teachers as well as the students you are saddled with because of how much group stuff there is. There was clear divisions between the kids who would reliably do their work and the kids who procrastinated and played around flicking pencils at eachother all day. This was generally possible while the main classroom teacher was busy with some subset of students for a lesson or some other work.
Once we got access to desktop computers we replaced the pencil flicking all day with games. They'd be in the main classroom but we'd just turn the crt monitors to the side to hide it. This was long before IT surveillance tools, we had full internet access too. Gameboys a plenty.
There was a lot of fluid experimentation however. At one point we took all the shelving in the room and turned it in such a way to create sort of cubicles. I think the idea was to get the kids who probably had ADHD to lock in and do their work more vs being tempted to socialize and screw around all day with their friends. Eventually they banned us from turning the CRT monitors as well.
Would a more rigid school structure help other kids? Sure, probably, but I don't think what public school was doing would have helped those kids much. Honestly montessori is a lot like the adult working world now that I am in that and see the parallels. A lot less handholding and you needing to not give into procrastination and ask mentors for individual direction from time to time. Group work and discussion coupled with independent work. Project based education that is more like actual real life work projects vs the dry lecture/memorize/exam patterns. That being said it was more "traditional" and less montessori towards the end as they had to prepare you for a proper highschool setup, so more formally scheduled classes and a lot less free time in the main classroom.
thank you for that detailed insight. i only had the opportunity to observe ad learn about montessori in kindergarten. what you describe is pretty much what i expected from reading about it, but i haven't seen any stories from actual students who experienced it.
it would seem that some groups in your class could have benefited from more teacher attention. or maybe from mixing up the groups.
It really depends on the teacher (like most school systems) and the support of the parents --- a fellow woodworker and I were enlisted to help make educational aids at one of the schools my daughter attended) --- agree one needs to find the best thing for each child.
Montessori is just an educational framework, I have no idea where you draw broad conclusion that the one or two things you looked at deemed it be "rigid" or little opportunity... Sounds like a random bad apple. There's a correlation between gifted children and montessori because it allows them to develop at their own pace which is often faster than that of traditional classrooms etc, it's not for everyone.
> 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
There exist various implementations of Montessori. AMI was founded by Dr. Montessori [0] and certifies schools so that parents can have some assurance of adherence to a standard. The many materials in a Montessori classroom, including things that look like a dollhouse, don't exist for unstructured play but are learning tools for the guide and student to use in their work. Once the student gets a lesson using a material, then they can choose to practice using the material in their self-directed work periods, which can be in groups.
My kids had a mostly positive mixed experience in Montessori. In addition to evaluating how a child comes to grip with the method, there is also how they work with their guide. My observation is that even skilled practitioners don't always achieve a strong rapport with every student. In those situations the Montessori classroom's weakness is that there is only one guide for all subjects as opposed to a traditional school's subject-specific teachers.
Montessori classroom's weakness is that there is only one guide for all subjects as opposed to a traditional school's subject-specific teachers
which tradition is that? in my country subject-specific teachers don't appear until middle school. so that's a rather moot point for kindergarten and primary school.
>In those situations the Montessori classroom's weakness is that there is only one guide for all subjects as opposed to a traditional school's subject-specific teachers.
This isn't a hardset rule. We had the main teacher but we also had specific teachers as well for stuff like music, art, languages, or gym class. By middleschool there was no more "main" teacher. You were basically in a committee of teachers all specific including science, english, and history by that point. Part of that I'm sure was to prepare you for highschool in a non montessori setting.
I had the exact same experience except my child is still there. No free play, very little time outdoors, very little interaction with classmates, no creativity allowed. Unhappy child who regularly doesn't want to go. We try to give her outdoor play with friends after preschool to make up for it.
I’m sorry you’ve had that experience. My kids’ Montessori school has a playground, athletic field, and butts up against woods, which they regularly go into for activities. One of the classes actually spends most of their time outside - weather permitting - because that teacher is getting her Master’s in some form of education that focuses on outdoor learning.
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.
Yeah, as one worked forward, one would arrive in the new class and be handed a stack of work required to catch up to where the class was at (moving forward at the end of a school year was strongly discouraged, but some kids would do it --- if need be, one could take the unfinished assignments home at the end of the year and work on them over the summer, turning them in at the beginning of the year).
I can’t find any record of a Mississippi Supreme Court decision regarding a program like you described. I did find evidence that Mississippi actively permits dual enrollment for secondary and post secondary education. Do you have a source for the decision you referenced?
> while academic classes (reading, math, science, geography, history, &c.) were by ability
My issue with this is that it just is selection bias, telling you nothing about how good the method is at teaching.
Does placing by ability actually helps student learn and score better? Or it's just that those who are good and bad already get divided up, and we know not why some are good and others are worse?
> Does placing by ability actually helps student learn and score better?
Yes, you shunt all the disruptive/obstinate kids into class 2 and they can spend 4 hours of math lessons every week rehashing arguments about how they have a phone so they don't need to know what 7x12 is.
This means the students in class 1 get undisrupted classes, learning more and raising their grades.
Because of the way these things are done, it does have the unfortunate side effect that the kid who struggles with math because he's dyslexic gets put in a class with the kid who doesn't give a shit about math. But they'd be in the same even if the school didn't place by ability, so they're not that much worse off.
> This means the students in class 1 get undisrupted classes, learning more and raising their grades.
That's pure hypothetical, and some disruptive kids are also good and could make it to the top class and still be a class clown. Unless you propose more splitting kids up by "disruptiveness".
I don't think any of this tells us of the quality of the method for actually teaching. It's like schools that have really hard entrance exams, and than assert they are the best school, yes in terms that they only allowed the smartest to come in, off course they will see that the students at the school is good, but those students would be good regardless.
There are a few K-12 Montessori schools, but not many. My wife is a primary (3-5 year olds) at the only one in our state. My kids are in 2nd and 4th grade, and we intend to see it through. They love it.
>> because it accorded a benefit to the students who were able to take advantage of it, with no commensurate compensation for those who were not
I came to comment (without reading it) that the study results are probably not universal. The programs are self selecting because kids not suited for it won't stay. This is not a critique of the program or the kids who dont fit it. Just an observation that its so "extreme" that only kids who benefit will stay.
My biggest skepticism about Mamdani in NYC is that he wants to get rid of gifted programs. Apparently some thing it's wrong to adjust each child's learning experience to their capacity for learning. Which is... Wild.
That’s not what he said. He wants to get rid of kids being tracked into gifted kindergartens because a) it’s ludicrous and b) testing four year olds is just a roundabout way of finding the kids with parents who got them a tutor for kindergarten entrance exams, and the replacement metric of getting pre-k teachers to pick them is not much different. He argues that kids don’t need to be shuffled off to special schools until more like 8 years old, when the 2nd grade testing happens.
He also obviously doesn’t believe it’s wrong to adjust learning to capacity. He just has the less popular view that this can be done without tagging kids at four years old and changing their lives. (He probably also understands that there’s plenty a brilliant math kid who belongs in a standard English class, or even in remedial classes to deal with a concurrent learning disability).
If this is true then I stand corrected. I understand the bias of "rich kids get training" so if he is not killing gifted programs but merely adjusting them, then fine.
I was blown away when I learned that public schools were testing kids before kindergarten and actually assigning the kids to different schools based on the result. I'd only ever heard of that as a "rich people pressure-cooker dystopia" kind of practice.
Absolutely, how many ghetto kids are in the school? It weeds them out through $ and expulsions.
Thinking the Montessori system is relevant to the public system shows your schooling failed.
