This is one part of a much larger trend of dismantling all niceness in American life. EVERYONE now works much harder than they used to: workers work more than 10 hours a day with similar or lesser benefits, college students work much harder to get the same jobs, where we had one breadwinner supporting an entire family we now have two struggling to support families. Even kindergarten kids work harder than they ever have in history.
It does not take a genius to figure out that this is not a sustainable system. All benefits of the lower classes working really hard will keep accumulating to the top until society collapses on itself. Or maybe not; we could return to a stable feudalism.
In any case, the solution to this obviously is that kids should not have preschool, but their parents (particularly the mom) should stay home with the kids and play. That interaction with parents teaches kids far more than a lowly paid preschool teacher will. That's how it was done for centuries. That's what works.
>parents should stay home with the kids and play. That interaction with parents teaches kids far more than a lowly paid preschool teacher will.
Do you have kids? I have a 2.5 year who has been in a small day care setting (about 10 kids) for 2 years. The effect it has had on her social (and even academic) skills have been pretty amazing.
She is learning so much more about how to deal with other people, social interactions, ect than she ever could staying at home with me.
>[One parent staying at home with the kids] was done for centuries.
Not really. Preindustrial revolution life was much more communal and based around large, multi-generational family units.
I don't agree with your last paragraph, as I have different values, but as far as your first one: this is the essence of 'hypercompetition', and it's bound up with our winner-take-all system / superstar effect.
Anyone who hasn't read "Twilight of the Elites" and "Average is Over" should do so.
My personal preference would be to accept this as the new reality and give better societal supports to allow people to compete (as Twilight of the Elites makes clear, you need more equality of outcome to enable equality of opportunity vis a vis education, tutors, etc.) like debt-free college and retraining programs, GBI, a more comprehensive unemployment system, etc. Rather than trying to roll the clock back, we should instead embrace it and allow people who want to be part of the race to have the tools to compete, while allowing those who would rather not to step away without starving and becoming homeless.
> It does not take a genius to figure out that this is not a sustainable system.
Or it's a more sustainable system. The American lifestyle in the past was mostly propped up by slave labor, both domestically and abroad. The reason the standard of living for the middle class is lower now is in part because of increasing equality. (Ignoring the massive wealth gap domestically, which almost certainly will be unsustainable in the long run.)
Dismantling the federal rules doesn't dismantle the state rules which, whether or not they were in part designed to meet the federal requirements, exist independently. Nor does it, more to the point, rewrite the actual school curricula or transform classroom practices that were shaped by the system produced by the old federal rules and associated state rules.
This is largely an advocacy piece about how practices should be changed (focusing on what is viewed as negative about current practices); it makes as much sense to see it now -- when the federal rules allow practice to change -- as any other time.
ESSA just removes the federal requirements for proficiency levels set by NCLB (i.e., 100% of students will be proficient by 2011/2012 and all the safe harbor calculations that came with this mandate). ESSA, however, it stills requires states to test in grades 3-8 and 11 and to develop success indicators including test scores, school climate (e.g., suspension and expulsion rates, graduation rates, and completion of advanced courses (e.g., AP/IB courses).
The biggest change is that state will have the freedom to develop their own local set of success indicators rather than relying on the federal department of education to tell which schools are successful and which are not. If you are in California, take a look at the CORE districts to have an idea about where the CA department of education is heading towards in regards of school and district accountability measures.
Back on topic: Kindergarten is actually still optional for California' students (see, http://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/gs/em/kindergartenfaq.asp and CA Ed Code Section 48010). There is some push in Sacramento to make kindergarten mandatory but the initiative is still gaining support. It is known that children from low social-economic status are at a disadvantage ausually nd start kindergarten with a developmental gap worth between 1-2 years of instruction.
Making kindergarten compulsory and pre-kindergarten optional is a step in the direction of strengthening early education and hopefully closing the achievement gap from an early age (in fact, we can already tell in 3rd grade which students will be successful and which will struggle by their reading test scores).
This is a very US-centric article. Lots of other countries start out education with a fair degree of desk work, rote memorization (eg of the alphabet, basic addition and subtraction), expectations of being able to read by the end of the first year and so on...and they're doing fine. My education in Ireland would probably have seemed pretty Dickensian by the author's standards (although we also had unstructured time, physical play and so on), and yet Ireland consistently does well on measures of academic achievement and in terms of cultural capital.
