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Dana Goldstein: Bill de Blasio’s Fight for Universal Pre-Kindergarten

By dianeravitch
September 18, 2016 //
36

Dana Goldstein writes here about New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s campaign to establish a universal program of free, public pre-kindergarten, equally available to the poor, the middle-class, and the rich.

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/09/bill-de-blasios-prek-crusade/498830/

In Dana’s cover note, she wrote:

“The story is also about something much bigger—the nature of government in America. Should public services be universal, meaning even affluent people can access them, regardless of whether they could procure pre-K, college, or health care on the private market? Or should we give “free stuff” only to the poor and working class?

“This was pretty much the exact debate Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton had during the Democratic primary. De Blasio, despite being a Clinton supporter, is firmly on the side of universality. Pre-K For All subsidizes the children of bankers and the children of parents living in homeless shelters. Does its play-based pedagogy work to remedy what the mayor famously decried as “the tale of two cities”—one rich and one poor? And can debates over early childhood education ever break out of gendered thinking, in which we believe only mothers can effectively care for their own children?”

In the article, she writes:

“In 2016 there is one central debate, between the left and center-left, about the role of government in America. Can the widening gap in opportunity and life outcomes between the rich and the poor be closed using the dominant policy tools of the last 30 years: tax credits that are supposed to encourage minimum-wage work, and stigmatized, underfunded social programs that serve only the poorest of the poor, like Medicaid, food stamps, and Head Start, the federal preschool program? Or, does the country need to return to an older, and until very recently, largely unpopular idea: taxing the rich to create big, new government entitlements, like pre-k, free college, or single-payer health care—entitlements available to everyone, including the affluent who currently have little trouble procuring such services on the private market?

“This was the crux of the debate between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. The signature Sanders policy proposal was a plan to make public college free for all. Even for the children of Donald Trump, as Clinton pointed out in one primary debate. Clinton became the Democratic Party standard-bearer, and after negotiations with Sanders, announced her own plan to make in-state public college free, but only for families earning under $125,000 per year.

“De Blasio’s Pre-K For All program is, notably, in the Sanders style: unabashedly free-for-all.
There are few places in the United States to look for big, new experiments in universal government entitlements. One of them is New York City under de Blasio. The mayor issued a late-in-the-game primary endorsement of Clinton—he was the manager of her 2000 Senate campaign—but his Pre-K For All program is, notably, in the Sanders style: unabashedly free-for-all. Some American social programs, like Medicare and Social Security, serve everyone, and have proven to be relatively popular and politically sacrosanct. Others, like Medicaid, Head Start, food stamps, and cash welfare, are available only to the destitute, and are under constant threat of budget cuts. Pre-K For All is for the poor, the rich, and everyone in between. The mayor would rather speak about the program’s educational quality than its political strategy, but if prodded, will concede, “anything that has a broad constituency will also have more sustainability.” Simply put, it is difficult for politicians to retract a benefit that the politically powerful upper-middle class enjoys.

De Blasio’s first elected office was as a school-board member in District 15, the swath of brownstone Brooklyn that includes Park Slope, where he and his wife, Chirlane McCray, lived. They sent their daughter and son to public school. His focus on pre-k reflects a longtime skepticism of some of the other education-reform enthusiasms of the last two decades, like standardized testing and charter schools. When the state of New York granted de Blasio’s predecessor as mayor, Michael Bloomberg, control of the city’s schools, Bloomberg abolished neighborhood school boards like the one on which de Blasio served. Bloomberg’s education agenda was based around the concepts of choice and competition. He opened new charter schools and gave all schools letter grades based largely on their students’ test scores. Bloomberg also created 4,000 new pre-k seats, but they were open only to the poorest children. That strategy has been the norm. In recent years, cities like Denver and San Antonio reserved new public pre-k seats for the neediest kids. Even Boston’s public pre-k program, considered a national model, does not guarantee every 4-year-old a seat.

“De Blasio wants all children, even the children of the financially secure, to benefit from public services. He speaks often about how difficult it is to afford rent, child care, and other basic necessities of life in New York City, not just for the impoverished, but also for the middle and upper-middle class. “A hedge-fund manager, maybe they’re not struggling, but the vast majority of people [are],” de Blasio told me. “The cost of living in this town has continued to go up and up, so I can’t tell you how many middle-class parents have told me what it meant to save $10,000 or $15,000” on pre-K, “how fundamental that was for their ability to live in the city.”

“In 2012, when de Blasio was serving as New York City’s public advocate, a sort of city ombudsman, his office produced a report showing a huge unmet demand for free pre-k. Only half of New York City 3- and 4-year-olds were enrolled in pre-k, either public or private. Every neighborhood had more young children than public-school pre-k spots, but in areas such as affluent brownstone Brooklyn, middle-class Bay Ridge, and immigrant-heavy Central Queens, there were as many as eight applicants per seat. The problem was a national one: Only 41 percent of American 4-year-olds, and 16 percent of 3-year-olds, are being served by publicly funded pre-k, according to the latest data.

