A few days before my daughter started pre-Kindergarten, she was asked to come in and be tested. As part of the test, the teacher asked my daughter to write her name on a piece of paper. My four-year-old daughter looked up at me with huge, puzzled eyes. I looked at the teacher with equally huge, puzzled eyes. Write her name? On the first day of pre-Kindergarten? My daughter didn’t know how to hold a pencil, much less write her name.
My elementary school colleagues have told me that this first meeting has traditionally been a time for the new student and the teacher to get to know each other. But there was no conversation about what my daughter liked to read, what she liked to do, or anything else that might have told the teacher who she was. It didn’t seem to matter who my daughter was. Rather, the issue was – how well can she do on this test?
It saddened me to think that my daughter’s very first impression of school was based on taking a test and failing it.
Since that time, my daughter regularly brings home worksheets that she did in school. They’re photocopies of activities like sorting, graphing, letter tracing, letter recognition. While she’s at school, she’s very busy. The teacher has them working in “centers.” Each center is focused on a specific task, usually associated with a literacy skill. According to the teachers that I’ve spoken to, these skills were the sorts of things that six and seven year olds used to do in first grade. Now four and five year olds are being asked to do them in pre-Kindergarten.
Next year, if my daughter stays at this school and attends Kindergarten there, she will be in school all day. As a Kindergartner, she will be very busy. She will have exactly 20 minutes of recess, and then she’ll get back to work.
I met with the principal and with my daughter’s teacher. I expressed my concern that this practice might not be developmentally appropriate. The principal looked at me, rolled her eyes, and said calmly and confidently, “Well, it’s not going to do them any harm.”
But I’m not so sure. Should we place such a heavy emphasis on academic skill development at such an early age? Is this a developmentally appropriate practice? The truth is, we don’t know. None of us know. That’s because this heavy skills-based, academic approach has never been taken before in pre-K and Kindergarten classrooms in this country. Ever. So there simply are no long-term data.
But what little data there are point to the fact that this practice simply isn’t working: if heavy skills-based instruction were working, we’d see a rise in scores. But the average 8th-grade reading score on the 2007 NAEP was below the level of achievement shown in 2002. In addition, researchers at Stanford University have joined with principals and administrators from 45 middle and high schools across the country to form S.O.S. – Stressed Out Students. The group was formed four years ago by Denise Pope, a lecturer at the Stanford University School of Education and author of the book, “Doing School: How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed Out, Materialistic and Miseducated Students.” Pope and her colleagues point to the rise in recent years in the number of students seeking mental health services, an increase in cheating behavior in school, and students' consistent worry about academic achievement.
Paul Richards, the principal at Needham High School located in the affluent suburbs of Boston, joined SOS four years ago after four of its young people — one in college, two in high school, and one in middle school — committed suicide. Even before the suicides, Needham school officials had established an initiative, starting in elementary school, to help students develop better emotional and social skills after youth surveys indicated disturbing rates of alcohol and drug use and depression.
Yet the lack of data on long-term effects, the clear indication that this practice is not having the desired effect, and the disturbing rise in stress-related behavior in young people have not stopped us from forging full steam ahead. We think this emphasis on academic achievement is good for very young children. We think it will benefit them. But we don’t actually know what effect it’s having, nor do we know what effect it will have 5, 10, or 15 years from now.
Where I’m from, we call this “driving with your eyes closed.” Others call it hoping. Call it what you will, but the fact of the matter is that our children in public schools – my daughter included – are participating in a giant experiment that none of us agreed to. Our children are guinea pigs, to put it nicely. Others might call them lab rats.
My daughter came home the other day in an incredibly grumpy mood. “How was school today?” I asked. “Terrible,” she answered. “Why? What happened?” “I want to play with my friends,” she said. “Don’t you get a chance to play with your friends?” “No,” she replied.
To be honest with you, it’s not so much the addition of academics that worries me as it is the subtraction of everything else. We seem to have lost the balance here. What are we getting rid of to make more time for all this skill building? Art, music, foreign languages and – yes – recess are being cut to make more time for skills, specifically math and reading skills. Starting in pre-K.
So I met with a district administrator at the Office of Teaching and Learning. I said to her, "Ideally for me, pre-K can be about play, socialization, and fun. I think we can introduce some early literacy and numeracy in Kindergarten, but let's wait until first grade to get into formal instruction." She replied, "Oh, no. That would be too late." "Too late?" I asked. “Too late for what?”
The truth is, I’m not in a hurry. Neither is my daughter. But kids are being pushed to be little grown-ups at earlier and earlier ages. The rush to make adequate yearly progress – AYP – under No Child Left Behind has only exacerbated this trend that Dr. David Elkind chronicled in his 1981 book
The Hurried Child.
Dr. Elkind showed that in blurring the boundaries of what is age appropriate, by expecting -- or imposing -- too much too soon, we force our kids to grow up far too fast. He referred to it as nothing less than an assault on childhood.