Montessori has the ability to chose pedagogy so certainly has facets that are the quite good and should be applied publicly except for liberal arts graduate ideals.
This study is very young children, limited pregnancies and gang bangers, and also not random. It's randomised on kids who enter the lottery.
Discipline is the only thing that matters in schools, $, class sizes, teacher education levels above average, amazing resources all don't matter except how it apply to discipline. We have 100+ years of data. Air-conditioning to control behavior is an example of what helps. Liberal arts graduates destroy anything else that could work so don't interact with them, stay outside their broken world.
I send my child to a private Montessori school. With that said, there's no denying that sending your child to a private Montessori school is similar to parents who buy books in learning to parent are typically better parents not because they read the books but because they care enough to buy the books. If you care enough to send your child to a Montessori school, the parent is invested in the child's success and I think that's way more important.
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.
In OLPC's case, the remedy was a retroactive, panicked attempt at teaching teachers how to use the laptops, an effort that largely failed.
You're exactly right, though. OLPC failed mostly because it didn't think to teach the teachers how to use the laptops as classroom tools (not that they would have succeeded otherwise). Countries that had the infrastructure to do the onboarding themselves were relatively well-set up to teach their kids anyway.
If this is interesting to you, I highly recommend Morgan Ames' The Charisma Machine.
i think the constructivist idealism got in the way here. i believe the expectation was that they wouldn't need to train the teachers because the students should figure out the laptops on their own.
seems they missed that figuring out the laptop and integrating it into the curriculum are two different things.
i read your post btw, one thing i am wondering about is that you wrote that countries didn't improve electricity in schools because OLPC claimed that this wasn't necessary.
my own speculation is that they simply didn't enough research and didn't expect that the situation would be so bad. it is also my understanding that the hand crank was dropped early because the laptop could not handle the physical stress of cranking, it would break apart. but then a separate hand crank charger was eventually produced after all: https://wiki.laptop.org/go/Peripherals/Hand_Crank but if i did the math right then it would still take an hour to charge the battery with that.
since there was no hand crank the need for electricity was already well known before any deployment, and part of the deployment efforts included improving the electricity infrastructure.
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.
In my hometown there is something like that. There are two schools, one of them had a year with particularly good approval rates. Competitive parents started preferring that school, finding ways to send their kids there. That school has been sustaining better approval rates since then.
Which should make no sense because the teachers themselves work odd years in one school, even years in the other school.
> Which should make no sense because the teachers themselves work odd years in one school, even years in the other school.
Peers make a huge difference. Before university, I split my high school between two schools - one that was near the top academically, and one that was quite poor. The latter did have some smart students intellectually, but almost none did well academically because it wasn't valued by their peers.
Then I went to a very average state university for undergrad, and a top school for graduate studies. The difference wasn't that high in terms of teaching (the average school actually had much better teachers, but offset it by low expectations). The real difference was in the peers.
You like engineering? You like coding? Want to do some cool side project? Very hard to find someone like you in that average university.
Then when I started working, I started tutoring some middle school kids. The kids seemed totally capable mentally, and I was trying to figure out how they can't retain simple facts like number of months in a year. Until finally it hit me. They don't have problems learning things. It's just that no one in their orbit (peers or parents) care if they know these things. When I was a kid, I'd be an idiot amongst my fellow students if I didn't know it. So I did. Everyone did.
But if you're around people who think it's OK not to know how many days are in a year, chances are you won't know it, no matter how intelligent you are.
It's even worse than that: in some circles, kids are expected to be ignorant, or expected to be emotionless, or mean to each others, or asocial etc. We became mostly what was expected from us, with little variations. Once you've set the wrong expectations, education is an uphill battle.
> Which should make no sense because the teachers themselves work odd years in one school, even years in the other school.
The finding here is, competitive parents have an impact on the college approval rates of their children. Get them to all send their kids to the same school, that school gets better approval rates, regardless of the teachers.
It makes perfect sense if we approach it from the stance that parents and peers matter more than the teachers. Anecdotally, kids who have parents who give a crap and peers who share similar goals (seek good grades, entrance to college, not doing drugs, etc) tend to do better in school.
Theres also a lot of college prep going on with private schools. We had far higher college adviser to student ratios than any public school. They started working with you earlier than any public school. No grade inflation and college admissions knew that and knew the reputation of the highschool. Academically the schedule, courseload, workload, things like freedom to pick different electives, were all designed to mirror college.
It also had an obvious and unhelpful result. Of course kids who spend all day learning will know that stuff better than kids who don't. What really matters is long term life outcomes.
Rudolf Steiner would say all that early learning is harmful and they should have been playing and imagining spiritual things.
There are studies that show Montessori students tend to have better executive function, better working memory, and no significant difference in creativity. I'm not aware of any that look at lifetime income or anything like that.
I'm not exactly sure, but measuring performance on education tests as a child is just a proxy for the whole point of education and raising children and it could even be backwards.
> 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.
> if you are well be enough to send your child to a private school
This is a similar but separate effect. Rich, uncaring parents can raise unachieving idiots.
It’s easier to be caring with resources. But plenty of public school difference-in-outcome studies have found a signal from parental participation that I believe remained after adjusting for income.
My kids went to a free charter school, with similar setup and care from parents. The outcomes were notable and it wasn't really about privilege imho. (Though some activist type folks I know who count "parents who care" as a form a privilege.)
I went to a Montessori school in the Netherlands and feel like it failed me. Just one data point and maybe it was just a bad school.
I have autism and nobody noticed or did anything about it until it was time to start preparing for high school in seventh grade. I had read all the books in the school library but was not able to spell and write. It was just way to easy for me to escape work I did not want to do.
We moved after I started high school and my sisters had to change school because of it. One of the first things they noticed at their new school is how incredibly lazy they where.
I am very happy working as a mailman but I do wonder what I would be doing now if I had learned how to study and learn at a younger age.
I want to offer a different data point. I took my daughter to a Montessori-adjacent school for 3 years. It's not Montessori exactly and they didn't advertise as such but they had a different European name attached to it that is downstream from Montessori. They had multi-age education, stressed in children directed learning and individual growth, they didn't have exams, etc.
I changed my daughter this year and overall I'm disappointed in that school. There were many issues but the most important ones to me where:
- No exams, only individual growth meant there's no guarantee the kid is learning at a good pace. When I worked with her at home I could easily identify many gaps and deficiencies. She's now struggling a bit in her new school because of this but I think it will resolve soon.
- Because they didn't like comparing kids to standards or among each other the feedback I received was useless. It was always "she's doing excellent, we see strong growth" but it wasn't true.
- The school rejected most parent feedback and issues raised with something "maybe this style of education is not for you". For example, I know of a few other kids that had to leave because the school didn't take action against bullying because they didn't believe in punishments, etc.
I have to say there were good things too, in particular my daughter really enjoyed it there and formed strong bonds with other kids. I think in general it was ok for elementary education but I strongly think it's not after that and I now have a perhaps unjust bias against Montessori and derivatives.
There is definitely a survivor bias. It probably works well for those kids who make it through. The kids who it isn’t working for, leave and there are so many of them.
I wonder sometimes if that kind of school is only good for the high-strung go-getter child prodigy types because they are so hands off. But the very lack of metrics and standardization that purports to help with that kind of mission unfortunately certainly makes the shopping a lot harder for prospective parents. Similar with other private schools later on. Is it a good academically strong place where kids get pushed and excel later? Or is it a party den where rich kids joke around and snort coke all day? Hard to tell. It also depends on the student and parent body itself. Good luck :-)
Another thing that kind of tempers my opinion of this kind of school is anecdotal, some friends were lamenting that in their otherwise excellent public elementary school in an affluent district, some parents are pulling their kids out of _first grade_ and moving to private school because "there is not enough homework." What a sad image.
