Thinking and Linking by Joanne Jacobs
As narcos battled near an elementary school in Monterrey, Mexico, kindergarten teacher Martha Rivera Alanis led her class in a duck-and-cover drill and sing-along.
The Nuevo Leon state government honored Rivera a 33-year-old mother of two, for “outstanding civic courage” for keeping the children from panicking.
Five people were killed in the gun battle at a taxi stand.
The teacher posted the video, made on her cell phone, to her Facebook account. It was reproduced on YouTube and went viral.
Some kindergarten parents want more play time at Public School 101 in Forest Hills, Queens, reports the New York Times.
Gone were the play kitchens, sand and water tables, and dress-up areas; half-days were now full days. Instead, there were whiteboards, and the kindergartners, in classes of up to 27, practiced reading and math on work sheets on desks at P.S. 101, also known as the School in the Gardens.
Play came in the form of “choice time,” a roughly 30-minute afternoon period during which each child chose what blocks or toys in the classroom to work with, and at recess, which was often truncated by the time it took for every child to calm down and form an orderly line back to class.
Half the parents signed a letter to the principal asking for “more unstructured time in the school day, an extra recess period” and better line-up procedures.
Principal Valerie Capitulo-Saide agreed to an extra 30 minutes of P.E. a week and decided students don’t need to form perfect lines at recess.
Via Early Stories.
California students will not be able to to take career classes instead of art or foreign language to earn a diploma. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed the bill. An advocate of vocational education, Schwarzenegger said he was worried the bill would impose new costs on school districts and could require funding of more career academies.
He also vetoed a bill creating “green tech” career academies in high schools using a small surcharge on electricity. The funding source would set a bad precedent, the governor said.
The governor signed a bill requiring kindergartners to turn five by Sept. 1 and creating “transitional” classes for children affected by the switch. The cut-off date has been Dec. 2.
Kindergarten is the new first grade, says an education professor quoted by the Chicago Trib.
Kindergarten is the new second grade, writes Richard Whitmire on Why Boys Fail.
Let’s just say kindergartners are doing more reading, writing and ‘rithmetic than in the past. Some argue children will learn more if they spend more time in free play.
Edward Miller, a senior researcher at the nonprofit Alliance for Childhood, points to a pivotal — and seemingly counterintuitive — German study that found that kids who had attended play-based kindergartens actually did better in reading and math at age 10 than kids who had attended academic kindergartens.
“I think the child’s innate interest in learning things gets suppressed and basically atrophies” in academic kindergarten, Miller said.
“It starts this process of burnout where they don’t learn to love learning and they don’t really enjoy school. School becomes a chore.”
Disadvantaged children need more than playtime, others say.
“If you want children to know how to read, you don’t work on their social skills” in a play-based kindergarten, said Tom Loveless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a nonprofit public policy organization based in Washington, D.C.
“That’s not the most effective way,” Loveless said. “The most effective way is to teach them reading-related cognitive tasks like identifying letters, knowing sounds, basic vocabulary. I think even an advantaged child who attends a play-based kindergarten pays some sort of price because that is a portion of the day that could be going for cognitive development but isn’t.”
According to Loveless, much of the research that supports play-based kindergarten is methodologically “weak,” relying on researchers’ potentially biased impressions (“The children appear more engaged.”) as opposed to more specific observations.
He also questions the idea that play and academics are at odds: “That’s a false dichotomy,” he said. Learning can remain playful, he said, even for kids who attend kindergartens with high academic standards.
A public school teacher in a high-poverty area of Chicago, Lake Bailey says some kindergarten students enjoy learning to read, while others aren’t ready.
A “combination of boys being unready to absorb those skills — and schools failing to adjust teaching methods to help them keep up — is creating the gender gaps we see building in college graduation rates,” Whitmire argues.
Is it impossible to enable children to learn at their own pace?
Getting children “kindergarten ready” is just as important as college and career readiness, argues Elanna Yalow in Education Week. She wants “common standards for early-childhood learning” that “both capitalize on the unique abilities and interests of all children and create a clear path to helping them develop the skills they will need in school and beyond.”
Much of the development that influences achievement throughout life occurs before children even set foot in school, and kindergarten teachers will tell you that they are not molding fresh pieces of clay. Not only do we need to create consistency across state lines for early learning, but we also need to expand content areas beyond language arts and mathematics, the focus of the Common Core State Standards Initiative, to include social and emotional competencies that are the foundations of learning itself.
