Susan Ochshorn is an advocate for early childhood education. This is her life, and she is good at it.
In this post, she reviews Reign of Error and assesses its stance on the issues that matter most to her.
Of course, she is delighted that early childhood education is high on my policy agenda. (She needs to talk to Chris Hayes, who said that there is research on both sides, which puzzled me.) She is happy to see that President Obama is making a big push for early childhood education, but fearful that he will push his standardized testing and metrics onto our youngest, most vulnerable children. I agree.
She wishes the book were shorter, so that more people would read it. I wish it were shorter, but I can’t think of what I could leave out!
But otherwise, her conclusion: “Ravitch’s message is urgent, and timely—and it must be heard.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Excellent Book!
We must continue to speak up about all the issues, especially, the predictable move to test our PreK children. No doubt in my mind that President Obama and his CorpReFormer$ are planning to shove the entire early childhood curriculum into 4 year old baby shoes. What in the world are we doing?
This PreK thrust has all the characteristics of all the other initiatives and regs beginning with NCLB. Who would ever have argued against …leaving children behind, challenging children to achieve more, getting rid of bad teachers, fixing bad schools, closing them if they had to and providing better, charter schools, etc? Sounds so innocent and well meaning. We trusted that they understood children and that they would want the best for them. Well, you know the rest of the story.
Giving little kids a good beginning, getting them school ready….college/career ready and keeping them out of jail???? Here we go again. Scare the loving parents of America as they turn over their precious children, along with their most confidential info to Gates & inBloom.
I see absolute disaster for our youngest ones. Based on data: years of education reform!
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Chris Hayes is probably referring to the Head Start Impact Study: http://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/opre/head_start_report.pdf. It shows that any academic effects of Head Start completely disappear by kindergarten, with very few other tangible benefits.
Even the most rosy, statistically suspect studies of preschool (http://fcd-us.org/sites/default/files/Evidence%20Base%20on%20Preschool%20Education%20FINAL.pdf) show no effect on academic outcomes. More frustratingly, it is difficult to pin down what makes a high-quality preschool high quality. It’s very likely that peer effects play an important role, which leads us to the same problem plaguing K-12: concentrations of at-risk kids in mostly segregated neighborhoods and schools.
This doesn’t mean putting all kids in preschool isn’t the right thing to do. But it’s perfectly fair to ask for a reality check with respect to outcomes, and to be skeptical about a goal of “high quality” for all programs.
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Gosh, Tim, why do you think every European nation invests in preschool education for all children? On the Economist survey of high-quality preschool education, the US ranked 34th of 45 nations.
Headstart would not be considered “high quality,” because the teachers are often parents of the children. In high quality programs, the teachers are well trained professionals.
So to use a Headstart study to knock “high quality preschool education” is a trick.
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It wasn’t until THIS September that at least half of Head Start teachers in center-based programs had to have a BA. Prior to this. at least one teacher in each class could have just a CDA (a competency-based credential which is lower than any college degree) or an AA. By far, the best Head Start classes I’ve seen are in public schools, where teachers must have at least a BA and certification in ECE –and many have MAs.
ECE professionals know what good programs look like and and our specialized professional association (SPA) has developed its own standards for teaching and learning, just as SPAs in other fields have.
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BTW, most Head Start programs are in centers, not in public schools.
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The EIU says we’re 24th, not 34th — http://www.lienfoundation.org/pdf/publications/sw_report.pdf. I’m guessing, just like PISA, that there’s a strong link between the quality of preschool programs and the types of kids who attend them.
From the FCD summary: “The most important aspects of quality in preschool education are stimulating and supportive interactions between teachers and children and effective use of curricula . . . Guidelines about the number of children in a classroom, the ratio of teachers and children, and staff qualifications help to increase the likelihood of—but do not assure—supportive and stimulating interactions. Importantly, in existing large-scale studies, only a minority of preschool programs are observed to provide excellent quality and levels of instructional support are especially low.”