“To expand access, de Blasio proposed a tax increase of less than 1 percent on income over $500,000. That idea became the centerpiece of his 2013 mayoral bid, a key to remedying what he decried as “the tale of two cities”: huge opportunity gaps between the super rich and everybody else. A New Yorker earning $600,000 annually would have paid an additional $530 in taxes to fund universal pre-k. This provoked outrage from the Partnership for New York City, a network of CEOs. The group’s president said the tax proposal showed a “lack of sensitivity to the city’s biggest revenue providers and job creators.”

“Many of de Blasio’s fellow progressives were skeptical such a big idea could ever become reality. Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, called de Blasio’s universal pre-k plan “non-serious,” and New York City’s teachers’ union endorsed another mayoral candidate in the Democratic primary. But regular New Yorkers liked de Blasio’s ambition. Private pre-k costs, on average, over $12,000 per year in New York City, and up to $40,000 for an elite program. (The city’s median household income is about $51,000.) Polls suggested that, along with his promise to end stop-and-frisk and his artful, optimistic embrace of his family’s biracial identity, the promise of free pre-k was why voters preferred de Blasio to his rivals. He won the election and immediately began lobbying Albany to make the idea a reality; the mayor would need the support of the state legislature to enact his pre-k funding scheme. Governor Andrew Cuomo, a Democratic tax-cutter, did not want de Blasio’s tax proposal to come to a vote. Still, the mayor’s boldness had changed the terms of the debate. Cuomo, somewhat mysteriously, reached into the state budget and found $340 million per year to fund the program for five years.

“From there, the de Blasio administration managed to launch Pre-K For All in less than six months. By the program’s second school year, 2015-16, it had reached its original enrollment target. Pre-K For All serves 68 percent of the city’s 4-year-olds, and 85 percent of those who are likely to enroll in public-school kindergarten. In the city of Washington, D.C., 86 percent of all 4-year-olds and 64 percent of all 3-year-olds, are enrolled in public pre-k, outpacing New York onpercentage of children served. But D.C. first launched its universal pre-k program in 2008 and allowed six years for full implementation. In comparison, New York City has moved at remarkable speed, while serving more than five times as many students.”

Open the article to read it all and to see the links to sources.

Categories Bill de Blasio, Childhood, Pre-K, K, Early Childhood Education, Education Reform, New York City

John Thompson: What If Reformers Had Paid Attention to Research-Based Solutions Instead of Billionaires’ Preferences?

By dianeravitch
August 20, 2016 //
15

Teacher and historian John Thompson writes here about the reflection that seems to be occurring among “reformers” as they realize that their test-and-punish reforms produce limited gains and limited outcomes. He wonders how different our federal and state policies would be had reformers strived to implement research-based reforms instead of ideas that had intuitive appeal.

He writes:


Something important is stirring in terms of education research. We’ve always gone through cycles, mostly notably in the aftermath of the Coleman Report, during debates over the so-called “culture of poverty,” and during the contemporary data-driven, market reform era, where scholars have had to think twice when analyzing where the evidence leads. This last month, however, a variety of social scientists have candidly expressed the facts that corporate reformers deride as an “excuse.”

Heather Hill’s review of the Coleman Report recalls the seminal study’s finding, “One implication stands out above all: That schools bring little influence to bear on a child’s achievement that is independent of his background and general social context.” Hill reviews the subsequent analyses of Coleman, and the findings of Tony Bryk and Stephen Raudenbush, who “show that differences among schools accounted for about one-fifth of the variability in student outcomes.” The bottom line, she reports is that “schools still pack a weaker punch than many imagine.”

Neither did the Chalkbeat editors pull any punches. Its subtitles clearly convey the message that has been condemned as heresy over the last two decades:

Meanwhile, evidence mounted for one central conclusion: schools matter – but not as much as people might think; and

The logical conclusion: You can’t fix schools without trying to fix broader social inequality, too.

Similarly, Stephen Dubner’s begins his recent Freakonomics Radio program with the words, “in our collective zeal to reform schools and close the achievement gap, we may have lost sight of where most learning really happens — at home.” Dubner concludes, “Most of us probably think too much about cognitive skills and not enough about non-cognitive. Most of us probably put way too much faith in the formal education system, when, in fact, the path to learning begins way before then, at home.” In between, we hear from economist John List, “Schools only have kids for a handful of hours per day, but who, really, will mold kids through their lives are the parents.” Also, early education expert Dana Suskind concludes, that we need preventive, not remediative programs. “About the only way” that we can “move the needle,” she says, is through science-based programs which begin the learning process at birth or before.