My parents both liked reading (thanks Mm & Dad) so I was lucky enough to be able to read before I went to school at age 4, and the idea that it's bad for kids' brains to teach them to read before 5 or 6 just seems laughably delusional to me. I would have resented anyone trying to interfere with my reading at a young age and certainly plan on teaching my own kids to read should any come along. The article's suggestion that kids can't identify any similarity between the veins in a leaf and those in their hand because they're being subjected to too much book learning strikes me as bizarre.
Of course one shouldn't generalize from one's own experience, but given the highly standardized nature of the educational curriculum I grew up with, if it was so bad I'd expect that to have manifested in the form of intractable social problems or declining international rankings by now.
This is a really disturbing trend to me. If you learn to read one year earlier then the last generation then.. what? What long term effect will that have on your life? Kids are learning so much at that young age already, even if they aren't sitting a desk learning from a certified teacher. It's cliche, but we need to let kids be kids for a while.
My daughter learned to "read" at 18 months. This was done by putting cards with words next to the things they described all around the house (a card written with "BUCKET" was put next to an actual bucket) for weeks, pointing them out and explaining them through the days. Then occasionally collecting them up and spreading them out on the floor to play a game "Emi, go bring me the bucket card". After six months she was reading billboards along the highway.
The key idea though was that it was always just a game, never a chore. We'd put the cards back BEFORE she got bored of them.
She could read a 400+ page novel in a day at age 11. I can't even come close to that.
What's the advantage of kids being kids for a while? So that parents can have cute young people to play with for a little longer?
Some people may enjoy their childhood, but I don't see why they wouldn't similarly enjoy life as younger adults. Kids learn to read earlier, then they move on to more productive pursuits earlier.
If anything, I think it's insane that we encourage people to behave like children well into their 20's (c.f. college students complaining about costumes that are too scary). Historically we didn't do this; the real question is what is the long term effect of treating 15-22 year olds like children.
Most of us here, I would venture to guess, learned to read before Kindergarten. We can look at the group of people who learned to read as early as 2 already.
I was taught to read before school, not in kindergarten, but at home. I feel like it didn't do any harm, and my reading comprehension was top of my class until I entered high school, when I more or less stopped reading for pleasure altogether. I wasn't bored in class, because we picked our own books to read, so you could read at your own level.
I think that being taught some stuff at home might have stunted the development of my time management skills, because I could always complete the work in a very small part of the assigned time.
Mum had taught me some basic mathematical manipulations and "short-cuts", and I remember for a while I was ahead of the class in that too, again I wasn't bored though, because I just completed the problems quickly and then did my own thing. The problem was, when the level of difficulty caught up to my skill level again in high school, I was used to having time to muck around in class, and I never put in enough time and effort to finish the assigned work.
When I eventually have kids, I'll teach them anything they ask about, or need help with, but I'm going to trust their teachers with their core subjects by default.
The way I see it, the school material will be pretty straightforward, and easily remediated, but soft skills and self discipline are developed early on, and should not be interrupted for the sake of knowing how to simplify a fraction a year early.
edit:
Thinking about it more, it probably wasn't just my Mum that had made class too easy, the pace was probably a bit too slow for me anyway. When I entered high school, I was put into the advanced stream/track, but by that time my poor study habits were already formed. Perhaps there should have been multiple streams in primary school also.
It's common now for parents to put their kids in Kindergarten at the age they used to start first grade. My kid just made the cutoff but my wife wants to hold him back and some of his friends parents with kids born in January or march are holding their kids back a year.
Why can't reading and learning be part of being a kid?
OK I'll admit dorkiness in public, I loved Tom Swift books when I was a little boy. Couldn't have had my childhood without reading Tom Swift books, wouldn't trade it for anything. The first book I ever sat down and read front to back was the one with the triphibian atomic car. I was probably about 5. Do not want to hear bragging along the lines of "my first book was the Silmarillion at age 2" but I'm sure this was not a unique childhood experience, especially here.
I actually assumed you were being sarcastic after the first 3 sentences, then I read further and realized you aren't.
My response to the question of "what will happen if they learn to read a year earlier" is that they will be a year ahead in learning to read of the previous generation.
I think it is incumbent upon you to explain why you think learning to read, write, etc. is a chore or something that shouldn't be part of very early childhood. I think later childhood makes it seem like a chore, but in reality these are very enjoyable pursuits!
New research sounds a particularly disquieting note. A major evaluation of Tennessee’s publicly funded preschool system, published in September, found that although children who had attended preschool initially exhibited more “school readiness” skills when they entered kindergarten than did their non-preschool-attending peers, by the time they were in first grade their attitudes toward school were deteriorating. And by second grade they performed worse on tests measuring literacy, language, and math skills. The researchers told New York magazine that overreliance on direct instruction and repetitive, poorly structured pedagogy were likely culprits; children who’d been subjected to the same insipid tasks year after year after year were understandably losing their enthusiasm for learning.