I attended Montessori in the 80s up to high school level and was part of a "gifted" group who went on to a public school a couple of years younger than typical. I was completely unprepared for student bullying in HS and the generally harsh attitudes of teachers. Also my learning style had to completely change, and I did not adapt well.
My Montessori persona was to be competitive about "finishing my weeks work first" usually on Monday or Tuesday, so I could enjoy working with other students on their work lists, and getting a crack at the highschool algebra book when the teacher would let our group at it. I had some strengths in English, math and computing, but weaknesses in foreign language and science where there were fewer opportunities for social learning. Obviously there were no opportunities for that in HS.
In addition to terrible grades, the transition to public school completely destroyed my social confidence and I had to stop playing sports due to my small stature. My dad noted this year (in my 40s now) later that I was unrecognisable after just a few months but he lost the argument to pull me out. It wasn't until my late 20s that I started to find my original confidence.
Very interesting story. If I may ask, looking back, do you blame Montessori for the “lack of real world preparation” or do you think rather that it was the regular school that had a bad system and you were in a better one and should have stayed there? If you had stayed there until uni do you think you’d adapted well to higher edu?
Only one-fifth of parents gave permission to participate in the study, the schools differed in how “authentic” their Montessori approach was, and the measurements only go up to the end of kindergarten. So we do not know whether the differences persist.
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!
Yeah. Certainly if the US regular pre-school system looks anything like the UK one, the difference between non-Montessori and Montessori pre-schools in the sorts of play actually encouraged probably isn't that big. The authors attempt to control for notable differences in the demographics of the treatment group, but they're there (and in this case, the higher incomes of the parents in the treatment group probably not just a wealth effect, but a correlate of other systematic differences with the parents who didn't...)
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.
I think the risk is that there is some systematic difference between those who chose to participate and the overall population of public Montessori kids. For instance, maybe those with high incomes disproportionately chose to participate, and Montessori strengthens learning for this group, but if we could measure the whole population the result is more mixed. It can't be a fully RCT if there's some kind of opt-in provision (which is not to say that an opt-in provision is bad, or a study that is not fully RCT is irrelevant).
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2506130122
You could have answered your own question by reading the abstract, which makes it clear that the OP's conjecture was correct: the lotteries were random or somewhat random, but the groups which consented to the study were notably different, with the treatment group being richer, more educated and whiter. They did of course attempt to control for this, whether the controls were adequate or omitted other underlying differences is another question.
Given all the money spent on trying different educational models to achieve better outcomes, it's really gratifying to see a result suggesting that improvement is actually possible. I have a lot of teachers in my family and they tend to take the perspective that education is an engineering problem rather than a research problem. That is, any apparent progress is due to extra funding or filtering students or the like.
> "Those costs do not include anticipated savings from improved teacher morale and retention, a dynamic demonstrated in other data."
That seems like some kind of supportive evidence as well. Teachers should logically be happier when working inside a system optimized for teaching efficacy!
Personally: we put our child in a Montessori preschool because we liked its emphasis on self-directed learning (I kind of think all learning has to be self-directed on some level. Even a lecture requires you to listen to and think about the lecture, instead of something else). We later moved him to a Reggio Emilia program for non-pedagogical reasons (there were problems with the building that the Montessori school was in). They're definitely different—in Montessori, he mostly played on his own, and in Reggio we now see him in pairs and groups all the time. I have no idea which is better, but his teachers at the Reggio school seem to like it.
Having been through Montessori, I think it's fantastic for kids that are naturally self-driven. I had a great time when it came to learning science and English (the two subjects I cared the most about).
Howrver, I was also pretty far behind in math for reasons unrelated to ability (standardized testing and secondary educational success indicate that I'm actually pretty good at math). I also left with very underdeveloped time management and study skills.
Could these downsides have been mitigated? Definitely, and my parents largely made sure they were. But in talking to my peers at the time, my parents after the fact, and parents of to hers that went to Montessori schools, I think the general idea holds.
Point being that self driven education is fantastic for a lot of reasons. But it will also let a lot of kids stay far behind their ability if not carefully monitored.
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.
Schools are not designed to calculate the actual cost on a per student basis.
Big ticket items like a dedicated SPED department, or a professional working 1:1 with a student can be accounted for. But if a special needs child participates in a standard class (which they do) and the standard teacher needs to do more than average work to accommodate them; that cost is not earmarked for that specific student. Once the bean counters see it, it is just "teacher salary", which gets averaged out across all the students.
Yeah, the intention to treat design is a particularly nice touch, not so common outside of biostatistics. They also compare the full cost of Montessori vs. plain ol', not the cost to the state, which could otherwise have given the Montessori schools (which are in wealthier neighborhoods on average) an unfair advantage if they have a lot of parents chipping in with donations and help. I've skimmed through the methods section and it does seem like they've gone to great lengths to allow for a fair comparison.
That doesn't necessarily mean the result will extrapolate, though. It seems plausible that teachers in Montessori schools are more motivated and knowledgeable than the average teacher and have made a conscious decision to teach in such a school. If every public school were to become a Montessori school, you would still get the cost savings (student-to-teacher ratios are higher in Montessori!) but you might lose that above-average enthusiasm and expertise and so the learning gains might not carry over. It's just really hard to know whether something might generalize in the educational sciences.
you might lose that above-average enthusiasm and expertise
yes, but montessori training can be done in one year (if you do it fulltime, my wife did i over multiple years 2 or 3 months each summer)), and it is entirely child focused. very different from traditional teacher training.
if we assume that every teacher starts their training with some amount of enthusiasm then the difference in enthusiasm and even more so in expertise should be minimal.
I've skimmed through the methods section and it does seem like they've gone to great lengths to allow for a fair comparison. That doesn't necessarily mean the result will extrapolate
Yes, I had exactly the same reaction. They appear to be presenting their work honestly, completely and clearly, so that other people have enough information to draw their own conclusions.
That's great! I did Montessori through 2nd grade, it was formative and important for me because I suspect I'm a little on the spectrum. Montessori helped me thrive in a way that was critical for my development at the time. I also suspect that switching to public school was equally important to toughen me up.
Most of public schools over the world struggle with much more basic problems than methods or programs. The most important thing IMHO is a stable environment. You can use the very best methods and programs, but if teachers change frequently, like it become more and more a norm in public schools, all these don't matter much really.
Somehow most of my circle of friends are public school teachers. Sure, there are teachers who forgot their "why" and only still do it for the (not very impressive) paycheck and eventual pension. But most teachers really, REALLY care about seeing kids succeed. The problems they talk about frequently are:
1. Lack of support from parents. Many parents treat school as free daycare and are not invested at all in their kids. They don't care of their kid gets good grades, they don't care if they get bad grades. They don't come to parent-teacher conferences. When their kid gets in trouble, they either insist that their kid didn't do anything wrong. Or literally tell the school, "hey, after that morning bell rings, he's your problem, don't hassle me about it."
2. Lack of funding. Need I say more.
3. Lack of authority. If a kid is being constantly disruptive, the teachers are told they just have to deal with it. They can't eject a kid from the classroom for ANY reason except when physical harm is imminent. My son's class had several students who were pretty much allowed to be on their chromebooks all day every day because the alternative was constant verbal abuse toward the their classmates and teacher. My son thought this was deeply unfair. He wasn't wrong.