Even the most steadfast true believers in accountability-driven, competition-driven reform seem to finally be facing reality. The first words of a NBER paper by John List, Roland Fryer and Stephen Levitt are President Barack Obama’s 2009 statement that, “There is no program or policy that can substitute for a mother or father who will attend those parent-teacher conferences … Responsibility for our children’s education must begin at home.”

And, even the TNTP seems to be questioning its blind faith that the answers for poverty can be found inside the four walls of the classroom. Its modest pilot project taught Ariela Rozman, Timothy Daly and David Keeling that, “We have a new appreciation for the annual catastrophe that is summer learning loss—and what a headache summer is for the families we work with in general. The out-of-school opportunity gap has received increased attention in recent years … because it is becoming clearer that it is a substantial driver of long term inequality.” After a year of working with real-life families in actual schools the TNTP acknowledges:

Some people argue the post-Katrina choice-based system has led to large, sustained improvements in performance and should become a model for the rest of the country. Others say it’s still largely a low performing system and the process of creating it profoundly disrupted its workforce and community.

That brings us to the research of Douglas Harris, the Tulane University Education Research Alliance, and their recent conference on early education in New Orleans. Harris has documented major post-Katrina gains in New Orleans test scores, while acknowledging that “critics are concerned that schools under reforms are too focused on test scores.” Moreover, he notes that “disadvantaged groups always see a smaller effect than the advantaged groups early in the reforms.” Especially before 2012 or so, there were “real horror stories about how special education students and others were suspended and expelled at high rates,” and “it remains unclear whether the problems are solved.” Harris sees “signs that high school dropouts are being under-reported,” and he says that NOLA’s decentralization can “negatively impact vulnerable groups.”

I sometimes question Harris’s confidence that oversight and accountability can mitigate such problems, but I trust his judgment in regard to the initial beliefs of NOLA reformers, “The original idea was that charters would create some degree of choice and competition, allow some schools more autonomy, facilitate innovation and diversify options. “Replacing” traditional public schools was almost never part of the conversation.” On the other hand, he doesn’t deny the current threat to traditional public schools, “Yet, this is exactly what is happening in New Orleans, Detroit, and some other cities (albeit to very different effect).”

I also sense that the participants in the ERA conference saw the multiple, often contradictory, outcomes of the radical NOLA reform, and that they are mostly preoccupied with addressing its remaining weaknesses. While they may or may not be fully aware of the national campaigns to impose their charter-driven system on cities across the nation, conference attendees mostly see the NOLA model as a “done deal” in their city. They are more concerned about the need to organize, fund, and implement early education programs than in other districts’ need to beat back corporate reforms.

I can appreciate those feelings, but I may have been alone in seeing one graphic as telling the most important story about New Orleans preschool, at least in terms of the lessons it holds for the rest of the country. Pre-kindergarten is only one part of the early education system that we need, but it is illustrative of the “opportunity costs” of the contemporary school reform movement. The percentage of NOLA’s students who attended pre-k dropped from 60% in 2007 to 40% in 2011. That’s a 33% drop at a time when the city’s schools were being funded at a level beyond the imaginations of most educators. Yes, the percentage of students who attend pre-k has increased since then, but in NOLA and across the U.S., we are now facing budget crises.

It’s bad enough that reformers let pre-school slide but, worse, the money for the gold-plated corporate reforms is gone. I doubt that anyone would claim that these reforms were cost effective, and now we have to tackle the complex early education challenge at a time when all of the participating education and social service providers face enormous budgetary constraints.

And that brings us back to the question of what would have happened if we had followed a science-based path to school improvement, as opposed to the test, sort, reward, and punish experiment, known as corporate reform. Granted, Katrina took New Orleans by surprise. It’s not like the city had the time and the inclination to study education research, debate policy options, and plan and implement the best possible reform policies. Not surprisingly, when offered a test-driven, competition-driven model, as well as enormous amounts of funding, they rushed the Billionaires Boys Club’s preferred approach into place.

On the other hand, if Katrina hadn’t hit during the accountability-driven, choice-driven craze, if edu-philanthropists had been assisting a science-based campaign to provide high-quality early education and to align and coordinate socioemotional supports, think of the great good that could have come from the rebuilding of New Orleans education and social service systems. In such a case, NOLA could have turned to state of the art, evidence-based solutions, not the endless edu-politics of destruction.

Yeah, in addition to the down sides of NOLA reforms, bubble-in scores are up. Those metrics probably reflect some meaningful learning, as well are the learning of the destructive habits that are nurtured by retrograde, teach-to-the-test instruction. Is there any doubt that students and families would have chosen humane, high-quality, aligned and coordinated early education programs over the competitive culture of today’s NOLA? And, had such a nurturing, science-based system been built in New Orleans, wouldn’t educators across the nation be welcoming – not shunning – help in replicating it?

