This IS a Test

The test that my daughter was asked to take in the week before she started pre-Kindergarten was a recognition of the huge gulf that separates the haves from the have nots in this country. The district would argue that this wasn't a test per se, but rather a "benchmark," a means by which the teacher could identify what students' strengths and weaknesses were.

But what 4-year-old enters pre-Kindergarten knowing how to write his or her name?

The answer: probably not many, but there's an increasing likelihood that some will. And, given the trends, more and more will.

So what will the socioeconomic profile be for these extremely precocious children?

The answer: not hard to guess. Parents that can afford to send their kids to academically-oriented preschool will have "the upper hand," they'll have "the edge" over the other kids. Their kids will have been given "a head start."

What are the implications of this?

The answer: also not hard to guess. Parents will be expected to to teach their children to acquire these precocious skills themselves or they will be expected to pay others to do it for them. Those parents that cannot do this themselves or that cannot afford to pay someone to do it for them will be regarded as deficient if not negligent.

Low-income parents are already sufficiently vilified in our society. Now they are being cudgeled even further. As the saying goes, "The beatings will continue until morale improves."

10 Signs of a Good Kindergarten Classroom

Here are 10 signs of a good kindergarten classroom, courtesy of the National Association for the Education of Young Children:

1. Children are playing and working with materials or other children. They are not aimlessly wandering or forced to sit quietly for long periods of time.
2. Children have access to various activities throughout the day, such as block building, pretend play, picture books, paints and other art materials, and table toys such as legos, pegboards, and puzzles. Children are not all doing the same things at the same time.
3. Teachers work with individual children, small groups, and the whole group at different times during the day. They do not spend time only with the entire group.
4. The classroom is decorated with children’s original artwork, their own writing with invented spelling, and dictated stories.
5. Children learn numbers and the alphabet in the context of their everyday experiences. Exploring the natural world of plants and animals, cooking, taking attendance, and serving snack are all meaningful activities to children.
6. Children work on projects and have long periods of time (at least one hour) to play and explore. Filling out worksheets should not be their primary activity.
7. Children have an opportunity to play outside every day that weather permits. This play is never sacrificed for more instructional time.
8. Teachers read books to children throughout the day, not just at group story time.
9. Curriculum is adapted for those who are ahead as well as those who need additional help. Because children differ in experiences and background, they do not learn the same things at the same time in the same way.
10. Children and their parents look forward to school. Parents feel safe sending their child to kindergarten. Children are happy; they are not crying or regularly sick.
    
    Individual kindergarten classrooms will vary, and curriculum will vary according to the interests and backgrounds of the children. But all developmentally appropriate kindergarten classrooms will have one thing in common: the focus will be on the development of the child as a whole.

Tracing the Roots of "Kindergarten Readiness"

Imagine this. You want to learn how to play the piano. So you sign up for a class for beginners. You show up for day one of your piano class. The teacher gives you a test on how well you can play scales, finger dexterity, and how well you can read music. You don't know how to do any of these things. You say to the teacher, "Hey, I can't do any of these things. I thought this was a class for beginners!" She replies, "Yes, it is a class for beginners. But all beginners are expected to know how to do these things." You reply, "But I'm a beginner. You know, a beginner. As in I'm just beginning. As in I don't know how to do these things because I'm a beginner."

Seems crazy, right? So does "Kindergarten readiness." As I've been saying over and over on this blog, 4-year-old children are said to be "behind" on the first day of pre-K. I find this mind-numbingly idiotic and oxymoronic. How ironic that a policy called "No Child Left Behind" can define 4-year-olds as "behind" on day one of the grade BEFORE Kindergarten. Arrrggh.

Go to this list of reviews of the book Let's Get Ready For Kindergarten! and see what I mean. Here's a good example:

In a kid-friendly format with engaging illustrations, Let's Get Ready for Kindergarten! has dry-erase pages where children can practice again and again the skills they are learning. Children can practice their alphabet, numbers, rhyming, time, calendar, seasons and much more.

Huh?? 4-year-olds practicing telling time??? When did the giant stone tablet drop down from the sky and declare that little kids were supposed to know all this stuff before they even start school?