I’m worried that we’re setting kids up to fail. We may succeed in getting some of them to read, write, and complete math equations precociously. But we may also be creating a cohort of four and five-year-old children who look at school as a place where they simply don’t belong. As a place that is devoid of fun. I'm concerned that children like my daughter are forming a negative self-image when asked to perform cognitive tasks when they are clearly not able or not comfortable doing so. Children may not only form negative self-images and develop negative self-esteem, but they may also form negative impressions about school, e.g., it's too competitive, it's too stressful, etc.
Competition and stress may or may not be something we want kids to learn to deal with. And I'm not one of those parents that wants to shield my little shnoogums from nasty people who don't think she's as marvelous as I do. But do we really want 4-year-olds to deal with these things in pre-kindergarten, in the grade BEFORE the beginning grade of elementary school? When are children ever allowed to be beginners? Surely PRE-Kindergarten is a good place for kids to be beginners. Or so we used to think.
The notion of children being "kindergarten ready" is extraordinarily bizarre oxymoron. It's like saying you have to know how to play the piano before you can learn how to play the piano. But if you are not "kindergarten ready," then you are considered “behind." How odd that a policy called “No Child Left Behind” can define children as “behind” on their very first day of school.
Children learn to play together by playing together. They learn how take turns by taking turns, how to share by sharing, how to resolve conflicts that come up by resolving conflicts that come up. In order to learn how to do these things, children need to experience them firsthand. They need to DO these things. But if they are not being given the time to do them, then how are they supposed to learn them?
I understand the need to close the achievement gap. I understand the need to do this sooner rather than later, and to target young children just entering school to make sure they don’t fall behind.
But as we try to correct one problem, we are unknowingly creating another.
Which leads me to wonder: who would benefit from the creation of a problem while also creating a solution to the same problem?
My friend Bill told me a story which helped me understand this phenomenon a bit more. When he was a young man, he worked with his father hauling bags of mortar. As he crossed the street one day, he dropped a bag right in the middle of the road, spewing its contents everywhere. He tried his best to clean up the mess, but had to run out of the road as cars passed by. He noticed that as the cars passed, they got covered with white dust from the mortar. So, being an enterprising young man, Bill set up a car wash just down from where he dropped the bag of mortar. He made a killing.
Kindergarten guru Vivian Paley notes
the earlier we begin academic instruction, the more problems are revealed. But, she wonders, are there problems actually there? Or are they instead waiting to be discovered by the external diagnostic tool that invented them? Paley argues that the premature introduction of academic skills-based lessons causes the problems. She writes, “Expectations for incoming first graders are quite precise, and the tension begins even before the teacher and student meet. The potential for surprise is largely gone. We no longer wonder ‘Who are you?’ but instead decide quickly ‘What can we do to fix you?’”
In the context of the educational assessments that children like my daughter are subject to, we see a diagnostic model that specializes in both quantifying educational deficiencies in very young children and providing an antidote that meets the needs of the diagnosis. We see the emergence of large publishing companies that are allowed to control the definition of the symptoms as well as prescribe and furnish the cure – for a hefty price. We see the emergence of the scripted curriculum, where “scripted” means an explicit formula to cure what ails them, as in “prescription.” In my daughter’s school, the prescription comes in the form of Scott Foresman’s Reading Street. Scott Foresman is a division of publishing giant Pearson Education. But the same kind of prescription is being handed out everywhere in the district, not just at my daughter’s school. And it’s being handed out all across the country. The prescription goes by various names, but they all have this in common: invent, identify, and remediate deficiencies, all in one slick package.
Now, I’m not a conspiracy theorist. But it’s useful to engage in some big picture thinking that is often considered conspiracy theory or chicken littleism. Who benefits from such a diagnostic model, apart from the companies that benefit financially from selling the model and its cure-all materials? Who would benefit from labeling children as “behind” before they even start school? Who would benefit from a system that rank-ordered children, starting at the age of four, into norm-based clusters of low, middle, and high-achievers? Who would benefit from such a classification system that virtually guaranteed that a large percentage of children would forever see themselves as incompetent, as “not meeting standards”? And who would benefit from the fact that a very large percentage of these children would be low-income minorities?
So what do I want? I want what my daughter wants: to be able to spend time with her friends, playing and being a little kid. She doesn’t have any kids to play with on her block, so school is the only place she has any chance to socialize and interact with her peers. I want her to have the chance to make friends. I want her to be given the opportunity to play. I want her to learn how to share and solve problems with her peers. I want this more than I want her to be phonemically aware. There will be time for such academic pursuits when she's a bit older. But there's only so much time she's allowed to be a little girl.
Lest you think this sounds a bit touchy-feely and out of synch with today’s calls for accountability, let me remind you of this.
The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development did a study in 2004 looking at literacy and reading skills for 15-year-olds. You know which country was the top-ranked producer of readers in the world? Finland. Of the 30 countries studied, the United States placed 15th.
So what does Finland do? Children in Finland start learning to read in the first grade. At the age of seven.
The Fins believe that play is the most effective learning tool in the early years and sets the stage for a lifelong love of learning.
I want this for all young children, not just my daughter. I want all children to have the opportunity to develop intellectually, socially, and emotionally. But most importantly, I want children to be allowed to have childhoods.