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Early Childhood Education, Education Industry, Education Reform, New Orleans, Privatization, Research, Testing

Susan Ochshorn: Some Thoughts for the Democratic Platform

By dianeravitch
July 3, 2016 //
9

Susan Ochshorn of ECE Policy Works offers these thoughts for the Democratic platform:

1) Children are rarely mentioned in this document. They are our precious “human capital,” the future of our nation and a robust democracy. I find their absence disturbing overall, but especially so in the section, “Poverty/Communities Left Behind.”

America’s child poverty rate puts us second only to Romania among advanced economies. The poverty rate for children under age 6 hovers around 22 percent. There are also whole communities of children across the nation living in communities of concentrated poverty, where more than 40 percent of families live below the line. All of this, in the richest nation in the world. [Diane’s note: Romania is not an ‘advanced nation,’ even though Susan correctly notes that some UN organizations created a list in which we ranked behind Romania in child poverty.]

2) Socioeconomic status has been shown to be a key factor in children’s academic success. Children living in poverty are more likely to be exposed to adverse childhood experiences–maternal depression, domestic and community violence, substance abuse, etc.–and suffer from toxic stress, which affects their ability to thrive in school.

3) Given all of the above, we need a much more comprehensive, holistic approach to early care and education. Universal preschool is essential, but families need support from the prenatal period, after birth, with paid parental leave and high-quality infant/toddler care. We must look to effective models of education that attend to the whole child, including community schools, which bring together social and mental health services and supports for parents.

4) We need to re-imagine education for all of our students, but especially for our youngest children, whose natural zest for learning we are squashing under the demands of standards-based accountability and the narrowed curriculum of the Common Core. The Finns, whose educational outcomes are stellar, see schools as laboratories for democracy–places of joy, exploration, and inquiry. They respect the unique developmental path of each child. Their children are not pushed into academic work and high-stakes testing at an early age.

Categories Democrats, Early Childhood Education, Poverty

Susan Ochshorn: Please, Mr. Gates, Help the Children!

By dianeravitch
June 5, 2016 //
24

Reactions to the mea culpa of Sue Desmond-Hellman, the CEO of the Gates Foundation, continue to roll in. Sue D-H admitted that “mistakes had been made” in the education arena and promised to listen to teachers. Many who have read the memo think that the foundation still doesn’t understand why its promotion of test-based teacher evaluation is failing or why the Common Core is meeting so much resistance.

Susan Ochshorn hopes that the Gates Foundation will listen to early childhood education professionals.

At the bottom of the totem pole of influence are early childhood teachers. None of these stewards of America’s human capital weighed in on the design of the Common Core standards. They were back-mapped, reaching new heights of absurdity, including history, economic concepts, and civics and government as foundations for two-year-olds’ emergent knowledge.

Most importantly, the standards make a mockery of early childhood’s robust evidence base. Young children learn through exploration, inquiry, hypothesis, and collaboration. Play, the primary engine of human development, has vanished from kindergarten and first-grade classrooms, replaced by worksheets, didactic learning, and increasingly narrow curricula, in keeping with standards’ focus on literacy and math. Policymakers are talking about bringing rigor and the Common Core down to four-year-olds.

If all lives have equal value, the core belief of the Gates Foundation, then our most vulnerable kids must have access to the kind of education enjoyed by those with greater resources: teaching and learning that nurtures creativity and innovation, attuned to the whole child. Too often, they’re subject to rote, passive, and joyless assimilation of knowledge. Collateral damage of your initiative—all in the name of higher test scores.

What if the Gates Foundation undertook a course correction, and put education back in the wheelhouse of educators?

Ochshorn points out that poverty is an enormous barrier to school participation and engagement. She briefly reviews the research base that establishes the harmful effects of poverty (an idea that Gates has derided in the past).

It’s hard, indeed, to be deeply engaged when you’re hungry or homeless—or traumatized by the growing number of adverse childhood experiences that plague our little ones. (As an oncologist, you have a deep understanding of physiological damage.) Moreover, it’s challenging for educators to do their job, no matter how well they’re prepared. The schools in communities of concentrated poverty are segregated institutions starved of investment, places fit for neither children nor teachers.

The results of a recent survey of teachers of the year, conducted by the Council of Chief State School Officers, are illuminating. When asked about the barriers that most affect their students’ academic success, family stress, poverty, and learning and psychological problems topped the list. Anti-poverty initiatives, early learning, and reducing barriers to learning were the teachers’ top picks for investment.

The Gates Foundation has done remarkable work across the globe. How about taking some of your formidable resources and bringing them on home to America’s children and communities?