So if this is so crazy, then why is it the common stock of the land? Why do so many people buy this line of thinking?

Betty Jones, PhD -- a member of the faculty of the school of education at Pacific Oaks College -- wrote this narrative account in a personal e-mail communication to me (my emphasis added):

Through the 50's the emphasis in university lab schools, parent co-ops, and other good preschools (serving primarily middle and upper-class children) remained comfortably on play and social-emotional development, on setting up an appropriate environment, and on observing and responding to child behavior. (I was a grad student in Child Development at University of Wisconsin in the 1950's and that's what I learned; Erikson's developmental theory was basic to our work.) There wasn't a push for standardizing curriculum or teaching basic skills; this was preschool, nursery school. (I wrote an article and gave the name to an early NAEYC publication, Curriculum is What Happens. The editor added the rest of the title :Planning Is the Key. Several decades later, writing Emergent Curriculum, I was still making the same point.)

Head Start and accountability required that programs adopt a curriculum. There were 10 approved models, ranging from strict behavioral (Bereiter and Engelmann) to very open (Bank Street and Education Development Corp in Newton, MA). There were comparative studies of their effectiveness. Bereiter and Englemann asserted that poor children didn't have time to play; they needed to catch up. That idea has continued to influence funding and politicians, reaching its zenith in No Child Left Behind and increasingly pushing down elementary curriculum into kindergarten and preschool.

Here is my effort to add to her explanation.

Head Start

Head Start was created in 1965. It was designed to help end poverty by providing preschool children from low-income families with a program that would meet emotional, social, health, nutritional, and psychological needs.

But the term "head start" suggested that raising children was essentially a race. Very young children could be given a leg up -- literally a "head start" -- in the race to whatever the intended prize was: admission to an Ivy League school, preserving the family's prestige, or simply being able to survive in the future. So if low-income kids could be given a head start, why shouldn't all kids be given a head start? The logic seemed (and still seems) unimpeachable. Not giving children every advantage has become unimaginable, and being a "good parent" is measured in terms of how many enrichments activities each child is engaged in.

Of course, what this "head start for every child" approach overlooks is the fact that kids who already had a head start are given an even bigger lead. So instead of narrowing, the achievement gap widens.

Markets and Marketing

As dual-income families became the norm in this country's professional class, there arose an unprecedented problem: who was going to raise their children? The extended family had all but vanished, replaced by the much more "efficient" nuclear family. There were no in-laws or grandparents to assist in child-rearing. The only thing these middle to upper-middle-class nuclear families with two working parents could do was pay someone to do it for them.

So we witness the tremendous growth of daycare facilities, where children typically start at the age of 2 or 3 months. These children are essentially raised by paid professional surrogate parents. Places like KinderCare began to see this market as in need of some tapping. They, and others like them, developed marketing plans to attract parents, saying they did more than "just play." They offered a leg up to their clients, giving very young children not just blocks to play with, but exercises in math and reading. Anxious parents responded. KinderCare Learning centers comprises approximately 1,900 community-based centers in 38 states and the District of Columbia serving more than 200,000 children and employing approximately 41,000 people. Note this observation from a marketing trade magazine, Direct:

The benefits pitched on [KinderCare's marketing] pieces has changed . . . , reflecting parents' expressed desire for a learning environment, even more so than a loving environment, or a convenient location -- or even a low-cost care option, as reasons for enrolling their children.

Sales in 2005 topped $16 billion.

Other markets serving anxious parents have also erupted. Kumon was started 50 years ago in Japan by Toru Kumon, a teacher and parent who wanted to help his son do better in school. According to their web site, "The unique instructional method he created was so successful that his son was able to do calculus by the time he was in the sixth grade." Kumon has more than 1,500 Kumon Centers in North America alone. With centers in 44 countries, Kumon "has helped more students succeed worldwide than any other after-school program."

Fear Is U.S.