4. Many school systems have a kind of twisted version of "no child left behind." All the kids who have special educational, emotional, or behavioral needs get plopped into regular classrooms with regular teachers. This is bad for basically everyone. The kids with special needs aren't getting the specialized teaching they require. If they are disruptive (and they often are when they aren't getting what they need), the whole class falls behind in learning because the teacher has to spend 1/2 their time dealing with 1/30th of the class.
Or even more basic, if the parents don't have the time or temperament to properly participate in parenting, then the teachers or the school aren't really going to matter either.
i believe some countries have a different experience. in a report about participating on online classes from home during covid in germany it was observed that kids with worse conditions at home were disadvantaged the most, which leads to the reverse conclusion that for these kids going to school did matter.
So long as it's a true Montessori and not just in name only.
The number of programs I see touting Montessori, Classical, and other models is wild. Usually it's charter and private schools that say one thing but do another.
The article doesn't really address why Montessori programs performed better at lower costs: these classrooms emphasize self-directed, hands-on learning where children choose activities based on their interests, driving independence and curiosity. Traditional classrooms follow a rigid teacher-led curriculum with structured lessons and uniform pacing for all students.
Table S34 shows that over 20% of the control group either stayed home or didn't provide info on what they did. (Compared with ~4% of the intent-to-treat group)
So, sadly, they weren't able to directly compare 'public Montessori PK3' with 'public non-Montessori PK3'.
That lowers the statistical power of the experiment. It does not bias it. That's the beauty of intention-to-treat designs: they trade away bias for lower power -- a worthwhile trade every day of the week.
There's a nonprofit Montessori school running in the biggest slum in Bangkok, Thailand which provides free schooling to the slums kids. It seems to work well.
They're always looking for foreign tourists to help teach English, even if it's just for a few days or a week.
I went to a Montessori school from pre-K through 6th grade. I totally agree with this article. It is not easy to make this work on a public school-sized scale. The problem in education is not funding. We were a private school, but we made it work on a shoestring.
The biggest problem with public school is school size and class size. The last century of school building built prison-like megaliths, when it should have built a much more distributed system. Class sizes under 20 and schools under 120 at least through middle school would raise a far less pathologically self-centered society. But most people who vote/make decisions would have to care more deeply, so I think it's a non-starter in the US, and more and more some other countries.
Kids stop caring way too young as a self-preservation mechanism. This means many of them also stop trying... It's a spiral that can only be broken by restructuring.
The biggest problem with public school is school size and class size
the montessori method can handle larger class sizes specifically because of the way it is designed. in other words, large class sized are an even better argument for why the montessori method should be used.
I have experience with Montessori, and I love the system. But it doesn't work for everybody. The Montessori educators I have known were open about the common situation where about 1 in 20 kids just do not learn with the lack of structure - they never become self-starters. In a public Montessori with large class sizes, there had better be a very clear plan of how to help those kids. We started our kids in Montessori and switched to Waldorf because my eldest really needed more structure, and my wife didn't want to try again.
When we transitioned our charter Waldorf to a public Waldorf, the kids experiencing it for their first year absolutely thrived. I would love to see both systems expand significantly in the public space, and have educators with enough savvy to help kids find their best place.
I think that even a more traditional school system can be totally healthy, and should stay part of the school mix. I have seen it work out relatively well in other countries. It just doesn't work when run like a for-profit prison.
PLEASE do your due diligence before considering Waldorf for your kids.
I'm not saying that kids cannot have a good experience at a Waldorf school, or that all their educational ideas are bad. Just that once you children have been there for a couple of years, you learn some very disturbing truths about the organization. It's not an education institution as much as it is a religious organization - your children WILL be taught hymns about god and angels in class. The teachers will not admit to this. They will be taught from the original lessons of Steiner, who had some rather unconventional pseudo-scientific ideas (even for his day). This is coming from a dad who had his kids at Waldorf for three years, and I'm so glad I finally got them out - even with the difficult academic transition.
There is plenty of information published about their organization online, and growing awareness worldwide.
My kids went to charter/public Waldorf. I personally am Catholic (not Protestant-adjacent like Waldorf tradition) and even though they do have some weird ceremonies that I am happy the charter Waldorfs don't adopt, my decidedly agnostic-to-atheist siblings sent their kids to private and charter Waldorfs and did not seem to find it so much of a problem. A Dragon Pagaent focused on Saint George and the Dragon (which we did have) is not much of a problem for most I would say. There is a chance you had a bad school. There are problems in every school, but none centered around Waldorf curriculum for any of us, and collectively we have over 50 school years of our kids in several different Waldorfs around the US. Any older pedagogy: Waldorf, Montessori, traditional schooling - they all need improvement. Still, there is no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
My kids are at a Waldorf school currently. I would not be surprised by your experience from what I’ve learned. However I’ve also seen a truly incredible environment at my school and zero cult adherence to Steiner. My best explanation is that each Waldorf school is very much its own island - it seems to be a very federated system.
"Class sizes under 20 and schools under 120 at least through middle school would raise a far less pathologically self-centered society."
This is a big if. Until the 1990s, class sizes routinely exceeded 30 and school sizes 500 in former Czechoslovakia, but I wouldn't call us "pathologically self-centered society".
As for self-centeredness, shrinking family size might be the true reason. Only children tend to be a lot more pampered than kids who were born into a family of six. In China, they are called "Little Emperors".
I think you are missing the context of what I said: I didn't say: all countries with large class sizes are self-centered. I said: in a self-centered society, smaller class sizes would be a big help to undo the harm that currently exists. Don't underestimate the influence schools and school communities have on the formation of character. It is huge.
1. It's easier to form friendships in a smaller group. In larger groups it is much easier for it to became a wall of people rather than individual persons. Large groups can be extremely overwhelming for children (they are still overwhelming for many adults).
2. It is much easier for the teacher to see the group dynamics, and jump in to make sure nobody is excluded. If the teacher doesn't do this, many of the benefits of smaller class size will be lost. Teachers need to very vigilant to teach that it's not okay to exclude kids and not play with them, its not ok to bully, etc. If there is nobody in the room to foster healthy relationships, they will never reach even close to their full potential.
I have seen and talked about this in quite a bit of detail with educators who are continually successful, and it is not hard to figure out - it requires devotion rather than advanced pedagogical theory and strategy.
> As for self-centeredness, shrinking family size might be the true reason. Only children tend to be a lot more pampered than kids who were born into a family of six.
to quote @inglor_cz - this is big if… you are arguing against generalization in your first paragraph and then you are proceeding to generalize… I am only child and my daughter is too and neither of us (especially me) have been pampered
I am an only child too. "Tend to be" is quite a soft claim, though, with plenty of room for exceptions.
The Little Emperors phenomenon is still a thing. If a kid has two parents and four grandparents who have no other descendands, it is USUALLY on the receiving end of a lot more attention and resources than if there are six of them.
Costs aren't exactly lower. The study noted that the cost savings came from higher student to teacher ratios in 1st-3rd offsetting higher costs of teacher training and classroom materials over a hypothetical amortization period. This is rational but not indicative of flipping a switch to save x%.
The upfront costs of teacher training and Montessori materials were amortized
over their expected lifespan of 25 y. Total costs for Montessori and
traditional programs were divided by the average number of children in each
type of classroom at the PK3, PK4, and kindergarten years, then summed to
yield the cost difference of Montessori and traditional programming over
three years of public preschool.
higher costs of teacher training and classroom materials
the current cost of montessori teacher training and materials is a matter of scale.
the training only takes one year. the cost comes from it being done on top of the traditional teacher education that most teachers likely went through.
if montessori training would be included into traditional teacher education, the cost would be absorbed (you could skip a few other redundant classes). likewise, the material produced at scale would be cheaper.