I found this article very frustrating. Everything the author is complaining about comes down to one issue: the ratio of Teachers to Students. And yet, she does not mention this once.
> A major evaluation of Tennessee’s publicly funded preschool system, published in September, found that although children who had attended preschool initially exhibited more “school readiness” skills when they entered kindergarten than did their non-preschool-attending peers, by the time they were in first grade their attitudes toward school were deteriorating... overreliance on direct instruction and repetitive, poorly structured pedagogy were likely culprits; children who’d been subjected to the same insipid tasks year after year after year were understandably losing their enthusiasm for learning.
The problem here isn't that preschoolers were more "school ready," the problem is that the school system isn't prepared to handle "school ready" students. School ready kindergartners have just come from a preschool like that of my sons, where state regulations require a 1:10 teacher to student ratio [1], and they are now in a 1:20 or worse ratio public school [2]. When a teacher is going over material some students have already mastered, those students zone out.
> Unfortunately, much of the conversation in today’s preschool classrooms is one-directional and simplistic, as teachers steer students through a highly structured schedule, herding them from one activity to another and signaling approval with a quick “good job!”
The author claims that providing a conversational class room is "relatively cheap to provide." But this isn't something a teacher can just change their teaching strategy and accomplish. This kind of interaction requires focusing attention on a student at the expense of the other students--so it takes more teachers. It is laughably naive to claim a teacher can have personalized dialogue with 20 kindergartners at once.
> Pedagogy and curricula have changed too, most recently in response to the Common Core State Standards Initiative’s kindergarten guidelines... One study, titled “Is Kindergarten the New First Grade?,” compared kindergarten teachers’ attitudes nationwide in 1998 and 2010 and found that the percentage of teachers expecting children to know how to read by the end of the year had risen from 30 to 80 percent.
And yet, the Common Core only requires children know a number of sight-words, basic phonetics, and the concepts of reading (words are separated by spaces, we read left-to-right, etc.) [3]. The standards, which everyone loves to criticize but no one seems to know what they actually say, are quite easy to meet. One of my preschoolers has easily mastered the Kindergartner recommendations with nothing but teaching him that the alphabet, words, reading, and books are fun--but it takes personalized time to encourage that attitude.
The biggest problem with modern formal education is that all of the incentives are screwed up. There's a race toward optimizing certain "metrics" and making progress on paper to the detriment of actual learning. Sometimes I wonder whether the educational system actually helps more than it hurts. So much of "education" is not about learning, and in fact turns students away from learning. It's amazing that the system works at all really.
If not now, then soon. The MS/MEng is for sure the new BS. I had a hiring manager from a local firm come in and say: "Yes, we are hiring entry level talent right now, masters students like you guys are in high demand and...."
The sentence betrayed his logic, that a MS is now entry level.
When asked if there were questions, one student said:"Wait, are masters now an entry level requirement or preference?"
He relied:"Yes, they are a requirement, and they are entry level not just in terms of comapny structure, but in terms of pay too"
No, but the Masters definitely reads as a B.S.++. I think the Ph.D. is qualitatively different. It puts you at risk of looking over-specialized, while opening you up to jobs that require that degree of specialization.
[+] [-] littletimmy|10 years ago|reply
It does not take a genius to figure out that this is not a sustainable system. All benefits of the lower classes working really hard will keep accumulating to the top until society collapses on itself. Or maybe not; we could return to a stable feudalism.
In any case, the solution to this obviously is that kids should not have preschool, but their parents (particularly the mom) should stay home with the kids and play. That interaction with parents teaches kids far more than a lowly paid preschool teacher will. That's how it was done for centuries. That's what works.
[+] [-] TheGirondin|10 years ago|reply
Do you have kids? I have a 2.5 year who has been in a small day care setting (about 10 kids) for 2 years. The effect it has had on her social (and even academic) skills have been pretty amazing.
She is learning so much more about how to deal with other people, social interactions, ect than she ever could staying at home with me.
>[One parent staying at home with the kids] was done for centuries.
Not really. Preindustrial revolution life was much more communal and based around large, multi-generational family units.
[+] [-] Futurebot|10 years ago|reply
Anyone who hasn't read "Twilight of the Elites" and "Average is Over" should do so.
Winner-take-all society: http://prospect.org/article/talent-and-winner-take-all-socie...
The superstar effect: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/business/26excerpt.html?_r...
Non-stop retraining: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/22/business/to-stay-relevant-...