We are afraid in this country. We've been ginned up by stories of child predators and gang-banging, of al Quaida, toys from China, and the health effects of mold. Despite the fact that I never wore a seatbelt -- much less rode in a car seat -- as a child, I simply cannot imagine not strapping both my kids in tight to their car seats, even if it's only a couple blocks away. And despite the fact that I never wore a helmet to ride a bike or a skateboard, I would never for a moment not demand that my kids wore helmets -- always.

Our actions are practical and they make sense, but they also serve as daily practices that ingrain in us the uncontested notion that life is a very dangerous place. Yet we do all of these things -- buckling our seatbelts, donning our helmets -- not merely unconsciously, but as default actions. We literally do not think of these things as we do them or think them, yet they frame our perception and, thus, our reality.

We're also afraid that we're not going to make it as a country. Just look at the rhetoric surrounding public education. The key rationale for public education -- as it is currently framed -- is to "compete in the global economy," i.e., beat the Chinese and the Indians at the game of global domination and "maintain our current high standard of living." Look at the speech of every major U.S. politician in the last 5 years -- with the exception of Kucinich and Nader -- and you'll see the meme "to compete in the global economy" or some version of "preparing our children for the 21st century economy" in every proclamation on the purpose of education.

We talk a lot about this as a country because there's concern that we're going to lose the game of global domination. But we talk about this -- to ourselves, mostly -- as parents because we're afraid that our kids are not going to make it. Make it out of high school. Make it into college. But also make it in life. Make it past drug addiction, pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases. Make it past the all-consuming doubt of their teenage years and into somewhere called "happy" or perhaps "fulfilled."

So take an anti-poverty program for inspiration, throw in some anxious, over-achieving parents who have outsourced childrearing to professionals, and now add a dash of fear about the future of the planet and you have the noxious cocktail that gives rise to such nonsense as "Kindergarten readiness." It's nonsense, but it makes perfect sense.

When Rigor Turns to Rigor Mortis

We're either serious about keeping kids in school and raising graduation rates -- esp. for low-income minority kids -- or we're not serious.

If we're serious about wanting to keep kids in school, it's vital that school be fun, interesting, and relevant from the very beginning of the school experience. It matters not a whit if there is rigor, rigor, rigor starting in pre-K. When this rigor turns to rigor mortis, kids will drop out of school in even larger numbers than they currently are. I think people either get this or not.

I got this after watching my daughter in her pre-K class during the academic/rigor portion of the class. She, along with most of the other 4 and 5 year olds, were very quiet, very still, and behaving very well. They also looked catatonic, a rather shocking site when observing groups of very young children.

If people don't get the rigor mortis/catatonia thing, then they're clearly not serious about keeping kids in school and raising graduation rates -- esp. for low-income minority kids.

I think it would be helpful to make this argument as clear as possible as part of our strategic communication on this issue.

What if the purpose of education was not to beat the Chinese?

I've been wondering what it would take to actually prepare children for the future.

The key driver for public education -- as it is currently framed -- is to "compete in the global economy," i.e., beat the Chinese and the Indians at the game of global domination and "maintain our current high standard of living." Look at the speech of every major U.S. politician in the last 5 years -- with the exception of Kucinich and Nader -- and you'll see the meme "to compete in the global economy" or some version of "preparing our children for the 21st century economy" in every proclamation on the purpose of education.

But what if there were no global capitalist economy to compete in?

Here's a snippet from today's NY Times:

Specialists say their biggest worry now is not whether the economy is already or will soon be in a recession. Far more fundamental and troubling is the health of the financial system that greases the wheels of capitalism.

“Recessions come and go — that is something investors can deal with,” said Marc D. Stern, chief investment officer at Bessemer Trust, an investment firm in New York. “The bigger issue is, Can our financial system be restored to a sense of normalcy? In recent weeks we have been moving away from that, which is potentially very serious.”

The Case for the Scripted Prescription?

I'm trying to be sympathetic to the proponents of the heavy cognitive/academic approach for pre-K and K children. They say that 4-year-old children are "behind" on the first day of pre-K. I find this mind-numbingly idiotic and oxymoronic. How ironic that a policy called "No Child Left Behind" can define 4-year-olds as "behind" on day 1 of the grade BEFORE Kindergarten! But I'm trying to understand. Really. It's not easy. But I'm trying.

