Archives for category: Childhood, Pre-K, K
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Leonie Haimson: The Expansion of Pre-K in New York City Has Worsened Overcrowding, with No Relief in Sight

By dianeravitch
December 21, 2018 //
19

Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters has released a report on the unintended consequences of Mayor De Blasio’s rapid expansion of Pre-K, his proudest achievement in education. The plan was rushed ahead with little forethought.

Her report begins:

School overcrowding in NYC has been worsened by the expansion of pre-K and 3-K classes, as detailed in a new report, “The Impact of PreK on School Overcrowding: Lack of Planning, Lack of Space.”

About 575,000 students, more than half of all students, attended schools that were at or above 100 percent capacity in 2016-2017, according to data from the NYC Department of Education. In recent years, overcrowding has worsened significantly, especially at the elementary school level. Nearly 60 percent of elementary schools are at 100 percent or more and 67 percent of elementary grade students attend these schools. This is due in part to the fact that enrollment in these grades has increased faster than new school construction.

The report’s analysis finds that 14,220, or more than half of the pre-K students enrolled in public elementary schools in 2016-2017, were placed in 352 schools that were at 100% utilization or more, thus contributing to worse overcrowding at these schools for about 236,000 students.

In about one quarter (22 percent) of these schools, the expansion of pre-K actually pushed the school to 100 percent or more. As of 2016-2017, 76 elementary schools, with a total of 45,124 students, became overutilized, according to the DOE’s data, because of the additional number of pre-K students at their schools.

In addition, thirty schools with pre-K classes had waitlists for Kindergarten, necessitating that these children to be sent to schools outside their zone and sometimes far from home.

District 20 in southwestern Brooklyn is the most overcrowded district in New York City with a critical shortage of elementary school seats.

The average utilization of elementary schools is 130 percent. Yet the DOE continued to place pre-K classes in already overcrowded District 20 schools, despite the presence of an under-enrolled pre-K center nearby.

Laurie Windsor, the former President of the Community Education Council in District 20 said: “It is appalling how the DOE insists on keeping pre-K classes in elementary schools when there is such severe overcrowding and families are forced to travel for Kindergarten, sometimes quite far away, without available public transportation. Especially egregious is that there are pre-K centers nearby which could absorb these classes easily. This practice has put unnecessary hardships on families and is insensitive to the needs of the community.”

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Class size, New York City

Defending the Early Years: Veteran Kindergarten Teacher Explains Value of Play-Based Learning

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2018 //
7

In this short video, veteran kindergarten teacher Jim St. Clair explains why play-based learning is important for young children and illustrates with examples from exemplary practice.

The video was produced by DEY (Defending the Early Years), a consortium of early childhood education practitioners and academics.

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Early Childhood Education, Education Reform, Play

Preschool Teacher: Let the Children Play

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2018 //
11

Defending the Early Years (DEY) has produced a 2-minute video featuring Boston preschool teacher Roberta Udoh explaining why play is crucial for young children and why the culture of testing is harming children at a point in their lives when play is most important.

Please watch and bear in mind that everyone of every age needs time to play.

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Play, Testing

Laura Chapman Reviews the Origins of “Baby PISA”

By dianeravitch
June 11, 2018 //
45

The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, which oversees the international tests called PISA, plans to start testing five-year-olds.

Early childhood education experts at DEY (Defending the Early Years) Are appalled. They have heard that several states have volunteered to participate in pilot testing, but secrecy is so tight that they don’t know which states they are. If you work in a state education department, please let us know if your state is one of them.