It’s critical that children arrive at kindergarten with the cognitive, emotional, and social skills needed to succeed. We know that children who start behind tend to stay behind.
Children develop at very different rates. Is it possible to create a common standard for all five-year-olds?
State-funded “universal kindergarten,” which spread in the ’60s and ’70s, was supposed to prevent school problems. Yet it had a small benefit for whites, but did nothing for blacks, concludes a new study by Elizabeth Cascio, a Dartmouth economics professor, in Education Next.
My results indicate that state funding of universal kindergarten had no discernible impact on many of the long-term outcomes desired by policymakers, including grade retention, public assistance receipt, employment, and earnings. White children were 2.5 percent less likely to be high school dropouts and 22 percent less likely to be incarcerated or otherwise institutionalized as adults following state funding initiatives, but no other effects could be discerned. Also, I find no positive effects for African Americans, despite comparable increases in their enrollment in public kindergartens after implementation of the initiatives. These findings suggest that even large investments in universal early-childhood education programs do not necessarily yield clear benefits, especially for more disadvantaged students.
State-funded kindergarten pulled black children from Head Start, which may have offered a higher-quality program, Cascio notes. White children were less likely to be enrolled in a program, so even a weakly effective kindergarten had some benefits.
Now, of course, many policy makers are pushing state-funded “universal” preschool, while others argue for expanding high-quality preschool programs designed for the neediest children. There will be more political support for preschools that serve everyone, but will these programs offer the academic preparation, especially language development, that most middle-class kids don’t need and most poor kids do?
Use rigorous research to expand what works for needy children, writes Isabel Sawhill of Brookings in Education Week.
To get their children into “gifted” kindergarten classes, affluent New Yorkers are hiring tutors to test-prep three- and four-year-olds, reports the New York Times. A “gifted” public education is free, while private school may cost $20,000 a year. So the cost of tutoring seems small by comparison
Bright Kids, which opened this spring in the financial district, has some 200 students receiving tutoring, most of them for the gifted exams, for up to $145 a session and 80 children on a waiting list for a weekend “boot camp” program.
New York City uses the Otis-Lennon School Ability Test, or Olsat, a reasoning exam, and the Bracken School Readiness Assessment, a knowledge test, to decide which children qualify for gifted programs. Applications have soared and the number of children scoring above the 90th percentile has increased from 18 percent to 22 percent.
If demand is so high for “gifted” classes, why not expand them? The easy-to-teach kids can learn in a larger class; the non-gifted classes could get a bit smaller.
Education Week reports on a National Association for Gifted Children study, which says gifted students’ access to programs varies greatly depending on where they live.
Update: The intelligence tests given to pre-kindergarteners don’t predict future school performance accurately, write Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman in Nurture Shock. A few years down the line, only 27 percent of “gifted” students are high performers. That’s because little kids’ brains are developing.
Kindergarteners should play more and spend less time on reading and math, argues Peggy Orenstein in the New York Times. She cites Alliance for Childhood‘s new report, Crisis in the Kindergarten, which argues that academics are crowding out play.
A survey of 254 teachers in New York and Los Angeles the group commissioned found that kindergartners spent two to three hours a day being instructed and tested in reading and math. They spent less than 30 minutes playing. “Play at age 5 is of great importance not just to intellectual but emotional, psychological social and spiritual development,” says Edward Miller, the report’s co-author. Play — especially the let’s-pretend, dramatic sort — is how kids develop higher-level thinking, hone their language and social skills, cultivate empathy. It also reduces stress, and that’s a word that should not have to be used in the same sentence as “kindergartner” in the first place.
Five is the new seven, she writes, pointing to her upper-middle-class friends’ designer children.
But the children of poorly educated, low-income mothers start school without the vocabulary, conversational skills and knowledge of middle-class kids. If they’re not taught in school, they won’t be taught at home. They can play at home.
Teaching kindergarteners has “produced significant gains in reading and math achievement,” writes Jay Mathews in response to a mother who complains her children’s kindergarten curriculum is too demanding.
The achievement gap between white and minority students has narrowed as a result. I have seen no research confirming your impression of an increase in bad side effects, but they might be there. Anybody have any ideas for preserving those gains with less pain?
One reason that kindergartens today look like first grades of the past is that so many kids go to preschool, which is a lot like kindergarten used to be. “Duck, Duck, Goose” gets old after awhile.
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