Take a look at this. Here's the language used by Missouri Senator Jeff Smith, a Democrat, in promoting a bill to provide free preschool in St. Louis:

"The facts are depressingly clear: more neurological development occurs by the age of 4 than in the rest of a person's life - and impoverished toddlers are at special risk of receiving limited brain stimulation. Children unable to read by third grade are unlikely to graduate high school, and will cost society dearly in increased social service costs. Our proposal will help kids come to kindergarten ready to read, and set them on a path to success."

In an effort to counter this logic and provide a counter to this cancerous meme, let's break this down, piece by piece:

Claim 1 - "more neurological development occurs by the age of 4 than in the rest of a person's life"

I've heard this cited over and over and am skeptical of its relevance. Might neurons be developing more rapidly in response to learning how to walk? how to speak? developing immune system? Our bodies are pretty busy when we're brand new, so you'd expect the brain to be equally busy. Yet we equate "neurological development "with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make our kids geniuses. You remember the scene from the movie Parenthood, where Steve Martin and Rick Moranis are discussing kids' cognitive ability?

Rick Moranis (Nathan): Our children are more capable of absorbing information than we are, yet we insist on treating them like adorable little morons.


Steve Martin (Gil): Are you saying Patty can learn things l can´t learn?


Rick Moranis: (holding up a flashcard with red dots) Patty, which one of these is the square root of 8649?


Patty: Ninety-three.


Rick Moranis: They´re like sponges, Gil, just waiting to absorb.

So we use flashcards, enroll them in ballet, and sing lullabies in Swahili every night. We know our kids have these spongey brains, so if we do nothing to take advantage of this, we're negligent as parents. So whether you accept this belief about neurological development or not, this belief creates a kind of frenzy on the part of parents. Like Rick Moranis's character, we go a little nutty. We forget that neurological development might also benefit from playing dress-up, pretending to be a pony, or just staring at a cloud. We equate parenthood with filling kids up, and we see our kids as empty receptacles into which knowledge is poured. Raising little kids is about getting them ready because they are, by default, not ready. It's our job to get them ready. This makes parenting a lot like a job with a set of tasks and milestones. It makes parenting pretty depressing. And not much fun.

Claim 2 - " impoverished toddlers are at special risk of receiving limited brain stimulation"

If you believe that "impoverished toddlers are at special risk of receiving limited brain stimulation," then how do you go about stimulating their brains? In my daughter's pre-school, there's a lot of emphasis on letter recognition, graphing, tracing, sorting, initial sound recognition, recall of details from a story, etc. There's no time at all devoted to unstructured, whole-body play of any kind. Everything is provided for the kids and is supervised -- closely -- by the adult(s) in the room. For 45 minutes each day, the children sit at the teacher's feet and listen to her read. She asks them a series of questions and then calls on children to respond. They either get it right or they get it wrong. I do not see this as terribly stimulating. I have observed my daughter at these times. She sits there, very quietly, and says nothing. She does not raise her hand. She waits for the lesson to be over.

Claim 3 - "Children unable to read by third grade are unlikely to graduate high school"

While I have no doubt there's a correlation between being unable to read by 3rd grade and dropping out of school, the way this statement is framed suggests that not being able to read by 3rd grade CAUSES kids to drop out. I suspect that kids drop out for lots of reasons, chief of which is the fact that school is boring and irrelevant. Making schools more academically oriented at the expense of other subjects (like art, music, drama, foreign languages) is not going to help. It will only serve to make the problem worse because it will make schools that much more irrelevant and boring.

Claim 4 - "will cost society dearly in increased social service costs"

At least we can be clear about why Smith is doing this. Like his neoliberal kin, he wants to save money. Saving kids is more cost effective.

Claim 5 - "Our proposal will help kids come to kindergarten ready to read, and set them on a path to success."

In my local school district in Portland, OR, free half-day pre-K is offered to a handful of schools (8 out of the 73 elementary schools). The district hasn't quite figured out the impact of its policy. If the intention is to get these kids ready for Kindergarten (whatever the hell that means) because they are behind, then the policy creates its own achievement gap between the kids in the 8 pre-K schools and the other 65 schools. After all, the kids from the 8 pre-K classes will be "ready for Kindergarten." The other 65 won't.

