You are here: Home / Archives for preschool

The school staffing surge

October 26, 2012 by

Between 1992 and 2009, the number of public school students grew by 17 percent, teachers by 32 percent and administrators and support staff by 46 percent, estimates The School Staffing Surge, a Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice report.

Before and after No Child Left Behind was passed, school staffs grew at more than double the rate of enrollment growth, writes Benjamin Scafidi. Schools hired more teachers — and a lot more support staff and administrators.

Compared to other nations’ schools, U.S. public schools devote significantly higher fractions of their operating budgets to non-teaching personnel—and lower portions to teachers.

. . . For example, Maine experienced an 11 percent decline in students from 1992-2009; however, the number of public school personnel increased by 35 percent. Perhaps more noteworthy during that period is the number of teachers in Maine public schools increased by 3 percent while the number of non-teaching personnel increased by 76 percent.

The staffing sure did not lead to improvements in student achievement or graduation rates, the study found.

If non-teaching personnel had grown at the same rate as the growth in students and if the teaching force had grown “only” 1.5 times as fast as the growth in students, American public schools would have an additional $37.2 billion to spend per year, Scafidi writes. Among other things, that would be enough to give every teacher a $11,700 per year raise, double taxpayer funding for preschool, give $2,600 in cash — or a $2,600 school voucher — to the parents of each child living in poverty. Or the taxpayers could get a break.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Vocabulary is destiny

October 9, 2012 by

In New York City, ambitious students are prepping for the test that decides admission to selective high schools. The game is rigged, writes Ginia Bellafante in For Poor Schoolchildren, a Poverty of Words in the New York Times.

Not too long ago, I witnessed a child, about two months shy of 3, welcome the return of some furniture to his family’s apartment with the enthusiastic declaration “Ottoman is back!”  The child understood that the stout cylindrical object from which he liked to jump had a name and that its absence had been caused by a visit to someone called “an upholsterer.” The upholsterer, he realized, was responsible for converting the ottoman from one color or texture to another.

. . . Reflexively, the affluent, ambitious parent is always talking, pointing out, explaining: Mommy is looking for her laptop; let’s put on your rain boots; that’s a pigeon, a sand dune, skyscraper, a pomegranate.

The children of less-educated parents don’t learn the words or the world knowledge. They start school behind — and they rarely catch up.

As the education theorist E. D. Hirsch recently wrote in a review of Paul Tough’s new book, How Children Succeed, there is strong evidence that increasing the general knowledge and vocabulary of a child before age 6 is the single highest correlate with later success.

We need high-quality preschools, not better test-prep programs in middle school, Bellafante writes.

If vocabulary is destiny, memorizing word lists doesn’t help, writes Robert Pondiscio at Core Knowledge Blog. We learn words “by repeated exposure to unfamiliar words in context.”  General knowledge provides the context.

What is needed to close the verbal gap is not just preschool. Not even “high quality” preschool. What is needed is high-quality preschool that drenches low-income learners in the language-rich, knowledge-rich environment that their more fortunate peers live in every hour of every day from the moment they come home from the delivery room.

Teachers should read aloud in class, adds Doug Lemov (Teach Like a Champion) in an e-mail discussion.

(Reading aloud) allows students to hear far more sophisticated words than they could decode and process on their own and at a faster rate than they could process on their own.  It’s a highly efficient delivery mechanism for sophisticated vocabulary development (with expression to aid with context and as an aside it also introduces complex syntax and language structures in advance of students being able to decode them successfully.)

But “reading aloud is a dying art these days,” Lemov writes.

 

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Persistence predicts success

August 14, 2012 by

Preschoolers who concentrate, follow directions and persist with a difficult game are much more likely to succeed in school, according to an Oregon State study that followed children from preschool through age 21.

Parents were asked to watch how long the children would play with one particular toy while at home, while teachers were instructed to give the class a task and then monitor which toddlers gave up and which ones kept persevering until they had completed it.

“Our study shows that the biggest predictor of college completion wasn’t math or reading skills, but whether or not they were able to pay attention and finish tasks at age four,” said researcher Megan McClelland. These skills can be taught, she said.