Reader Laura Chapman decided to research how this monstrous idea got off the ground. Here is her Research:

“The new International Early Learning and Child Well-being study (IELS)- dubbed “Baby PISA” will focus on testing 5 year-olds on narrow academic skills achievement. But…

If you go to the links beyond this headline, you will see a more complete description of the tests and surveys that are part of the package. This is not to say that I endorse the internationalization of tests for five-year olds and related surveys of parents and staff. I do not. The computer interface is a bummer. These tests and surveys will end with international stack rankings, just like everything else from OECD. Here is more information about the tests in the International Early Learning Study (IELS), officially administered in the US by the National Center of Education Statistics https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/iels/study_components.asp

Because this blog post indicates there was no consultation with experts from the US, I have spent the afternoon poking around to find more information. The short story is this: Around 2001, OECD enlisted high profile US experts in the early stages of work on early childhood, but for research not clearly related to test development. By 2015, only two US experts were listed as contributors to the project and the tests were being field tested–a fact announced in one session of an OECD conference titled: “Data Development for Measuring Quality in Early Childhood and Education and Care: International ECEC Staff Survey and International Survey of Early Child Outcomes” (p. 29). https://www.oecd.org/leed-forum/activities/Brochure-fpld2015-web.pdf

In 2015, the contact person for the tests was Arno Engel, a consultant for OECD’s Directorate for Education and Skills. Engel was also an Associate Lecturer with the University of Bayreuth, Germany. At that time six other scholars, were also working for OCED on early childhood research and assessments. Brief bios are here, none based in the US. http://www.oecd.org/education/school/international-early-learning-and-child-well-being-study.htm

This OECD project seems to have originated in 1998-99 with a series of commissioned papers under the title, Starting Strong, with the first publication in 2001. That publication summarized “themes” in papers from 12 OECD countries—Australia, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States http://www.oecd.org/newsroom/earlychildhoodeducationandcare.htm

I found the 2001 “Starting Strong” report from the United States, with “themes” that suggest the authors could not have imagined the current computer-based tests. Here are the topics (themes) and contributors.

I – DEFINITIONS, CONTEXT, AND PROVISION
Introduction and Definitions, Policy and Program Context, Overview of Current Provision—Sheila B. Kamerman: Compton Foundation Centennial Professor for the Prevention of Children, Youth, and Family Problems at the Columbia University School of Social Work, Co-Director of the Cross-National Studies Research Program at the School, and Director of the Columbia University Institute for Child and Family Policy and Shirley Gatenio a PhD candidate and Adjunct Lecturer at the Columbia University School of Social Work

II – POLICY CONCERNS
Quality—Debby Cryer: Frank Porter Graham Child Development Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Access to ECEC Programs—Edna Ranck: Director of public policy and research for National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies, early education historian and independent consultant for early childhood

Regulatory Policy and Staffing—Gwen G. Morgan: Coordinator of the Advanced Management seminars for Day Care Directors, Chair of the Social Policy Committee of the Day Care Council of America.

Program Content and Implementation—Lilian Katz: Professor of Early Childhood Education, Director of ERIC Clearinghouse on Elementary and Early Childhood Education, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Family Engagement and Support—Barbara T. Bowman: Erikson Institute (a graduate school based in Chicago specializing in studies of child development, named for Erik Erikson developmental psychologist).

Funding Issues—Steve Barnett & Len Masse: Both from the Center for Early Education at Rutgers, Graduate School of Education, Rutgers—The State University of New Jersey.

Evaluation and Research—Kristin Moore: Social psychologist with Child Trends and
Jerry West, National Center for Education Statistics

Noteworthy innovations—Victoria Fu: Professor of human development, College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, Virginia Tech; co-author Teaching as Inquiry: Rethinking Curriculum in Early Childhood Education

III – CONCLUDING ASSESSMENTS

General shifts in ECEC policy—Richard M. Clifford: Senior scientist emeritus at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. (No bio in original report).

Future trends Moncrieff Cochran—Professor Emeritus in Human Development in the College of Human Ecology at Cornell University. (No bio in original report).

Issues for further investigation—Sharon Llynn Kagan, Virginia and Leonard Marx Professor of Early Childhood and Family Policy, Co-Director of the National Center for Children and Families at Teachers College, Columbia University, and Professor Adjunct at Yale University’s Child Study Center

Click to access 27856788.pdf

In the 2015 paper, Starting Strong IV: Monitoring Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care, I found only two contributors from the United States. They were Sharon Lynn Kagen: who contributed to the first report and Mr. Steven Hicks: a Nationally Board Certified Teacher in Early Childhood and former Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Early Learning in the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education at the U.S. Department of Education (Obama Administration). He is now Assistant State Superintendent for the Division of Early Childhood Development at the Maryland State Department of Education.
https://read.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/starting-strong-iv_9789264233515-en#page1

In the most recent report, Starting Strong 2017: Key OECD Indicators on Early Childhood Education and Care (189 pages), I found not a single contributor from the United States. The absence of any contributor was conspicuous.