Finally, what would it mean to get low-income minority children "ready for Kindergarten"? I think we get a glimpse of this from Linda Perlstein's extraordinary book, Tested. Perlstein painfully documents the dumbed-down, test-centric path that a Title 1 school in Maryland follows to make AYP. In reading this book, I was saddened, enraged, and disgusted. After being exposed to a constant regimen of "BCR's" (brief constructed responses), decoding drills, and endless test prep, it's amazing that any of these children would ever want to read anything ever again.

Of Cash and Cookies

The NY Times has a story today on cash rewards given to 4th grade students in New York City:

The fourth graders squirmed in their seats, waiting for their prizes. In a few minutes, they would learn how much money they had earned for their scores on recent reading and math exams. Some would receive nearly $50 for acing the standardized tests, a small fortune for many at this school, P.S. 188 on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. When the rewards were handed out, Jazmin Roman was eager to celebrate her $39.72. She whispered to her friend Abigail Ortega, “How much did you get?” Abigail mouthed a barely audible answer: $36.87. Edgar Berlanga pumped his fist in the air to celebrate his $34.50.

I've always loathed explicit rewards and punishments with my five-year-old daughter. I know that once you start down the road of side-stepping intrinsic motivation and feeding extrinsic factors through chocolate and swats to the behind, it's hard to reverse course. So my wife and I have refrained, often to our short-term chagrin because patient parenting is so much more difficult than simply controlling and manipulating your children's behavior. My brother has his kids on a short leash. They do whatever they are told. They have been sufficiently trained to listen to him, fearing the lash or coveting the candy bar. I don't blame him for raising his kids this way. I get it. I see how much easier it is. Sometimes I wonder if I should raise my kids this way . . .

But then I'm reminded of why we do it the way we do it. I got a taste of the poisonous effects such Skinnerian techniques have with my daughter's theatre class. The teacher told the kids that if they learned their lines, she would give them candy. So when practicing with her the other day, my daughter said, "When I learn my lines, I will get candy!" I said, "Yeah, but if you learn your lines, you'll also be able to have fun in the play." She said nothing. Did she understand what I was saying? Or was she too busy thinking about what kind of candy she would get?

I admit that it's a hard thing to get, to see that practicing and memorizing your lines will eventually lead to an as-yet unexperienced joy -- the thrill of performing live in front of an audience, being in character, flowing with your fellow actors, pretending to be sad or angry or -- in my daughter's case -- a flying taco. But I would ideally like her to get this, to understand that practice and hard work and being involved in a play are their own rewards.

Ultimately, I'm not worried. She'll probably get it. The candy reward will be a nice treat, and it probably won't snuff out her nascent intrinsic motivation. But that's because there are so few external factors in her world right now that manipulate her choices, affect how she views herself in relation to a world of possibilities.

Not so with these 4th grade kids at P.S. 188. For them, and for lots of other kids, there's an inextricable link between learning and external rewards (or punishments). It might seem like an insignificant thing, and many would argue, "If the reward or punishment gets them to do SOMETHING, isn't something better than nothing?" But if you peel it back far enough for each kid, if you undo all the decisions these kids made because they were rewarded for approved behavior or punished for bad behavior, what would be left? I suspect you'd have a kid that would experience the same sense of joy I wish for my daughter -- the joy of practice and hard work and being involved in something challenging as their own rewards. But because the sugar-coated behaviorist tactics have been laid on so thick, have been applied so consistently and so relentlessly, there's little chance this will happen.

This means these kids have been short-changed, robbed of something I'd consider to be one of the main benefits of our species. Apologists claim it's done on their behalf. It's done to help them. But, really, it's done to them because it's so much easier to control them this way. Allowing kids' intrinsic motivation and inherent curiosity to flourish would be rather messy. It would be hard to do with classes of 25, much less 30 or 35 students. So, for the sake of efficiency, we give them cash and cookies in exchange for their cooperation.