Might be due to many other things than the Montessori methodology. Such as peer quality and teacher quality, potentially better and more expensive/healthy lunches or a million other things.
montessori methodology and training (at least as certified by AMI) is a strong selector for teacher quality. trainees have to spend 90 hours in class just observing children and writing reports about their observations as part of their training. they learn to understand what the kids need and how to teach them. i am not aware that traditional teacher education does any of that.
likewise peer quality should not be even a factor because of the way how montessori education works. children are not given the opportunity to disrupt others.
the methodology is all-encompassing. it affects the children from the moment they enter the school, until they leave to go home. most of the potential other factors in the school are eliminated by the methodology itself.
it's hard to envision. you have to observe a class in action to understand why.
Teachers who pass the tests required for this probably are from the top of their teacher cohort regarding intelligence, consciousness, empathy, motivation etc and they are likely better paid, so less stressed from life stuff like bills or whatever.
The peers all come from non-random families who generally have good life outcomes either way. These kids will model good behavioral norms. If kids can interact, they will influence each other. It's not only disruption or no disruption, but likely more subtle.
The effects were only shown here up to end of kindergarten. It likely disappears later.
My default assumption remains that these fashionable methodologies do very little actually. The correction is probable almost entirely due to who the people involved are. I know that the study participants were randomized to Montessori or not, but the rest of peers and the teachers are not random.
The real test would be for a Montessori kindergarten to drop the methodology while keeping the same people.
Sounds good. The school systems are messed up, everybody agrees on that. But the article is missing out the underlying cause for the results. What exactly caused the beneficial outcome? Montessori itself is quite a vast term nowadays.
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.
>As shown in Figure S1, we began with a list of 588 public Montessori schools in the United States supplied by the National Center for Montessori in the Public Sector
>[procedural stuff, possibly introducing bias but not definitional]
>Finally, because “Montessori” is not a trademarked term, we checked whether schools met our minimum standards for Montessori inclusion
>- 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. [italics mine, furthermore, holy crap!]
I think one thing that is particularly noticeable is that, while there is definitely some particular form of education being put forward here which is interesting, there is obviously a very "aesthetic" trend as well, because plenty of schools are failing on the practices and the teachers while somehow none are failing the materials. But maybe this is actually just path-dependence in measuring the exclusion per criterion?
These were randomised. It sounds like they eliminated this selection bias.
Also, this is just about preschool. For regular school, I've grown more skeptical, because it didn't work well for either of my kids. They struggled with the independence and planning, and didn't get much done. One switched to special education during primary school and is doing excellent there (but that has much more guidance and costs more, though I wish it was available for everybody), the other switched to a regular school during secondary school after almost failing to pass year after year despite his extraordinary intelligence. He's doing somewhat better now.
It's a good option to have, but it's quite likely the advantage is bigger for preschool than school.
I think it largely depends upon the child. I thrived in a Montessori environment right through sixth grade before transitioning to a standard “prep school” and found myself way ahead of the other kids in a lot of things.
Alternately, my son was much the same as your kid. He struggled in a Montessori school which was very similar to the one I went to (in fact, my lower elementary teacher was the learning specialist at his school while he was there). He couldn’t handle the open structured style of the learning, and just floundered badly. We ended up getting him into a much more structured special ed school where he succeeded and is now off doing well at college.
It absolutely depends on the child. I phrased it too generally. I like the idea of Montessori a lot, but it depends a lot on executive skills: being able to plan, start project, finish projects, etc. My kids both sucked at that, and I'm not great at it either. My oldest son, despite his stellar IQ, completely drowned in projects. No idea what to do, when to start, how to start, how to finish it, and even when he finished it, he forgot to turn it in. He simply needs more guidance.
He's now finally getting better at it, at 16, which is about time, because at the university, you have to be able to do all of this. I sucked at it in university, so maybe it's actually good that he ran into these problems earlier than that, but for him to actually finish school, it was not a good fit.
So while it is randomized in the terms of who they chose to participate, the students did attend already existing schools. This could lead to selection bias from the participates, as the schools themselves are located in wealthier areas as that is where their clientèle are.
Lower income families may not have been able to take advantage of the lottery due to distance constrains thus self-opting out.
I have not read the study methodology details, the schools may have been chosen to avoid this problem but just wanted to point out that just because something say "random lottery" it may not be.
Still the ones who got in would be with more other students who opted in, the ones who didn't get in would be with more students who didn't opt-in to the lottery.
You would need to have a second group of those who lost the lottery and were all put into the same non-Montessori school with no others who didn't opt-in maybe.
Yeah but even then teachers that opt in to train in Montessori might just be better teachers, and converting a whole school system to Montessori, training everyone, might not have as good results.
My kids went to Montessori school, first private which was good, they learned a lot of life skills, not so much academics tbh, which is why I switched them to public Montessori, which was in name only.
What worked for us better is competence grading which is Summit system that originated in California.
But principles are system are great, if you can make it work. It requires effort from teachers and parents and all. It is not trivial to make it work everywhere.
I compared Montessori and non Montessori labeled daycares/preschools for my 3 and 4 year olds, and was unable to discern a meaningful difference in the course of the day.
Edit: I ended up going with the daycare that had cameras (so that at least management could audit employees), and a livestream for the parents, which was at a non Montessori daycare. Staff turnover also seemed lower. Was more expensive, but have been happy with results.
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.
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.
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.
I would really like to see an extension of this learning method up through high school --- the closest thing I'm aware of was a school I attended in Mississippi for a couple of years --- classes were divided between academic and social, social classes (homeroom, phys ed, social studies, &c.) were attended at one's age, while academic classes (reading, math, science, geography, history, &c.) were by ability (with a limit on no more than 4 grades ahead up to 8th grade) --- after 8th grade that was removed and students were allowed to take any classes.
Some of the faculty were accredited as faculty at a local college, and where warranted, either professors travelled from there to the school, or students travelled to the college for classes --- it wasn't uncommon for students to graduate high school and simultaneously be awarded a college degree.
Apparently, the system was deemed unfair because it accorded a benefit to the students who were able to take advantage of it, with no commensurate compensation for those who were not, so the Miss. State Supreme Court dismantled it.
I would say the same of the public high school that I attended. The attitude of the teachers and the other students was fantastic, and it really helped propel me forward in life, gave me a ton of lessons that I don't think most people were able to take from their own public high schools.
In both cases, my parents (Mom especially) were so incredibly stubborn about finding the best school for their kids. We literally moved the whole family to the town that had the best public school where my parents could afford a single family home. Love you Mom, thank you for caring, and to all other parents I would strongly advise against picking a school based on its philosophy. The quality of teacher matters much more than anything else.
I myself went to shitty public schools and became an exceptional student later on. I am doubtful about the impact of early education on future success.
I do recall there being a lot of toys and stuff. There was an old Texas Instruments computer that caught my interest as we had computers with Windows 95 at my school. Apparently nobody was allowed to touch it though.
My guess is the best school for your kids is one where they're safe and one with curious and motivated kids and enthusiastic teachers that can help inspire and unlock talent. The method is secondary, but kids should be both challenged and given some amount of freedom to explore. It also helps if the parents care and ensure their kids are functioning members of society.