Categories Accountability, Childhood, Common Core, Early Childhood Education, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Play, Poverty, Standardized Testing

Eva Moskowitz Cancels Pre-K Program with City Rather than Accept Regulation

By dianeravitch
June 1, 2016 //
14

Eva Moskowitz agreed to open a pre-K program on behalf of the City of New York. But she refused to sign the contract that other charter schools (and all public schools and facilities) agreed to sign. Eva said that the city was not her boss, even though the money for the program came from the city.

She refused to back down. She refused to sign the contract. She canceled the pre-K program, for the fall, which enrolled about 70 children at a cost to the city of about $700,000.

Success Academy Charter Schools Cancels Pre-K
After months of fighting with City Hall about a prekindergarten contract, Success Academy Charter Schools said Wednesday it was canceling its pre-K program for the fall.

For nearly a year the charter’s founder, Eva Moskowitz, has refused to sign a contract that New York City requires of providers who participate in its public pre-K program. She says it aims to exert too much control over her curriculum, daily schedule and field trips.

City officials have said that every other pre-K provider, including charter schools, signed the same basic contract, and doing so was a clear condition of joining the initiative. Expanding public preschool has been a key part of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s agenda.

Ms. Moskowitz has said the charter oversight body at the State University of New York is the proper authority over her network. State Education Commissioner MaryEllen Elia ruled in the city’s favor in February, saying pre-K is a state-funded grant program, rather than part of the K-12 levels overseen by SUNY.

Ms. Moskowitz appealed to the state Supreme Court earlier this year, but said Wednesday that the court’s decision would come too late to open doors in August, and families of admitted children must scramble to find alternatives.

“It is unbelievably sad to tell parents and teachers that the courts won’t rescue our pre-K program from the mayor’s war on Success in time to open next year,” she said in a news release.

“The state upheld our important standards to ensure all programs are high quality,” Department of Education spokeswoman Devora Kaye said.

Success Academy started a prekindergarten program for 72 children in four classrooms last August, and planned to expand slightly for the next school year. A spokesman said about 3,000 children entered an admissions lottery for about 100 seats for the coming year.

Ms. Moskowitz and Mr. de Blasio have clashed repeatedly over the city’s obligation to provide space for charters and other issues. She said she hopes for a court victory so she can reopen prekindergarten classes in August 2017.

A spokesman said she is still seeking $720,000 reimbursement from the city for the current school year.

Categories Early Childhood Education, Harlem Success Academy, New York City

New Jersey Dems Want Social Impact Bonds to Reduce Special Education, Reward Investors

By dianeravitch
December 19, 2015 //
23

New Jersey Democrat Theresa Ruiz, chair of the Senate Education Committee, has a truly terrible idea. She wants to introduce “social impact bonds” that would pay off investors to reduce special education referrals. The assumption behind the bonds is that high-quality pre-K can reduce the need for special education.

A parent blogger was aghast and sees these bonds as an effort to end special education.

The blogger writes:

“What is Senator Ruiz attempting to achieve? Her statement, “we won’t have to have early-intervention programs and classification and wrap-around services because we did the work early on” is naive at best and potentially destructive at worst.

“High quality” Pre-K is not a magic bullet. Students with disabilities will not be magically cured by attending preschool. It sounds too good to be true because it is. New Jersey’s classification rate is about 14.5%, higher in low-income districts where this program will take place.

“Will preschool help decrease the percentage of students who need special education services in those districts? I have no doubt that it will. The research supports that presumption.

“Are you going to end the need for Early Intervention, classification, and wrap-around services? No. You aren’t. There will always be students who would have been classified no matter how much preschool they had. There will always be students who need wrap-around services because we, as country, much less as a state, are doing nothing to address the poverty that creates the need for these services.

“Big picture here is, Goldman Sachs is going to make money on students NOT being classified. RtI is going to become the framework for K-12, delaying as long as possible the identification and classification of students with disabilities. And the Special Education Ombudsman position the Senator is trying to create (because constituents have been begging for help) will work for the NJ Department of Education.”

A reader posted a comment about her own children.

“OMG! We won’t have to have early intervention because we have high quality PreK!

“I have three kids. One reg ed., one legally blind, one entered school as profoundly autistic.

“How, precisely, would the most awesome preK in the world have helped my one year old legally blind child? Who would have taught me to teach him?

“Would great preK have made my autistic kid neurally typical?

“Would NOT classifying them have led to educational success? Does Ruiz honestly believe that neither kid would need special ed if they got great preK?
$1700 a year would not have paid for OT!(and, strangely enough, legally blind kids have issues with hand eye coordination !)

“I am way to hot to write to her right now. I will gather my thoughts and write a letter.

“Thanks. I didn’t know Ruiz was so short sighted as to believe no child could possibly remain disabled when they had great preK.”

