Mayor Bill de Blasio’s major initiative in education was implementation of universal pre-K for four-year-olds. Now he has announced his plan to provide universal pre-K for three-year-olds. The earlier initiative was popular, so what could go wrong?
The Mayor needs the state to fund it with $700 million, which is far from certain.
Leonie Haimson, founder of Class Size Matters, says there are too many overcrowded classrooms, and the Mayor should attend to them before launching a new initiative.
Susan Ochshorn of ECE Policyworks fears that the cost of the new grade will be other than financial. She worries that the addition will banish play from the lives of three-year-olds.
She writes:
“I was over the moon when de Blasio pioneered free preschool for four-year-olds. New York’s children and families had been waiting since 1997, when Republican Governor George Pataki first enacted legislation. The state’s movement toward universal access and adequate financing has been erratic, at best, and the mayor’s initiative was bold. But with kindergarten as the new first or second grade, expectations for preschoolers have increased. The pressure is on.
“The tradeoff for early education’s legitimacy and funding has been painful—a Faustian pact. The kind of playfulness that we see in the smartest mammals has lost its pride of place. Our littlest children have been abandoned, left to wander in the desert. We need to bring them to the oasis, before it’s too late.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
TOTALLY AGREE. Universal Pre-K is another SCAM by the elite. I am afraid for our young.
This scam is like “women’s liberation,” which didn’t really liberate anyone.
Google goes greedy. Here’s another one about SCAMS: https://educationalchemy.com/2017/05/15/my-response-to-the-new-york-times-google-article-what-they-left-out-a-lot/
Let’s get behind play in Pre-k, 3k, and kindergarten! They are all too academic without enough social emotional and learning through play and hands in explorations foundation for learning. It’s like asking a Martian to understand fully what an apple is after seeing a picture of one.
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Children need to play. They need to be physically active. When a pre K class cannot use the school playground because older students are being tested, ( too much noise) or when they cannot get outside because the overall school schedule requires an indoor activity, or when “preps” mean a substitute teacher babysits the class, their needs are not being met. Some of the children may in fact need more exposure to reading by being read to, or numbers by playing counting games, but many do not. As with any other grade level, students need to be differentiated and treated according to their individual needs. But ALL children must be free to run around………. a lot.
It was popular, so let’s do it? Popular with whom, why? Who has recommended this?
I am starting to feel like an old fogey! I feel myself tempted to say over and over, “When my kids were little…” I understand that some kids live in such impoverished conditions despite the love their parents might have for them that the opportunities available to them to enjoy playing can be very limited. However, this push to micromanage each moment of a child’s life leading to some far off in the future goal is ludicrous. Somehow, people have managed to raise children who go on to raise their own children without the help of rigid competency goals. Are kids going to get to splash in puddles after a rainstorm just to watch the water fountain around their feet? Will they still get to blow bubbles for the sheer joy of watching them float away while others try to catch them? Or does some adult compelled to turn the experience into a mini physics lab? There is so much to experience in this world that does not require a lesson plan to learn. We had better figure out how to preserve those experiences for our children.
Is one of the problems associated with the societal tendency to compete with instead of help out each other?
The whole “college and career ready” propaganda has resulted in pushing down the curriculum eliminating what young children need most. They need to be free to explore and play is how young children make sense of the world. We need to drown out the brain washing noise from deformers and resist any attempts to implement any harmful programs that are contrary to the nature of the young child.
Considering that De Blasio and Chancellor Farina have maintained most of the policies of the Bloomberg administration, in addition to keeping 80% of the arrogant know-nothings whom Bloomberg imported into the DOE, combined with the lack of play for toddlers in Pre-K (College and Career Ready!!!!!), this looks more dystopian than anything else: training for a school and work-life filled with demands for obedience, acceptance of authoritarianism, tolerance of tedium, and a means of the Frightful Five (Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft) to get their fangs into children at even younger age.
The “frightful five” is a great term for the companies that would like everyone to plunk their infants down in front of a computer screen.
My first job was in 1985 as an assistant in a public school kindergarten. It was a pilot school founded by unsatisfied parents. The focus was on a “developmentally appropriate” curriculum. While our counterparts across the district were using phonics flash cards, etc. we were embracing Whole Language and teaching through play and free exploration. My teacher said she did not want public schools to ever offer preschool because they would not “do it right”. So here we are. Early childhood (birth-8) teachers need expertise in child development to teach, not Common Core and tests.
Sadly, educational decisions are being made by people without background or experience in early education and child development. My twin grandchildren, five years old, are in a “transitional kindergarten” in my city. It is very academic with lots of paper/pencil work and few developmentally appropriate activities. Only the more mature twin seems to like school and the little girl is already showing shame when the subject of reading is brought up because she knows her brother is “ahead” in this area. What’s really sad is that she can read too but the pressure is on her to be at a first grade level. And this is TRANSITIONAL kindergarten. It’s a crime against young children and we can only hope enough people speak out against it. Is my granddaughter’s love for reading being destroyed now? In coming years, will the printed word represent something painful to her?