Which families tend to win the lottery to go to these schools? The parents that can afford to. Even if the school is free, the transportation is often not. Plus the parents have to have enough free time to be aware of the lottery for their 3 year old.
(disclaimer: my wife got accredited by AMI)
We enrolled her at the local Montessori and she rushed to the map section but was told she is forbidden from using it until she takes the lesson on that or whatever is called. That lesson was 2-3 months away, and meanwhile all other kids were able to play with the maps.
This, combined with other rigidities and a crazy schedule totally unsuited for working parents (9-1pm wtf) made it impossible. After struggling a lot for two months, she went back to her old daycare and was very happy there, and is now at her elementary school now
Part of this is, I think, to teach responsibility; for example, if a student gets a work out, they’re expected to put it back exactly how they found it. Montessori classrooms are incredibly well-organized, with everything having its (labeled) place.
I see a lot of sentiment along the line of "quality over philosophy" -- how can we evaluate quality? There is limited data available[1]. What do we ask the school when we visit them?[2]
[1]: Unsure if standardised test scores really matter at a young age, so we're grasping for straws with "fraction of parents with tertiary education" (higher means children have more progressive views?) and "fraction of girls in each class" (higher means calmer classrooms?).
[2]: I don't know how to evaluate schools so my best ideas are to ask about staff retention (is it a tolerable environment?), how they evaluate that they get the desired effects out of efforts (do they do things purposefully?), etc.
But in hindsight I could tell it depends heavily on the teachers as well as the students you are saddled with because of how much group stuff there is. There was clear divisions between the kids who would reliably do their work and the kids who procrastinated and played around flicking pencils at eachother all day. This was generally possible while the main classroom teacher was busy with some subset of students for a lesson or some other work.
Once we got access to desktop computers we replaced the pencil flicking all day with games. They'd be in the main classroom but we'd just turn the crt monitors to the side to hide it. This was long before IT surveillance tools, we had full internet access too. Gameboys a plenty.
There was a lot of fluid experimentation however. At one point we took all the shelving in the room and turned it in such a way to create sort of cubicles. I think the idea was to get the kids who probably had ADHD to lock in and do their work more vs being tempted to socialize and screw around all day with their friends. Eventually they banned us from turning the CRT monitors as well.
Would a more rigid school structure help other kids? Sure, probably, but I don't think what public school was doing would have helped those kids much. Honestly montessori is a lot like the adult working world now that I am in that and see the parallels. A lot less handholding and you needing to not give into procrastination and ask mentors for individual direction from time to time. Group work and discussion coupled with independent work. Project based education that is more like actual real life work projects vs the dry lecture/memorize/exam patterns. That being said it was more "traditional" and less montessori towards the end as they had to prepare you for a proper highschool setup, so more formally scheduled classes and a lot less free time in the main classroom.
it would seem that some groups in your class could have benefited from more teacher attention. or maybe from mixing up the groups.
Oh man… survivorship bias thinking is dangerous.
There exist various implementations of Montessori. AMI was founded by Dr. Montessori [0] and certifies schools so that parents can have some assurance of adherence to a standard. The many materials in a Montessori classroom, including things that look like a dollhouse, don't exist for unstructured play but are learning tools for the guide and student to use in their work. Once the student gets a lesson using a material, then they can choose to practice using the material in their self-directed work periods, which can be in groups.
My kids had a mostly positive mixed experience in Montessori. In addition to evaluating how a child comes to grip with the method, there is also how they work with their guide. My observation is that even skilled practitioners don't always achieve a strong rapport with every student. In those situations the Montessori classroom's weakness is that there is only one guide for all subjects as opposed to a traditional school's subject-specific teachers.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_Montessori_Interna...
which tradition is that? in my country subject-specific teachers don't appear until middle school. so that's a rather moot point for kindergarten and primary school.
This isn't a hardset rule. We had the main teacher but we also had specific teachers as well for stuff like music, art, languages, or gym class. By middleschool there was no more "main" teacher. You were basically in a committee of teachers all specific including science, english, and history by that point. Part of that I'm sure was to prepare you for highschool in a non montessori setting.
https://law.justia.com/codes/mississippi/title-37/chapter-15...
My issue with this is that it just is selection bias, telling you nothing about how good the method is at teaching.
Does placing by ability actually helps student learn and score better? Or it's just that those who are good and bad already get divided up, and we know not why some are good and others are worse?
Yes, you shunt all the disruptive/obstinate kids into class 2 and they can spend 4 hours of math lessons every week rehashing arguments about how they have a phone so they don't need to know what 7x12 is.
This means the students in class 1 get undisrupted classes, learning more and raising their grades.
Because of the way these things are done, it does have the unfortunate side effect that the kid who struggles with math because he's dyslexic gets put in a class with the kid who doesn't give a shit about math. But they'd be in the same even if the school didn't place by ability, so they're not that much worse off.
That's pure hypothetical, and some disruptive kids are also good and could make it to the top class and still be a class clown. Unless you propose more splitting kids up by "disruptiveness".
I don't think any of this tells us of the quality of the method for actually teaching. It's like schools that have really hard entrance exams, and than assert they are the best school, yes in terms that they only allowed the smartest to come in, off course they will see that the students at the school is good, but those students would be good regardless.
Too many kids are just completely lost because they were moved up to the next math class despite not understanding the previous math class.
I came to comment (without reading it) that the study results are probably not universal. The programs are self selecting because kids not suited for it won't stay. This is not a critique of the program or the kids who dont fit it. Just an observation that its so "extreme" that only kids who benefit will stay.
If an 8 year old can do algebra, let them cook.
He also obviously doesn’t believe it’s wrong to adjust learning to capacity. He just has the less popular view that this can be done without tagging kids at four years old and changing their lives. (He probably also understands that there’s plenty a brilliant math kid who belongs in a standard English class, or even in remedial classes to deal with a concurrent learning disability).
https://www.chalkbeat.org/newyork/2025/10/02/zohran-mamdani-...
Absolutely, how many ghetto kids are in the school? It weeds them out through $ and expulsions.
Thinking the Montessori system is relevant to the public system shows your schooling failed.
Montessori has the ability to chose pedagogy so certainly has facets that are the quite good and should be applied publicly except for liberal arts graduate ideals.
This study is very young children, limited pregnancies and gang bangers, and also not random. It's randomised on kids who enter the lottery.
Discipline is the only thing that matters in schools, $, class sizes, teacher education levels above average, amazing resources all don't matter except how it apply to discipline. We have 100+ years of data. Air-conditioning to control behavior is an example of what helps. Liberal arts graduates destroy anything else that could work so don't interact with them, stay outside their broken world.
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.
Or worse, know we need a remedy when no one is even checking for success or failure?
Thankfully the US is well on its way to dismantling the Department of Education. So no stuffy bureaucrats getting in the way /s
You're exactly right, though. OLPC failed mostly because it didn't think to teach the teachers how to use the laptops as classroom tools (not that they would have succeeded otherwise). Countries that had the infrastructure to do the onboarding themselves were relatively well-set up to teach their kids anyway.
If this is interesting to you, I highly recommend Morgan Ames' The Charisma Machine.
seems they missed that figuring out the laptop and integrating it into the curriculum are two different things.
i read your post btw, one thing i am wondering about is that you wrote that countries didn't improve electricity in schools because OLPC claimed that this wasn't necessary.
my own speculation is that they simply didn't enough research and didn't expect that the situation would be so bad. it is also my understanding that the hand crank was dropped early because the laptop could not handle the physical stress of cranking, it would break apart. but then a separate hand crank charger was eventually produced after all: https://wiki.laptop.org/go/Peripherals/Hand_Crank but if i did the math right then it would still take an hour to charge the battery with that.
since there was no hand crank the need for electricity was already well known before any deployment, and part of the deployment efforts included improving the electricity infrastructure.