This reminds me of the Stanford marshmallow study:  Four-year-olds who could delay gratification and wait for the second marshmallow did much better in later years than the kids with less self-control.

To what extent can parents teach persistence, concentration and self-control to their children? How much of that reflects inborn personality and temperament?

Filed Under: Children, Education, Parenting Tagged With: , , , , ,

‘Broader, Bolder’ is ‘narrow, niggling, naive’

March 9, 2012 by

Low achievement by low-income students isn’t caused by poverty, argues Paul Peterson in Education Next.  He’s responding to a speech by Helen Ladd to the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management calling for fighting poverty and income inequality rather than trying to change schools.

Education reform policies “are not likely to contribute much in the future —to raising overall student achievement or to reducing [gaps in] achievement,” said Ladd, an advocate of the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education. Instead, policy makers should adopt “macro-economic policies designed to reduce unemployment, cash assistance programs for poor families, tax credits for low wage workers, or or an all-out assault ‘war on poverty.’”

Family income correlates with reading and math scores, but research hasn’t found a causal link, Peterson writes. It’s possible that “parents who make a better living also . . . do a better job of raising their children.”

In a 2011 Brookings Institution report, increasing a poor family’s income by 50 percent lifted math achievement by 20 percent of a standard deviation,” but that drops to 6.4 percent after adjusting for “race, mother’s and father’s education, single or two-parent family, smoking during pregnancy, and so forth.”  It’s more than twice as important for achievement to have a mother with a high school diploma instead of a mother who dropped out.

Drawing on a study by Stanford education professor Sean Reardon, Ladd says that the gap in reading achievement between students from families in the lowest and highest income deciles is larger for those born in 2001 than for those born in the early 1940s. She suspects it is because those living in poor families today have “poor health, limited access to home environments with rich language and experiences, low birth weight, limited access to high-quality pre-school opportunities, less participation in many activities in the summer and after school that middle class families take for granted, and more movement in and out of schools because of the way that the housing market operates.”

But her trend data hardly support that conclusion. Those born to poor families in 2000 had much better access to medical and preschool facilities than those born in 1940. Medicaid, food stamps, Head Start, summer programs, housing subsidies, and the other components of Johnson’s War on Poverty did not become available until 1965. Why didn’t those broad, bold strokes reduce the achievement gap?

What has changed for the worse is family structure, Peterson writes. More children are growing up in single-parent families, which doubles the risk that a child will drop out of high school.

Ladd proposes spending more on preschool, after-school programs, school-based health clinics and social services. These programs “have never been shown to have more than modest effects on student achievement,” Peterson writes. She also wants high-quality schools with good teachers for needy students — with no way to judge quality. “In sum, the Broader, Bolder platform is narrow, niggling, naïve, and negligible. . . . They promise little hope of stemming the rising number of single-parent families, a major contributor to both child poverty and low levels of student performance. “

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Teaching math in preschool

December 5, 2011 by

Preschool teachers are introducing math concepts, reports the Wall Street Journal.  The Early Mathematics Education Project at Erikson Institute is training preschool and kindergarten teachers at high-poverty Chicago schools.

At Lovett Elementary School, where the preschool teacher adopted the new methods, math instruction is omnipresent, if not always apparent. It’s there where 4-year-old Jasmine Wilson arranges four Popsicle sticks into a zigzag pattern under the number “4.” It shows up when Cedric Carter mimics the teacher’s syncopated clapping pattern. And it appears when students join a growing line of characters from “The Gingerbread Man” to chase Anasia Simmons around the room.

The children don’t realize it, but they are learning fundamental math concepts such as connecting numerals to quantity, building patterns, and the idea that adding something, or someone, creates a larger number.

Students of Erikson-trained teachers average three to five months more progress in math than students whose teachers were on the waiting list to get into the program, the institute reports. Children who started far behind in math made the most progress.

