Not All Preschool Is Created Equal

Speaking of questions that came up in comments and preschool, there’s a fascinating article at NPR by Anya Kamenetz largely consisting of an interview with the individual who conducted the study of Tennessee’s statewide preschool program that found negative effects from the program on test scores, math, science, reading, and behavioral problems. That wasn’t what Dale Farran wanted or expected and, frankly, she was shocked by it.

The key point is that some preschool programs are better than others and the direction in which we’ve been headed for decades. Consider:

“One of the biases that I hadn’t examined in myself is the idea that poor children need a different sort of preparation from children of higher-income families.”

She’s talking about drilling kids on basic skills. Worksheets for tracing letters and numbers. A teacher giving 10-minute lectures to a whole class of 25 kids who are expected to sit on their hands and listen, only five of whom may be paying any attention.

“Higher-income families are not choosing this kind of preparation,” she explains. “And why would we assume that we need to train children of lower-income families earlier?”

Farran points out that families of means tend to choose play-based preschool programs with art, movement, music and nature. Children are asked open-ended questions, and they are listened to.

This is not what Farran is seeing in classrooms full of kids in poverty, where “teachers talk a lot, but they seldom listen to children.” She thinks that part of the problem is that teachers in many states are certified for teaching students in prekindergarten through grade 5, or sometimes even pre-K-8. Very little of their training focuses on the youngest learners.

So another major bias that she’s challenging is the idea that teacher certification equals quality. “There have been three very large studies, the latest one in 2018, which are not showing any relationship between quality and licensure.”

Read the whole thing.

Who’d a thunk it? Children learn best through doing things that are developmentally appropriate and for young children that means play. That flies in the face of what we’ve been training teachers to do for decades. They’ve been told the wrong things.

The key point here is that universal pre-K is not only not sufficient it may actually be counter-productive. It needs to be the right kind of preschool as well.