By 2017, NCES had outsourced the US testing contract to Westat, an employee-owned statistical services corporation in Rockville, Maryland. The NCES description of this IELS project says: “ an international consortium was contracted to develop the study measures and fine tune the study design…” but there is no information about that “consortium.”

I am trying to get a list of the members of that international consortium and the names of the experts who were enlisted to “fine tune the study design.” Perhaps someone reading this blog knows who these unpublicized members are. It is no wonder that the test looks as if it came from nowhere known to current workers in early childhood education. The test will produce national rankings and these will make headlines even if the sample sizes are small (and they are).

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Education Industry, International, Stupid, Testing

Stop Baby PISA: Don’t Test the Little Ones!

By dianeravitch
May 27, 2018 //
16

Defending the Early Years (DEY) was organized to fight for the rights and childhood of little children.

One of their current goals is to stop the pilot testing of what is called “Baby PISA.”

PISA is like a giant octopus that wants to test everything that breathes. It is sponsored by the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.) It already has the nations of the world frantic that only one of them is #1 in test scores.

The expansion of PISA to include 5-year-olds is part of what Pasi Sahlberg dubbed “the Global Education Reform Movement” or GERM.

Five states have agreed to pilot testing of Baby PISA. But no one knows which states they are, and the OECD refuses to say.

DEY issued this press release earlier this year.

In 2012, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development proposed an assessment of early learning outcomes called the International Early Learning and Child Well-Being Study. The proposal was made with little consultation with large facets of the early childhood community. In response to this international trend for increasing formal early childhood assessment that is gaining traction, Defending the Early Years releases the following statement:

Ignoring early childhood educators, researchers and scholars in making early education policy is not new, but the scale of this latest effort in the Global Education Reform Movement for young children is a frightening development. PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) has been used to test 15 year-olds since 2000. The new International Early Learning and Child Well-being study (IELS)- dubbed “Baby PISA” – will focus on testing 5 year-olds on narrow academic skills achievement.

The impact on the field of early childhood, already contorted by policies that push early academics and eradicate play, will be disastrous. If Baby PISA gains a foothold, we’ll see more of what we have already endured: more standardization, more academic drills, and more testing. And, we’ll see less of what we have already been losing: less of the arts, less play, less child choice, and less active, hands-on, developmentally meaningful learning. And we will see more children disaffected with school at younger and younger ages.

We early educators in the U.S. need to follow the lead of early childhood communities in Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Norway, New Zealand, Sweden, and Denmark and speak up in protest against the IELS and advocate for appropriate and developmentally meaningful learning.

For more information on Baby PISA please see Baby PISA is Just Around the Corner. So Why is No One Talking About It?

Categories Accountability, Childhood, Pre-K, K, Education Industry, Testing

DEY: The Corporate Hijacking of Early Childhood Education

By dianeravitch
May 10, 2018 //
8

Defending the Early Years (DEY) is the premier organization advocating for early childhood education and play.

This week, it launched its Two-Minute Documentary Series: Teachers Speak Out.

In the first mini-documentary, public school kindergarten teacher teacher Bianca Tanis discusses the corporate hijacking of early education and the growing crisis among early learners.

Watch it here:

https://www.deyproject.org/dey-2-minute-documentary-series.html

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Education Reform

Why We Should Not Teach Tech in Kindergarten

By dianeravitch
January 7, 2018 //
32

 

Veteran educators Shaheer Faltas and Kate Nicholson explain why little children should not be taught coding and computer science. 

Although they write about kindergarten children, the basic principles are the same for very young children of 6 and 7. They may enjoy playing on the computer but take care not to start direct instruction and career preparation for little children. I am not sure when children should start preparing for the computer age, but what they write sounds reasonable to me. What do you think?