I think the odds that the many districts educating a disproportionate share of at-risk kids will be able to successfully add two years’ worth of preschool at this level of quality are slim to none.
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As I was saying, and also stated in the FCD report:
“Long-term benefits occur despite convergence of test scores. As children from low-income families in preschool evaluation studies are followed into elementary school, differences between those who received preschool and those who did not on tests of academic achievement are reduced. However, evidence from long-term evaluations of both small-scale, intensive interventions and Head Start suggest that there are long-term effects on important societal outcomes such as high-school graduation, years of education completed, earnings, and reduced crime and teen pregnancy, even after test-score effects decline to zero. Research is now underway focusing on why these long-term effects occur even when test scores converge.”
It should be interesting what they conclude. How about, ‘Many critical components of human development and learning are not reflected in standardized test scores’???
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ECE is what my life has been about, too, for nearly half a century, and it’s not just the “standardized testing and metrics” that are disconcerting. The pushed down academic curriculum and lack of learning through play –or any play at all– are also alarming.
I didn’t particularly like the Hayes interview. He seemed rushed and out for “gotcha” moments. When he cut at the end to Rachel Maddow (a reported close friend of Eva Moskowitz), I wondered if that might be why…
Anyways, what Hayes was probably referring to is how test score gains made in Head Start tend to wash out in primary school. What that says to most of us in the field is that Preschool is not an inoculation against poverty, as measured by standardized tests, and that supports are probably needed for poor children to continue to do well on tests.
However, standardized tests are not the only measures of success, as indicated by the longitudinal research on the Perry Preschool Project: http://www.highscope.org/file/Research/PerryProject/specialsummary_rev2011_02_2.pdf
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The book is incredible and was the catalyst for my becoming more aware of what’s really going on in public education. I agree, Diane, that there’s really nothing you could leave out….it’s all so important for the public to know! I’ve shared with many friends that it is a must read. For those whose lives are so swamped they think they don’t have time to read the entire book, chapters 1 and 2 provide plenty of information to open their eyes and light their fires! Most likely, they’ll be like me after reading the first two chapters: unable to put the book down and no longer willing to sit by and watch as our kids are made to suffer.
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Here are the really problematic issues regarding the policies of Obama/Duncan for Head Start and Preschool for All:
Duncan worked with Sebelius on changing Head Start, so that now Head Start programs must compete for funds, just like Preschools in states that won the Race to the Top – Early Learning Challenge (RttT-ELC) –and that includes for-profit centers. Head Start could not be situated in for-profits until Obama/Duncan, so there’s a whole new ball game for preschool profiteers.
The largest for-profit chain in this country is KinderCare, which is a part of Knowledge Learning Corporation, which is a subsidiary of Knowledge Universe, established and owned by convicted felon (for securities fraud) billionaire Michael Milken… in my experience, it’s those private, for-profit programs which are most likely to have the least qualified staff and implement a pushed down academic curriculum, use methods that are not developmentally appropriate (for infants on up), and eliminate or severely limit play.
ECE professionals raised concerns to Duncan about the use of standardized tests with young children for these competitions and Duncan denied any impetus to test preschoolers. However, ever since shortly after NCLB was enacted, Head Start has been required to use standardized tests on kids as young as 3. They are a battery of tests that must be individually administered repeatedly…
In the first round of competitions, Head Start did not use classroom evaluations or academic goals to review programs, but they are on the list for future evaluations, so many professionals suspect that this denial by Duncan is not the truth. We fear that program evaluations are likely to be based on standardized test scores, including for RttT-ELC preschools, as well as for teacher evaluations. RttT-ELC requires that states implement a quality improvement rating system, which includes publishing scores for private for-profit centers and home day care programs.
While many of us welcome improvements to quality in ECE programs, we’d prefer to see that handled at the state level and have a lot of concerns about the federal DoE’s involvement in all of this, including their carrot and stick approach, not to mention the testing issues. Little has been published in the press about these matter so far, but once it all starts rolling out, we may begin to see the same kinds of pushback in ECE that we are seeing in K12 today.
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