My personal preference would be to accept this as the new reality and give better societal supports to allow people to compete (as Twilight of the Elites makes clear, you need more equality of outcome to enable equality of opportunity vis a vis education, tutors, etc.) like debt-free college and retraining programs, GBI, a more comprehensive unemployment system, etc. Rather than trying to roll the clock back, we should instead embrace it and allow people who want to be part of the race to have the tools to compete, while allowing those who would rather not to step away without starving and becoming homeless.
[+] [-] humanrebar|10 years ago|reply
Maybe you mean "quality of life" instead of "niceness"?
I find that niceness is incredibly overemphasized, especially in early childhood education and media. Often things are unpleasant, but good to do.
[+] [-] Alex3917|10 years ago|reply
Or it's a more sustainable system. The American lifestyle in the past was mostly propped up by slave labor, both domestically and abroad. The reason the standard of living for the middle class is lower now is in part because of increasing equality. (Ignoring the massive wealth gap domestically, which almost certainly will be unsustainable in the long run.)
[+] [-] debacle|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oldmanjay|10 years ago|reply
Appeals to tradition don't provide a very compelling basis for arguments with people who prize reason.
[+] [-] europa|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dfabulich|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dragonwriter|10 years ago|reply
This is largely an advocacy piece about how practices should be changed (focusing on what is viewed as negative about current practices); it makes as much sense to see it now -- when the federal rules allow practice to change -- as any other time.
Where is the weirdness?
[+] [-] pacbard|10 years ago|reply
The biggest change is that state will have the freedom to develop their own local set of success indicators rather than relying on the federal department of education to tell which schools are successful and which are not. If you are in California, take a look at the CORE districts to have an idea about where the CA department of education is heading towards in regards of school and district accountability measures.
Back on topic: Kindergarten is actually still optional for California' students (see, http://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/gs/em/kindergartenfaq.asp and CA Ed Code Section 48010). There is some push in Sacramento to make kindergarten mandatory but the initiative is still gaining support. It is known that children from low social-economic status are at a disadvantage ausually nd start kindergarten with a developmental gap worth between 1-2 years of instruction.
Making kindergarten compulsory and pre-kindergarten optional is a step in the direction of strengthening early education and hopefully closing the achievement gap from an early age (in fact, we can already tell in 3rd grade which students will be successful and which will struggle by their reading test scores).
[+] [-] anigbrowl|10 years ago|reply
My parents both liked reading (thanks Mm & Dad) so I was lucky enough to be able to read before I went to school at age 4, and the idea that it's bad for kids' brains to teach them to read before 5 or 6 just seems laughably delusional to me. I would have resented anyone trying to interfere with my reading at a young age and certainly plan on teaching my own kids to read should any come along. The article's suggestion that kids can't identify any similarity between the veins in a leaf and those in their hand because they're being subjected to too much book learning strikes me as bizarre.
Of course one shouldn't generalize from one's own experience, but given the highly standardized nature of the educational curriculum I grew up with, if it was so bad I'd expect that to have manifested in the form of intractable social problems or declining international rankings by now.
[+] [-] vlunkr|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickbauman|10 years ago|reply
The key idea though was that it was always just a game, never a chore. We'd put the cards back BEFORE she got bored of them.
She could read a 400+ page novel in a day at age 11. I can't even come close to that.
[+] [-] yummyfajitas|10 years ago|reply
Some people may enjoy their childhood, but I don't see why they wouldn't similarly enjoy life as younger adults. Kids learn to read earlier, then they move on to more productive pursuits earlier.
If anything, I think it's insane that we encourage people to behave like children well into their 20's (c.f. college students complaining about costumes that are too scary). Historically we didn't do this; the real question is what is the long term effect of treating 15-22 year olds like children.
[+] [-] ebiester|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leohutson|10 years ago|reply
I think that being taught some stuff at home might have stunted the development of my time management skills, because I could always complete the work in a very small part of the assigned time.
Mum had taught me some basic mathematical manipulations and "short-cuts", and I remember for a while I was ahead of the class in that too, again I wasn't bored though, because I just completed the problems quickly and then did my own thing. The problem was, when the level of difficulty caught up to my skill level again in high school, I was used to having time to muck around in class, and I never put in enough time and effort to finish the assigned work.
When I eventually have kids, I'll teach them anything they ask about, or need help with, but I'm going to trust their teachers with their core subjects by default.