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.
Which should make no sense because the teachers themselves work odd years in one school, even years in the other school.
Peers make a huge difference. Before university, I split my high school between two schools - one that was near the top academically, and one that was quite poor. The latter did have some smart students intellectually, but almost none did well academically because it wasn't valued by their peers.
Then I went to a very average state university for undergrad, and a top school for graduate studies. The difference wasn't that high in terms of teaching (the average school actually had much better teachers, but offset it by low expectations). The real difference was in the peers.
You like engineering? You like coding? Want to do some cool side project? Very hard to find someone like you in that average university.
Then when I started working, I started tutoring some middle school kids. The kids seemed totally capable mentally, and I was trying to figure out how they can't retain simple facts like number of months in a year. Until finally it hit me. They don't have problems learning things. It's just that no one in their orbit (peers or parents) care if they know these things. When I was a kid, I'd be an idiot amongst my fellow students if I didn't know it. So I did. Everyone did.
But if you're around people who think it's OK not to know how many days are in a year, chances are you won't know it, no matter how intelligent you are.
The finding here is, competitive parents have an impact on the college approval rates of their children. Get them to all send their kids to the same school, that school gets better approval rates, regardless of the teachers.
Rudolf Steiner would say all that early learning is harmful and they should have been playing and imagining spiritual things.
What would those be and how do we measure them?
There are studies that show Montessori students tend to have better executive function, better working memory, and no significant difference in creativity. I'm not aware of any that look at lifetime income or anything like that.
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.
This is a similar but separate effect. Rich, uncaring parents can raise unachieving idiots.
It’s easier to be caring with resources. But plenty of public school difference-in-outcome studies have found a signal from parental participation that I believe remained after adjusting for income.
I have autism and nobody noticed or did anything about it until it was time to start preparing for high school in seventh grade. I had read all the books in the school library but was not able to spell and write. It was just way to easy for me to escape work I did not want to do.
We moved after I started high school and my sisters had to change school because of it. One of the first things they noticed at their new school is how incredibly lazy they where.
I am very happy working as a mailman but I do wonder what I would be doing now if I had learned how to study and learn at a younger age.
I changed my daughter this year and overall I'm disappointed in that school. There were many issues but the most important ones to me where:
- No exams, only individual growth meant there's no guarantee the kid is learning at a good pace. When I worked with her at home I could easily identify many gaps and deficiencies. She's now struggling a bit in her new school because of this but I think it will resolve soon.
- Because they didn't like comparing kids to standards or among each other the feedback I received was useless. It was always "she's doing excellent, we see strong growth" but it wasn't true.
- The school rejected most parent feedback and issues raised with something "maybe this style of education is not for you". For example, I know of a few other kids that had to leave because the school didn't take action against bullying because they didn't believe in punishments, etc.
I have to say there were good things too, in particular my daughter really enjoyed it there and formed strong bonds with other kids. I think in general it was ok for elementary education but I strongly think it's not after that and I now have a perhaps unjust bias against Montessori and derivatives.
Another thing that kind of tempers my opinion of this kind of school is anecdotal, some friends were lamenting that in their otherwise excellent public elementary school in an affluent district, some parents are pulling their kids out of _first grade_ and moving to private school because "there is not enough homework." What a sad image.
My Montessori persona was to be competitive about "finishing my weeks work first" usually on Monday or Tuesday, so I could enjoy working with other students on their work lists, and getting a crack at the highschool algebra book when the teacher would let our group at it. I had some strengths in English, math and computing, but weaknesses in foreign language and science where there were fewer opportunities for social learning. Obviously there were no opportunities for that in HS.
In addition to terrible grades, the transition to public school completely destroyed my social confidence and I had to stop playing sports due to my small stature. My dad noted this year (in my 40s now) later that I was unrecognisable after just a few months but he lost the argument to pull me out. It wasn't until my late 20s that I started to find my original confidence.
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!
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.
Who cares? It's not about me or someone else (or you), it's about the issues at hand. If the commenter wants to make a claim, they are welcome to.
People on HN can't read a study without finding one of the few methodological flaws they are aware of - as if that's some form of serious analysis.
> "Those costs do not include anticipated savings from improved teacher morale and retention, a dynamic demonstrated in other data."
That seems like some kind of supportive evidence as well. Teachers should logically be happier when working inside a system optimized for teaching efficacy!
Personally: we put our child in a Montessori preschool because we liked its emphasis on self-directed learning (I kind of think all learning has to be self-directed on some level. Even a lecture requires you to listen to and think about the lecture, instead of something else). We later moved him to a Reggio Emilia program for non-pedagogical reasons (there were problems with the building that the Montessori school was in). They're definitely different—in Montessori, he mostly played on his own, and in Reggio we now see him in pairs and groups all the time. I have no idea which is better, but his teachers at the Reggio school seem to like it.
Howrver, I was also pretty far behind in math for reasons unrelated to ability (standardized testing and secondary educational success indicate that I'm actually pretty good at math). I also left with very underdeveloped time management and study skills.
Could these downsides have been mitigated? Definitely, and my parents largely made sure they were. But in talking to my peers at the time, my parents after the fact, and parents of to hers that went to Montessori schools, I think the general idea holds.
Point being that self driven education is fantastic for a lot of reasons. But it will also let a lot of kids stay far behind their ability if not carefully monitored.
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.
Big ticket items like a dedicated SPED department, or a professional working 1:1 with a student can be accounted for. But if a special needs child participates in a standard class (which they do) and the standard teacher needs to do more than average work to accommodate them; that cost is not earmarked for that specific student. Once the bean counters see it, it is just "teacher salary", which gets averaged out across all the students.
I only read up on the 'impact' part of the study's claim, not the 'lower cost' part. I thought you were talking about the impact part.
The cost part is obviously suspect, for the reason you stated. It is so obviously suspect that I had subconsciously 'tuned it out'!
That doesn't necessarily mean the result will extrapolate, though. It seems plausible that teachers in Montessori schools are more motivated and knowledgeable than the average teacher and have made a conscious decision to teach in such a school. If every public school were to become a Montessori school, you would still get the cost savings (student-to-teacher ratios are higher in Montessori!) but you might lose that above-average enthusiasm and expertise and so the learning gains might not carry over. It's just really hard to know whether something might generalize in the educational sciences.
yes, but montessori training can be done in one year (if you do it fulltime, my wife did i over multiple years 2 or 3 months each summer)), and it is entirely child focused. very different from traditional teacher training.
if we assume that every teacher starts their training with some amount of enthusiasm then the difference in enthusiasm and even more so in expertise should be minimal.
We accept that different colleges (and other post-secondary training) at different cost points serve different populations.
We somehow do not accept the same idea for secondary or primary education. Why not improve educational outcomes for some of the population?
1. Lack of support from parents. Many parents treat school as free daycare and are not invested at all in their kids. They don't care of their kid gets good grades, they don't care if they get bad grades. They don't come to parent-teacher conferences. When their kid gets in trouble, they either insist that their kid didn't do anything wrong. Or literally tell the school, "hey, after that morning bell rings, he's your problem, don't hassle me about it."
2. Lack of funding. Need I say more.
3. Lack of authority. If a kid is being constantly disruptive, the teachers are told they just have to deal with it. They can't eject a kid from the classroom for ANY reason except when physical harm is imminent. My son's class had several students who were pretty much allowed to be on their chromebooks all day every day because the alternative was constant verbal abuse toward the their classmates and teacher. My son thought this was deeply unfair. He wasn't wrong.