Jie-Qi Chen, an Erikson professor who helped develop the project, said proper math instruction helps students develop reasoning and logical thinking skills—cognitive building blocks that prepare them to learn any subject. But she said early math gains in preschool can “wash out” if teachers in elementary grades don’t know how to teach it. And unlike reading, she said, which requires little explicit instruction after a certain level, “math cannot be fully grasped without assistance from a well-trained teacher.”

On any given day, 21 percent of Chicago preschool and kindergarten teachers teach math, while 96 percent teach language arts, a 2007 Erikson study found.

Many early-education teachers are “math phobic,” said Jeanine Brownell, assistant director of programming for Early Mathematics.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , ,

Why so many hyperactive kids?

October 8, 2011 by

Nine percent of school-age children in America have attention deficit disorder, according to a health professional.   Why so many? Pediatrician Lawrence Diller blames a growing willingness to medicalize childhood misbehavior.  Uncertain about discipline and worried too much about self-esteem, parents turn to professionals, who are quick to prescribe drugs for what may be “minor differences in children’s behavior or performance.”

Children are under more stress at school, Diller adds.

. . . more than 20 years ago kindergartners only had to sing the ABCs and play “ring around the rosie.” Now, they are expected to read and do simple math before the start of first grade.

When both parents are working, children spend a long day trying to meet the “behavioral demands” of structured preschool and  after-school programs, he writes. “Parents are tired, too, when they finally get their kids at the end of the day.”

Via I Speak of Dreams.

Filed Under: Children, Health, Parenting Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Massachusetts will test kindergarteners

October 5, 2011 by

Massachusetts will assess kindergarteners to evalute their school readiness.

. . .  teachers would measure students’ early knowledge of literacy and math by carefully observing and questioning them during classroom activities, meticulously documenting their performance against a set of state standards, and including samples of their work. They will also take note of students’ social, cognitive, emotional, and physical development.

Education officials hope the information — how many kids can read? how many don’t know their ABCs? — will help the state ”more effectively target money and create new programs for elementary schools with large numbers of students lagging in key skills,” reports the Boston Globe.  In addition, the data will be used to improve preschool programs.

Filed Under: Children, Education, Testing Tagged With: , ,

The preschool socialization myth

October 1, 2011 by

Preschool won’t socialize your wild and crazy kid, writes Shawn Burns on Babble.

. . . unless your kid is already a shrinking violet, having that many other kids around just means that now your strong-willed kid has an army to lead, and new authority figures against whom to plan even greater rebellions. You know how they say prison is just a post-graduate work in crime? That, but with three year olds. And all the shivs are made of plastic spoons.

Preschool isn’t evil, Burns writes.  But parents should have realistic expectations.  “One thing preschool did not do was socialize my daughter. It turned her into a general.”

 

Filed Under: Children Tagged With: ,

Pink witches, tan paper

September 29, 2011 by

o help preschoolers “unlearn” racism, toy witches should wear pink, while fairies should be clad in darker shades, advise British equality experts. White paper should be replaced with paper that matches darker skin tones, advises consultant Anne O’Connor.

Finally, staff should be prepared to be economical with the truth when asked by pupils what their favourite colour is and, in the interests of good race relations, answer “black” or “brown”.

The measures, outlined in a series of guides in Nursery World magazine, are aimed at avoiding racial bias in toddlers as young as two.

“People might criticise this as political correctness gone mad,” says O’Connor.  “But it is because of political correctness we have moved on enormously.”

Wizard of Oz film still: Dress witches in pink and avoid white paper to prevent racism in nuseries, expert says

Wizard of Oz, 1939 Photo: REX FEATURES

Filed Under: Children Tagged With: , , , , ,

Early education shows long-term payoffs

September 3, 2011 by

Early education paid off in the long run for low-income children who spent two to six years in Chicago’s Child-Parent Center Education Program (CPC). In a study published in Science, University of Missouri and University of Minnesota researchers found 9 percent higher high school graduation rates,  22 percent fewer felony arrests, less substance abuse and higher earnings by age 28 for CPC graduates compared to a control group.

The Chicago Child-Parent Center program begins in preschool and provides up to six years of service in the Chicago public schools.

Filed Under: Children, Education Tagged With: , , ,
«Older Posts
Newer Posts»