They write:

“President Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos intend to prioritize science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education by making available $200 million in grants and recommend that coding and computer science skills be taught in K-12 schools across the nation. Though the intention to improve K-12 education is admirable, doubling down on technology in America’s kindergarten classrooms is not the answer.

“As a lifelong educator now running a school in Mill Valley within the orbit of Silicon Valley, and a parent who writes regularly about education, we have daily insight into what tomorrow’s leaders need in order to walk confidently into the future — and it’s not the development of skills like coding.

“All across the country, experienced educators will tell you that putting more digital devices into the hands of young, impressionable children won’t take them where we want them to go. Rather, it will leave students adrift in a sea of obsolescence.

“A quick glimpse at a report by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which lists the fastest declining occupations for 2014 to 2024, demonstrates why pushing a narrow skill set — like computer coding — into our youngest grades is unwise. Over the past two decades, entire industries have been gutted by technological advances that were impossible to predict.

”Instead of prioritizing technology first, we need to teach students how to think and adapt, how to communicate and ask questions. Childhood is a cherished, sacred time — one for sparking imagination.

“Indeed, the purpose of K-12 education has expanded beyond offering just content and now entails equipping students with life skills. Elementary school is where the basic foundations of character are built, where self-control takes shape, and where students begin to perceive of themselves as part of a larger community.”

A womderful article!

Let children be children. Defend childhood.

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Education Reform

New Orleans: Researchers Find That Charter Schools Dropped Pre-K Because of Cost

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2017 //
28

The Education Research Alliance for New Orleans issued a report about Pre-Kindergarten in the nearly all-charter district. It found that the growth of charter schools had a negative effect on pre-kindergarten because of the lack of funding.

In this study, we examine how the growth of charter schools in New Orleans affected pre-kindergarten (pre-K) program offerings as the school system transitioned from a centralized school system to an almost-all-charter district. In Louisiana, charter schools can opt into offering state subsidized pre-K for low-income and special-needs students, but the per pupil funding level is far below the average cost of educating a pre-K student. In New Orleans’ decentralized setting, schools offering pre-K must cover this funding gap from other sources of revenue.

School districts and charter schools have different incentives for offering optional educational services, such as pre-K. In order to better understand school-level decision making, we interviewed school leaders about their reasons for offering or not offering pre-K. We also analyzed data from 2007 to 2015 to determine whether charter schools that offer pre-K programs gain a competitive advantage over those that do not. Our key findings are:

After the reforms, the number of schools offering pre-K and the number of school-based pre-K seats dropped, even after accounting for drops in kindergarten enrollment. The decrease in seats occurred primarily in charter schools.
At charter schools that continued to offer pre-K after Katrina, school leaders offered two school-centered motivations – pursuit of higher test scores and early recruitment of families committed to sticking with the school for the long-run – in addition to more mission-focused commitments to providing early education for the benefit of students and the community.

Through analyses of student test scores from 2012 to 2015, we find that offering pre-K had no measurable effect on charter schools’ third grade math or ELA test scores, potentially as a result of high student mobility between pre-K and third grade.

Charter schools that offered pre-K programs saw short-term, but not long-term, enrollment benefits. On average, charter schools with pre-K filled half of their kindergarten seats with existing pre-K students, whereas schools that did not offer these programs had to fill all kindergarten seats with new students. However, charter schools offering pre-K did not have any advantage in persistent student enrollment after kindergarten.

It is important to emphasize that our results do not speak to the important and cost-effective benefits of pre-K for students, as those have been well established in prior research. Rather, the study is meant to show how charter-based reforms influence how and why pre-K and other optional educational programs are offered in almost-all-charter systems. While we discuss below new efforts to address the shortfall of pre-K seats, our study provides initial evidence that decentralization without offsetting financial incentives can lead to reduced investments in programs that advance the broader social goals of public education.

Categories Charter Schools, Childhood, Pre-K, K, Early Childhood Education, New Orleans, Privatization

Nancy Carlsson-Paige: This is the Way to Do Early Childhood Education Right!

By dianeravitch
November 5, 2017 //
9

Nancy Carlsson-Paige, an expert in early childhood education, recently visited Nova Scotia, Canada, and returned excited about what she saw there.