The way I see it, the school material will be pretty straightforward, and easily remediated, but soft skills and self discipline are developed early on, and should not be interrupted for the sake of knowing how to simplify a fraction a year early.
edit:
Thinking about it more, it probably wasn't just my Mum that had made class too easy, the pace was probably a bit too slow for me anyway. When I entered high school, I was put into the advanced stream/track, but by that time my poor study habits were already formed. Perhaps there should have been multiple streams in primary school also.
[+] [-] lakeeffect|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] VLM|10 years ago|reply
OK I'll admit dorkiness in public, I loved Tom Swift books when I was a little boy. Couldn't have had my childhood without reading Tom Swift books, wouldn't trade it for anything. The first book I ever sat down and read front to back was the one with the triphibian atomic car. I was probably about 5. Do not want to hear bragging along the lines of "my first book was the Silmarillion at age 2" but I'm sure this was not a unique childhood experience, especially here.
[+] [-] leshow|10 years ago|reply
My response to the question of "what will happen if they learn to read a year earlier" is that they will be a year ahead in learning to read of the previous generation.
[+] [-] shas3|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thewarrior|10 years ago|reply
One lamenting that college graduates don't have any real skills and the other saying that Kindergarten is now harder than ever.
[+] [-] qntty|10 years ago|reply
New research sounds a particularly disquieting note. A major evaluation of Tennessee’s publicly funded preschool system, published in September, found that although children who had attended preschool initially exhibited more “school readiness” skills when they entered kindergarten than did their non-preschool-attending peers, by the time they were in first grade their attitudes toward school were deteriorating. And by second grade they performed worse on tests measuring literacy, language, and math skills. The researchers told New York magazine that overreliance on direct instruction and repetitive, poorly structured pedagogy were likely culprits; children who’d been subjected to the same insipid tasks year after year after year were understandably losing their enthusiasm for learning.
[+] [-] MIKarlsen|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grandalf|10 years ago|reply
Any approach is going to have consequences. For most Americans, the purpose of both is primarily daycare and also a bit of socialization.
[+] [-] ideonexus|10 years ago|reply
> A major evaluation of Tennessee’s publicly funded preschool system, published in September, found that although children who had attended preschool initially exhibited more “school readiness” skills when they entered kindergarten than did their non-preschool-attending peers, by the time they were in first grade their attitudes toward school were deteriorating... overreliance on direct instruction and repetitive, poorly structured pedagogy were likely culprits; children who’d been subjected to the same insipid tasks year after year after year were understandably losing their enthusiasm for learning.
The problem here isn't that preschoolers were more "school ready," the problem is that the school system isn't prepared to handle "school ready" students. School ready kindergartners have just come from a preschool like that of my sons, where state regulations require a 1:10 teacher to student ratio [1], and they are now in a 1:20 or worse ratio public school [2]. When a teacher is going over material some students have already mastered, those students zone out.
> Unfortunately, much of the conversation in today’s preschool classrooms is one-directional and simplistic, as teachers steer students through a highly structured schedule, herding them from one activity to another and signaling approval with a quick “good job!”
The author claims that providing a conversational class room is "relatively cheap to provide." But this isn't something a teacher can just change their teaching strategy and accomplish. This kind of interaction requires focusing attention on a student at the expense of the other students--so it takes more teachers. It is laughably naive to claim a teacher can have personalized dialogue with 20 kindergartners at once.
> Pedagogy and curricula have changed too, most recently in response to the Common Core State Standards Initiative’s kindergarten guidelines... One study, titled “Is Kindergarten the New First Grade?,” compared kindergarten teachers’ attitudes nationwide in 1998 and 2010 and found that the percentage of teachers expecting children to know how to read by the end of the year had risen from 30 to 80 percent.
And yet, the Common Core only requires children know a number of sight-words, basic phonetics, and the concepts of reading (words are separated by spaces, we read left-to-right, etc.) [3]. The standards, which everyone loves to criticize but no one seems to know what they actually say, are quite easy to meet. One of my preschoolers has easily mastered the Kindergartner recommendations with nothing but teaching him that the alphabet, words, reading, and books are fun--but it takes personalized time to encourage that attitude.
[1] http://dphhs.mt.gov/Portals/85/hcsd/documents/ChildCare/STAR...
[2] http://ecs.force.com/mbdata/mbquestRT?rep=Kq1411
[3] http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/RF/K/
[+] [-] CaptSpify|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Balgair|10 years ago|reply
The sentence betrayed his logic, that a MS is now entry level.
When asked if there were questions, one student said:"Wait, are masters now an entry level requirement or preference?"
He relied:"Yes, they are a requirement, and they are entry level not just in terms of comapny structure, but in terms of pay too"
This was bioengineering, by the way.
[+] [-] sevensor|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sergiotapia|10 years ago|reply