Categories Democrats, Early Childhood Education, For-Profit, New Jersey, Special Education

Nancy Carlsson-Paige on Testing and Play

By dianeravitch
November 23, 2015 //
17

Nancy Carlsson-Paige, professor emerita at Lesley College and eminent defender of childhood, recently was honored with the Deborah Meier award by Fairtest. She is a founding member of Defending the Early Years, which commissions research about early childhood education and advocates for sane, kind, loving policies for young children.

 

It may be superfluous, but I would like to take this opportunity to name Nancy as a hero of American education for her fearlessness, integrity, and deep understanding of children.

 

Nancy was honored along with Lani Guinier, professor if law at Harvard Law School.

 

This is Nancy’s speech, accepting the award:

 

“Thank you FairTest for this Deborah Meier Hero in Education Award. FairTest does such great advocacy and education around fair and just testing practices. This award carries the name of one of my heroes in education, Deborah Meier—she’s a force for justice and democracy in education. I hope that every time this award is given, it will allow us to once again pay tribute to Deb. Also, I feel privileged to be accepting this honor alongside Lani Guinier.

 

“When I was invited to be here tonight, I thought about the many people who work for justice and equity in education who could also be standing here. So I am thinking of all of them now and I accept this award on their behalf—all the educators dedicated to children and what’s fair and best for them.

 

“It’s wonderful to see all of you here—so many family and friends, comrades in this struggle to reclaim excellent public education for all– not just some–of our children.

 

“I have loved my life’s work– teaching teachers about how young children think, how they learn, how they develop socially, emotionally, morally. I’ve been fascinated with the theories and science of my field and seeing it expressed in the actions and the play of children.

 

“So never in my wildest dreams could I have foreseen the situation we find ourselves in today.

 

“Where education policies that do not reflect what we know about how young children learn could be mandated and followed. We have decades of research in child development and neuroscience that tell us that young children learn actively—they have to move, use their senses, get their hands on things, interact with other kids and teachers, create, invent. But in this twisted time, young children starting public Pre-K at the age of four are expected to learn through “rigorous instruction.”

 

“And never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that we would have to defend children’s right to play.

 

“Play is the primary engine of human growth; it’s universal–as much as walking and talking. Play is the way children build ideas and how they make sense of their experience and feel safe. Just look at all the math concepts at work in the intricate buildings of kindergartners. Or watch a 4-year old put on a cape and pretend to be a superhero after witnessing some scary event.

 

“But play is disappearing from classrooms. Even though we know play is learning for young kids, we are seeing it shoved aside to make room for academic instruction and “rigor.”

 

“I could not have foreseen in my wildest dreams that we would have to fight for classrooms for young kids that are developmentally appropriate. Instead of active, hands-on learning, children now sit in chairs for far too much time getting drilled on letters and numbers. Stress levels are up among young kids. Parents and teachers tell me: children worry that they don’t know the right answers; they have nightmares, they pull out their eyelashes, they cry because they don’t want to go to school. Some people call this child abuse and I can’t disagree.

 

“I could not have foreseen in my wildest dreams that we would be up against pressure to test and assess young kids throughout the year often in great excess—often administering multiple tests to children in kindergarten and even Pre-K. Now, when young children start school, they often spend their first days not getting to know their classroom and making friends. They spend their first days getting tested. Here are words from one mother as this school year began:

 

“My daughter’s first day of kindergarten — her very first introduction to elementary school — consisted almost entirely of assessment. She was due at school at 9:30, and I picked her up at 11:45. In between, she was assessed by five different teachers, each a stranger, asking her to perform some task.

 

“By the time I picked her up, she did not want to talk about what she had done in school, but she did say that she did not want to go back. She did not know the teachers’ names. She did not make any friends. Later that afternoon, as she played with her animals in her room, I overheard her drilling them on their numbers and letters.

 

“The most important competencies in young children can’t be tested—we all know this. Naming letters and numbers is superficial and almost irrelevant in relation to the capacities we want to help children develop: self-regulation, problem solving ability, social and emotional competence, imagination, initiative, curiosity, original thinking—these capacities make or break success in school and life and they can’t be reduced to numbers.

 

“Yet these days, all the money and resources, the time dedicated to professional development, they go to tooling teachers up to use the required assessments. Somehow the data gleaned from these tests is supposed to be more valid than a teacher’s own ability to observe children and understand their skills in the context of their whole development in the classroom.

 

“The first time I saw for myself what was becoming of many of the nation’s early childhood classrooms was when I visited a program in a low income community in north Miami. Most of the children were on free and reduced lunch.

 

“There were ten classrooms–kindergarten and Pre-K. The program’s funding depended on test scores, so—no surprise—teachers taught to the test. Kids who got low scores, I was told, got extra drills in reading and math and didn’t get to go to art. They used a computer program to teach 4 and 5 year olds how to Bubble. One teacher complained to me that some children go outside the lines.