She realized that Nova Scotia has the right framework for ECE, and the United States is heading in the wrong direction.

In this illuminating article, she describes the Nova Scotia program.

For starters, the program was written by experts in early childhood education, unlike the Common Core standards, which did not include anyone from the field and produced developmentally inappropriate standards and curriculum for young children.

An excerpt:

The Nova Scotia Framework focuses on the whole child — on cognitive, social, emotional and physical development — and the importance of a holistic view of the child that includes personal, social and cultural contexts. The U.S. approach is to teach bits of information and isolated skills.

The Nova Scotia Framework emphasizes dispositions for learning such as curiosity, creativity, confidence, imagination and persistence. It emphasizes processes such as problem solving, experimenting and inquiry. The U.S. approach emphasizes memorization and expects all children to learn the same things at the same time.

The Nova Scotia Framework views the child as a participant in her or his own learning — a co-constructor of knowledge who contributes to shaping the learning experience. The U.S. approach consists of telling children what they should learn, with activities and outcomes predetermined.

The Nova Scotia Framework describes play as one of the highest achievements of the human species. It emphasizes the critical role of play in learning and the increasing recognition by researchers and policymakers of the role of play in fostering capacities such as investigating, asking questions, creativity, solving problems and thinking critically. Play is seen as vital to building a wide range of competencies such as language development, self regulation and conflict resolution. In the U.S. approach, play is minimized and considered secondary to acquisition of academic skills.

Read the rest of this article for yourself.

Early childhood educators know all of this. It is what they believe. It is what they teach and practice, when they are allowed to do so.

Yet in every state, the standards for early childhood education violate the basic principles of learning.

Get out the pitchforks, parents and teachers.

Change is needed.

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Early Childhood Education, Play

Susan Ochshorn Sends a Message to Billionaires: Little Children Are Not Investment Vehicles

By dianeravitch
October 22, 2017 //
10

Susan Ochshorn founded ECE PolicyWorks to advocate for high-quality education for young children.

In this post, she analyzes the pernicious influence of financiers and hedge fund managers on decisions about the fate of young children, as they figure out how to make a profit with “Social impact bonds.”

Everyone loves the idea of early childhoood education. But unfortunately the financiers have figured out how to make it pay—for them.

Ochshorn shows how Goldman Sachs and other investors saw a path to profit and how public officials fell in love with metrics. The children? Not so much.

She gives the background of the social impact bond.

And she concludes that commodifying children is a very bad idea:

“By last summer, the U.S. Department of Education had gotten on board. Under the aegis of John King, former education commissioner of New York, they launched a Pay for Success grant competition, $2.8 million available for state, local, and tribal governments interested in exploring the investment vehicle’s feasibility. Early this year, as Betsy DeVos replaced King in the top job, the department distributed funding ranging from $300 to $400 million to 8 recipients. Rigorous evaluation, as the Urban Institute’s “Pay for Success Early Childhood Education Toolkit,” makes clear, is the sine qua non of the transaction, precise metrics and data collection essential for determining the venture’s outcome.

“To quantify is to have the illusion of mastery over all that defies our control, yet the metrics fall short, the ends perverted: they cannot capture children’s unique capacities, or the uneven trajectory of their development—as messy and challenging as it gets.

“Three- and four-year-olds are not commodities. They have had the grave misfortune of entering the academic arena in a period of measurement gone berserk. What young children need most is time, and sustained support for experiences that nourish their bodies, minds, and spirits—their due, according to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which the U.S has not yet ratified more than 25 years after the resolution was adopted by the U.N. General Assembly.

“The benchmarks and assessments of the Common Core violate this right—especially for our youngest students. So do social impact bonds. If the payback is contingent upon a particular timetable, and the desired outcomes are not forthcoming, where does that leave the kids?

“Those who have made their millions and billions in private equity, investment banking, and hedge funds see themselves as the saviors of our most vulnerable children. Yet their fancy models are putting our youngest learners at greater risk—along with democracy and the public good.”

Categories Bill de Blasio, Billionaires, Childhood, Pre-K, K, Corporate Reform, For-Profit
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