4. Many school systems have a kind of twisted version of "no child left behind." All the kids who have special educational, emotional, or behavioral needs get plopped into regular classrooms with regular teachers. This is bad for basically everyone. The kids with special needs aren't getting the specialized teaching they require. If they are disruptive (and they often are when they aren't getting what they need), the whole class falls behind in learning because the teacher has to spend 1/2 their time dealing with 1/30th of the class.
So, sadly, they weren't able to directly compare 'public Montessori PK3' with 'public non-Montessori PK3'.
They're always looking for foreign tourists to help teach English, even if it's just for a few days or a week.
Kids stop caring way too young as a self-preservation mechanism. This means many of them also stop trying... It's a spiral that can only be broken by restructuring.
the montessori method can handle larger class sizes specifically because of the way it is designed. in other words, large class sized are an even better argument for why the montessori method should be used.
When we transitioned our charter Waldorf to a public Waldorf, the kids experiencing it for their first year absolutely thrived. I would love to see both systems expand significantly in the public space, and have educators with enough savvy to help kids find their best place.
I think that even a more traditional school system can be totally healthy, and should stay part of the school mix. I have seen it work out relatively well in other countries. It just doesn't work when run like a for-profit prison.
I'm not saying that kids cannot have a good experience at a Waldorf school, or that all their educational ideas are bad. Just that once you children have been there for a couple of years, you learn some very disturbing truths about the organization. It's not an education institution as much as it is a religious organization - your children WILL be taught hymns about god and angels in class. The teachers will not admit to this. They will be taught from the original lessons of Steiner, who had some rather unconventional pseudo-scientific ideas (even for his day). This is coming from a dad who had his kids at Waldorf for three years, and I'm so glad I finally got them out - even with the difficult academic transition.
There is plenty of information published about their organization online, and growing awareness worldwide.
This is a big if. Until the 1990s, class sizes routinely exceeded 30 and school sizes 500 in former Czechoslovakia, but I wouldn't call us "pathologically self-centered society".
As for self-centeredness, shrinking family size might be the true reason. Only children tend to be a lot more pampered than kids who were born into a family of six. In China, they are called "Little Emperors".
how would small class sizes help make children less self centered?
more attention from the teacher? why would that help?
i have to admit i have no clue what factors help kids be less self centered.
1. It's easier to form friendships in a smaller group. In larger groups it is much easier for it to became a wall of people rather than individual persons. Large groups can be extremely overwhelming for children (they are still overwhelming for many adults).
2. It is much easier for the teacher to see the group dynamics, and jump in to make sure nobody is excluded. If the teacher doesn't do this, many of the benefits of smaller class size will be lost. Teachers need to very vigilant to teach that it's not okay to exclude kids and not play with them, its not ok to bully, etc. If there is nobody in the room to foster healthy relationships, they will never reach even close to their full potential.
I have seen and talked about this in quite a bit of detail with educators who are continually successful, and it is not hard to figure out - it requires devotion rather than advanced pedagogical theory and strategy.
to quote @inglor_cz - this is big if… you are arguing against generalization in your first paragraph and then you are proceeding to generalize… I am only child and my daughter is too and neither of us (especially me) have been pampered
The Little Emperors phenomenon is still a thing. If a kid has two parents and four grandparents who have no other descendands, it is USUALLY on the receiving end of a lot more attention and resources than if there are six of them.
Why not? Costs are lower, etc.
If that's our standard, then nothing is worth doing. Lower costs seem like a good possibility.
the current cost of montessori teacher training and materials is a matter of scale.
the training only takes one year. the cost comes from it being done on top of the traditional teacher education that most teachers likely went through.
if montessori training would be included into traditional teacher education, the cost would be absorbed (you could skip a few other redundant classes). likewise, the material produced at scale would be cheaper.
likewise peer quality should not be even a factor because of the way how montessori education works. children are not given the opportunity to disrupt others.
the methodology is all-encompassing. it affects the children from the moment they enter the school, until they leave to go home. most of the potential other factors in the school are eliminated by the methodology itself.
it's hard to envision. you have to observe a class in action to understand why.
Teachers who pass the tests required for this probably are from the top of their teacher cohort regarding intelligence, consciousness, empathy, motivation etc and they are likely better paid, so less stressed from life stuff like bills or whatever.
The peers all come from non-random families who generally have good life outcomes either way. These kids will model good behavioral norms. If kids can interact, they will influence each other. It's not only disruption or no disruption, but likely more subtle.
The effects were only shown here up to end of kindergarten. It likely disappears later.
My default assumption remains that these fashionable methodologies do very little actually. The correction is probable almost entirely due to who the people involved are. I know that the study participants were randomized to Montessori or not, but the rest of peers and the teachers are not random.
The real test would be for a Montessori kindergarten to drop the methodology while keeping the same people.
https://www.pnas.org/action/downloadSupplement?doi=10.1073%2...
Talk of causation anywhere other than the unit of randomization is speculation.
>As shown in Figure S1, we began with a list of 588 public Montessori schools in the United States supplied by the National Center for Montessori in the Public Sector
>[procedural stuff, possibly introducing bias but not definitional]
>Finally, because “Montessori” is not a trademarked term, we checked whether schools met our minimum standards for Montessori inclusion
>- 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. [italics mine, furthermore, holy crap!]
I think one thing that is particularly noticeable is that, while there is definitely some particular form of education being put forward here which is interesting, there is obviously a very "aesthetic" trend as well, because plenty of schools are failing on the practices and the teachers while somehow none are failing the materials. But maybe this is actually just path-dependence in measuring the exclusion per criterion?
Also, this is just about preschool. For regular school, I've grown more skeptical, because it didn't work well for either of my kids. They struggled with the independence and planning, and didn't get much done. One switched to special education during primary school and is doing excellent there (but that has much more guidance and costs more, though I wish it was available for everybody), the other switched to a regular school during secondary school after almost failing to pass year after year despite his extraordinary intelligence. He's doing somewhat better now.
It's a good option to have, but it's quite likely the advantage is bigger for preschool than school.
He's now finally getting better at it, at 16, which is about time, because at the university, you have to be able to do all of this. I sucked at it in university, so maybe it's actually good that he ran into these problems earlier than that, but for him to actually finish school, it was not a good fit.
Lower income families may not have been able to take advantage of the lottery due to distance constrains thus self-opting out.
I have not read the study methodology details, the schools may have been chosen to avoid this problem but just wanted to point out that just because something say "random lottery" it may not be.
You would need to have a second group of those who lost the lottery and were all put into the same non-Montessori school with no others who didn't opt-in maybe.
What worked for us better is competence grading which is Summit system that originated in California.
But principles are system are great, if you can make it work. It requires effort from teachers and parents and all. It is not trivial to make it work everywhere.
You can’t understand Google unless you know that both Larry and Sergey were Montessori kids. — Marissa Mayer
It is not like they were Abel and Gauss as impressionable tech workers seem to think.
I compared Montessori and non Montessori labeled daycares/preschools for my 3 and 4 year olds, and was unable to discern a meaningful difference in the course of the day.
Edit: I ended up going with the daycare that had cameras (so that at least management could audit employees), and a livestream for the parents, which was at a non Montessori daycare. Staff turnover also seemed lower. Was more expensive, but have been happy with results.
"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
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.
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.
Look for a school/teachers with AMI (Association Montessori Internationale) certification.