Although my son and his wife have advanced degrees, neither seems aware that the education their children are getting is inappropriate. Like parents before them, they trust the local school. Ironically, the teachers likely DO know what is right but are being pressured to do something else.
It is all so unnecessary. With a rich literary environment in the earliest grades, most children learn to read in a joyful and relaxed manner in the first and second grades. There should be only pleasure and no pain.
“Ironically, the teachers likely DO know what is right but are being pressured to do something else.”
Such a bogus excuse.
Definition of GAGA Good German.
My grandfather, who lived in London after his 18th birthday had a story about a speaker in Hyde Park who preached about revolution.
“After the revolution you can all have peaches and cream”.
“But I don’t like peaches and cream” came a voice from the audience.
“After the revolution you’ll have to have peaches and cream”.
Once again, kudos to Leonie Haimson for keeping our policymakers oriented to a trivial little thing called reality.
I agree with Susan. Before you know it, they will want to enroll babies into the public schools! When will parents learn that they can give the best teaching possible just by spending time, reading, and talking with their little ones!
Very interesting article. I passed it along on my blog for my community with the following
commentary.
Reading Diane Ravitch’s blog early today I came across the following article about a proposal by New York City’s mayor to extend free public access to pre-K education. (Aside – As you may have heard, New York recently initiated a program to provide tuition-free access to public higher education, though this proposal is not without controversy.)
The author of the pre-K article is clearly concerned about academic pressures extending down into the pre-K years and the effect that the elimination of play will have on young children.
“In a 2016 study, Daphna Bassok, Scott Latham, and Ana Rorem, researchers at the University of Virginia, compared kindergarten classrooms between 1998 and 2010, a period of heightened accountability in which No Child Left Behind was enacted, more money was invested in early education, and the Common Core state standards were designed. Academics, they confirmed, had trickled down to early childhood. Kindergarten had become the new first—or even second—grade.
The use of textbooks and worksheets had substantially increased, as had standardized testing. Child-initiated inquiry, how kids learn best, was pretty much gone, replaced by teacher-led instruction. Curriculum focused on math and literacy skills had pushed out art, music, and science, depriving these young students of a broad, rich experience.
It has been about 25 years since my children attended pre-school and kindergarten here, so I am curious to hear readers’ comments about local trends. Is this happening here too? Comments can be entered in the form following this article.”
Last year I mentioned a book by Amanda Ripley entitled “The Smartest Kids in the World and How They Got That Way.” Ripley followed several American foreign exchange students as they experienced other countries’ education systems as well as the experiences of students from other countries here in the U.S. The book is the most interesting read on education that I have found in the last several years – highly recommended!!
Finland gets very favorable mention, but there are dire warnings about South Korea which is one of the most test-driven countries in the world. I quote the most ghastly, but consequently memorable story from the book. If you are squeamish, please skip the following block quote:
“One Sunday morning during that school year, a teenager named Ji stabbed his mother in the neck in their home in Seoul. He did it to stop her from going to a parent-teacher conference. He was terrified that she’d find out that he’d lied about his latest test scores.
Afterwards, Ji kept his secret for eight months. Each day, he came and went to school and back again as if nothing had changed. He told neighbors his mother had left town. To contain the odor of her decomposing body, he sealed the door to her room with glue and tape. He invited friends over for ramen. Finally, his estranged father discovered the corpse, and Ji was arrested for murder.
This ghastly story captivated the country, as might be expected, but for specific and revealing reasons. Ji’s crime was not, in the minds of many Koreans, an isolated tragedy; it was a reflection of a study-crazed culture that was driving children mad.
According to his test scores, Ji ranked in the top 1 percent of all high school students in the country, but, in absolute terms, he still placed four thousandth nationwide. His mother had insisted he must be number one at all costs, Ji said. When his scores had disappointed her in the past, he said, she’d beaten him and withheld food.
In response to the story, many Koreans sympathized more with the living son than the dead mother. Commentators projected their own sour memories of high school onto Ji’s crime. Some went so far as to accuse the mother of inviting her own murder. A Korea Times editorial described the victim as “one of the pushy ‘tiger’ mothers who are never satisfied with their children’s school records no matter how high their scores.
As for Ji, he confessed to police immediately, weeping as he described how his mother had haunted his dreams after he’d killed her. At the trial, the prosecutor asked for a fifteen-year prison sentence. The judge, citing mitigating circumstances, sentenced the boy to three and a half years.
Meanwhile, Korean politicians vowed anew to treat the country’s education fever, as it was called…”
Unfortunately, what happened as a result of the politicians’ efforts is sickening, but I will leave that part for you to read in the book.
To return to the main topic of this article, I think that play is very important for kids as I wrote in my article “How to Interest Kids in Science, Engineering, and Math.”
I realize that many in the community may not share this view, very possibly including tech workers who grew up in countries where high-stakes testing was the only path to success (though based on past comments, some of these tech workers can also be the most vocal critics of such tests…).
How are our local schools doing currently in pre-K and kindergarten??
Hyperlinks were lost in the cut-and-paste unfortunately, but the info is still clear.
You go, Dienne77!!!!! A very astute point.