 

“In one of the kindergartens I visited, the walls were barren and so was the whole room. The teacher was testing one little boy at a computer at the side of the room. There was no classroom aide. The other children were sitting at tables copying words from the chalk board. The words were: “No talking. Sit in your seat. Hands to Yourself.”

 

“The teacher kept shouting at them from her testing corner: Be quiet! No talking!

 

“Most of the children looked scared or disengaged, and one little boy was sitting alone. He was quietly crying. I will never forget how these children looked or how it felt to watch them, I would say, suffering in this context that was such a profound mismatch with their needs.

 

“It’s in low-income, under-resourced communities like this one where children are most subjected to heavy doses of teacher-led drills and tests. Not like in wealthier suburbs where kids have the opportunity to go to early childhood programs that have play, the arts, and project-based learning. It’s poverty—the elephant in the room—that is the root cause of this disparity.

 

“A few months ago, I was alarmed to read a report from the Department of Education Office for Civil Rights showing that more than 8,000 children from public preschools across the country were suspended at least once in a school year, many more than once. First of all, who suspends a preschooler? Why and for what? The very concept is bizarre and awful. But 8,000? And then to keep reading the report to see that a disproportionate number of those suspended preschoolers were low income, black boys.

 

“There is a connection, I know, between these suspensions and ed reform policies: Children in low income communities are enduring play deficient classrooms where they get heavy doses of direct teaching and testing. They have to sit still, be quiet in their seats and comply. Many young children can’t do this and none should have to.

 

“I came home from that visit to the classrooms in North Miami in despair. But fortunately, the despair turned quickly to organizing. With other educators we started our nonprofit Defending the Early Years. We have terrific early childhood leaders with us (some are here tonight: Deb Meier, Geralyn McLaughlin, Diane Levin and Ayla Gavins). We speak in a unified voice for young children.

 

“We publish reports, write op eds, make videos and send them out on YouTube, we speak and do interviews every chance we get.

 

“We’ve done it all on a shoestring. It’s almost comical: The Gates Foundation has spent more than $200 million dollars just to promote the Common Core. Our budget at Defending the Early Years is .006% of that.

 

“We collaborate with other organizations. FairTest has been so helpful to us. And we also collaborate with –Network for Public Education, United Opt Out, many parent groups, Citizens for Public Schools, Bad Ass Teachers, Busted Pencils Radio, Save Our Schools, Alliance for Childhood and ECE PolicyWorks —There’s a powerful network out there– of educators, parents and students—and we see the difference we are making.

 

“We all share a common vision: Education is a human right and every child deserves one. An excellent, free education where learning is meaningful– with arts, play, engaging projects, and the chance to learn citizenship skills so that children can one day participate—actively and consciously–in this increasingly fragile democracy.

 

Categories Early Childhood Education, Honor Roll, Joy, Standardized Testing

Susan Ochshorn: Monetizing the Vocabulary Gap

By dianeravitch
August 8, 2015 //
25

Susan Ochshorn of The ECE Policy Wirks notes an insidious trend: entrepreneurs have discovered Hart and Risley’s vocabulary gap between children who live in poverty and those who live in professional families.

“Reducing the gap of 30 million words between low- and high-income children has approached the level of national obsession. The Clinton Foundation got on board with its initiative Too Small to Fail. So did the University of Chicago medical school, which created a website to support the ongoing conversation.

Efforts reached a fevered pitch in the fall of 2014. The White House Office on Science and Technology, the Urban Institute, Too Small to Fail, the U.S. Department of Education, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the Institute for Museum and Library Services hosted a forum for policymakers, researchers, and early childhood advocates to discuss the gap–a matter, some might argue, of national security.”

It was only a matter of time until the “education industrial complex” began to produce new technologies to sell.

But before you buy the latest software or apps, writes Ochshorn, consider a better alternative.

She writes:

“Just today, Roberta Michnick Golinkoff and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, the authors of ‘How Babies Talk’, and two of the nation’s foremost experts on language acquisition, published an op-ed in the Dallas Morning News. Our efforts are missing the mark, they say. Filling little ones’ brains with 30 million words is not the right approach. How we communicate is key, in that intimate sphere of adult and child:

“We must promote warm and caring relationships in which adults don’t just talk to children, but instead engage in a back-and-forth interaction. When parents keep the conversation going, rather than simply trying to get their children to hear as many words as possible, they are preparing their children for later language and school success.

“I’ll take that—along with economic security, paid family leave, high-quality child care, flexibility in the workplace, and a big reduction in the child poverty rate. It seems to me that all of the above would go a long way toward promoting those “positive experiences with language and reading, in a safe, nonjudgmental environment.”

Categories Early Childhood Education, Education Industry, For-Profit

Amy Moore: If State Won’t Fund Schools, At Least Let Us Teach

By dianeravitch
July 12, 2015 //
9

Amy Moore has a simple proposal for the governor and legislature of Iowa: If you won’t fund our state’s public schools adequately, then let us have the freedom to teach.

Moore teaches fifth grade and writes frequently for the Des Moines Register. She taught second grade for many years. She wrote this article after Governor Terry Branstad vetoed a $56 million increase in school funding. The legislature had approved the increased funding to compensate for having earlier granted an increase of 1.25%, not enough to cover rising fixed costs.

Republicans in the legislature–and the governor–expect the schools to do more with less.

Moore writes:

What improvements can educators make without cost? She has some ideas.

“The first thing that would make a great impact is to bring back play-based curriculum in the early childhood grades. There is a recent, almost comical, “new” movement being highlighted by the media to restore play in kindergarten. I say comical because some of those touting its importance are acting as if early childhood educators haven’t been screaming for years that traditional academic materials and learning approaches are not appropriate for our youngest.
The thing that is not funny at all is the lost childhood many of our babies are suffering as they are pushed to do things earlier than they should and in ways that are detrimental to their development. One positive that has emerged is newer research is proving little ones have neurological connections that are made when exploring their worlds through play and being forced to learn in other ways can actually be harmful.

“So if we want to improve our schools programs without purchasing anything, we should discontinue the use of any scripted curricular materials in the earliest grades. That is not how young kids learn. There should not be multiple choice tests, but instead only teacher created assessments along with observation.

“God bless those administrators who haven’t gotten caught up in data hysteria and who have allowed their teachers to continue to implement lessons that are suitable for little girls and boys. For the rest, we should allow our teachers to dust off their dramatic play areas, their sand tables, and their art easels and let them be used.

“Early childhood educators have known for years how to use these tools to enhance academic skills with what appears to others to be “just play” and, at the same time, our young ones will again learn essential life skills such as problem solving, cooperation, communication, persistence and creativity. The most important thing of all that children can gain through play is a lifelong love of learning. There is such a thing as the wrong kind of teaching. It’s happening in many of our schools and we have the power to stop it. It won’t cost a dime.”

Here is another no-cost idea:

“No single textbook company or method of teaching can be a good fit for all. If districts have spent thousands of dollars purchasing materials that all are expected to follow then that’s great. Have them available to the teachers to use at their own discretion, in their own time, with their own supplements as they see fit. That’s called teaching. Not only will it not demand additional money but it will reduce the exodus of great educators from the profession because they will once again be allowed to do the job for which they were trained. It will set us back on the path to the highest quality of teaching and learning possible.”

Moore advises teachers to get involved in the Presidential primary. Study the candidates’ records on education. Ask them questions.

“The last thing is an easy one for those of us in the first-in-the-nation caucus state. We need to pay attention to the political races and, ultimately, cast our vote for candidates who will make schools a priority. We have the opportunity to shake hands with many of these people. We can ask them directly how they plan to fight poverty and inequity, to strengthen public schools, to keep the decision-making process away from business interests and with educators….

“Have these candidates supported taking away teacher job protections? Have they promoted a test-based culture? Have they allowed taxpayer money to go to for-profit schools? We need to ask about their beliefs about using artificial measures such as test scores to judge teachers. Showing up at a forum and posing these types of questions will cost us only the gas money to get there.”

Good advice for parents and teachers in every state.

Categories Budget Cuts, Early Childhood Education, Funding, Iowa

Early Childhood Educator Feels the Pain of Income Inequality

By dianeravitch
July 9, 2015 //
29

In a brief discussion of income inequality on the blog, I pointed out that it was unfair that a handful of people live in luxury while large numbers of people worry about paying their rent. It is not healthy for our democracy to have such vast inequality. Read the book “The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger.”

 

In response, the following comment was posted by reader ECE Educator:

 

 

I’m one of those people who can’t pay my rent. I added up my lifetime earnings as an educator over the past 40+ years at non-unionized schools and it turns out that I made HALF of what the government says the average worker with a high school diploma earns in their lifetime. I have three college degrees and my average annual salary is below minimum wage.

 

That occurred because I’m an Early Childhood Education specialist and since we do not have free programs for all birth – 5 year olds in this country, I went where the jobs were and taught primarily in private child care centers, where the pay is low and most teachers receive no benefits. Consequently, my Social Security is unlivable. My experience is not unusual. I fear this is the model that privatizers most relish and would love to emulate. Please do what you can to prevent that. Since I am now three months behind in my rent and can’t possibly pay it, I’m going to become homeless this month. There could be many more teachers like me out there.

Categories Democracy, Early Childhood Education
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