TKW Consulting

St. Peter eyes day cares to help prepare children
District looking for ways to help all children begin school on same level

Once upon a time, kindergarten readiness meant having a box of crayons and tied shoelaces.

Not any more.

Kindergarten readiness is one of the latest ideological innovations in education. The logic is that children who enter kindergarten with age-appropriate skills are more likely to experience continued success in the classroom. And if kids are more successful in school, they are less likely to drop out and/or commit crimes.

The St. Peter School District, along with the city’s Community and Family Education department and the St. Peter Early Childhood Coalition, have already devised and implemented several kindergarten readiness programs.

But St. Peter’s newest initiative takes kindergarten curriculum somewhere it doesn’t often go — into the living rooms of home day care providers.

“We found the curriculum and we thought it made sense to make it available,” said St. Peter Supt. Jeff Olson. “One of our long-term goals is having every student ready for kindergarten.”

According to community education director Nancy Penn, there are more than 30 home day care providers in the St. Peter area. With limited resources and materials — at least compared to center-based day care facilities — home providers have not typically had the opportunity to implement kindergarten curriculum.

Not any more.

“Home day cares are on their own,” Penn said. “They just don’t have everything that
centers do. This curriculum respects that and really reflects what home day cares are able to do. ... We are really depending on them to help get our kids ready.”

The curriculum, which is certified by the school district, emphasizes reading skills and, especially, comprehension skills. The reason, Penn said, is that the biggest challenge for young learners, regardless of background, is language.

Penn said children reach kindergarten at different reading, speaking and comprehension levels. Hopefully, she said, the curriculum will even the playing field and ensure all children have the necessary language skills when they show up for their first day of school.

“When they start school, all kids bring different language with them,” Penn said. “One child is from a farm, one child has parents that teach at Gustavus Adolphus. Those two kids will know different vocabulary and use language differently.”

Training for the curriculum begins Tuesday and continues once a month until March. The sessions begin at 6 p.m. and last less than two hours. The $30 registration fee is refunded upon completion of the training.

Anyone interested can contact St. Peter Community and Family Education at (507) 934-3048.

// posted by Tammy Wachter @ 1:32 PM 0 comments

Obama unveiled an ambitious $18 billion plan to expand public education frompre-school through 12th grade while at Central High School in Manchester, New Hampshire this morning.

Calling education "the currency of the Information Age," Obama stressed the need for expanding public programs to help American competitiveness with other nations. He said that a child in Boston now needs the training to compete with the kids getting an equal or better education in Bangalore or Beijing.

"In this kind of economy, countries who out-educate us today will out-compete us tomorrow,” Obama said. “Already, China is graduating eight times as many engineers as we are. By 12th grade, our children score lower on math and science tests than most other kids in the world."

Obama criticized No Child Left Behind, saying that educating America's children shouldn't involve teaching them how to "fill in bubbles." He also used the unpopular education bill to take a dig at the records of both Clinton and Edwards.

"It's pretty popular to bash No Child Left Behind on the campaign trail,” Obama said, “but when it was being debated four years ago, my colleague Dick Durbin offered everyone a chance to vote so the law couldn't be enforced until it was fully funded. Senator Edwards and Senator Clinton passed on that chance, and I believe it was a serious mistake.” Obama's education plan calls for: (1) full funding for educational programs from birth to 5 years old; (2) increasing the number of teachers through scholarships and incentive grants for taking challenging assignments; (3) prioritizing math and science education; and (4) focusing on parental responsibility in education.

The focus of Obama's education policy is on birth to 5, years Obama said were pivotal in children's development. The investment he added would be paid back to society 10-fold. His plan sets the goal for universal pre-school, but does not provide require parents to enroll their kids in it.

"And for every dollar we invest in early childhood education,” Obama said, “we get $10 back in reduced welfare rolls, lower healthcare costs and less crime.”

He cited his record in the Illinois Senate, where he said that he started the Early Learning Council, to point to how early education programs could be successfully implemented.

In order to address the current teacher shortage, Obama said that he would create a national teacher service corps, which would provide $25,000 scholarships to encourage undergraduates to become teachers. He also called for "professionalizing" teaching, creating a career ladder that would allow teachers to pass national assessment tests and reward teachers who perform well.

Aides to the senator, however, quickly disputed that this is “merit pay,” which they say simply ties compensation to how students perform on a standardized test. Obama has in the past called for performance-based pay -- most notably while at the National Education Association’s annual conference.

The Obama plan, though, does provide a "differentiated compensation system," which would reward teachers for undergoing additional training, for demonstrated learning gains by students, and for showing expertise and leadership. It would also allow teachers to take a role in deciding how to design their compensation at the local level.

Policy aides also disagreed with the idea that this plan was a significant expansion of the role of federal government in public education, saying the investment was in line with the current role that federal government plays in enhancing and supporting states' roles in providing public education. Instead, they pointed to Obama's call for parental involvement in education as a sign of his commitment that education must rely on partnership between parents and public educators.

Though Obama called for a renewed investment in math and science education, his plan would actually pull money from the federal government's greatest investments and achievements in math and science. Obama would delay funding for the NASA Constellation program for five years, though he would maintain the $500 million in funding the program would receive for its manufacturing and technology base, in order to help fund his education policy. The campaign did not say how much money delaying the program would provide.

The plan would also be paid for through the auctioning off of surplus public land, closing the CEO pay deductibility loophole, reduce costs of standardized procurement and through the some of the money that would be saved by ending the war in Iraq.

This is the third significant domestic policy Obama has unveiled in the past two weeks. Earlier this month, under the umbrella of a middle-class agenda, Obama unveiled tax-savings plans, day care and child care credits and the expansion of the Family and Medical Leave Act. In Iowa yesterday, Obama touted his commitment to community colleges and called for grants to expand their reach.

Baby DVDs may slow early language acquisition
There appears to be no benefit whatsoever from having infants watch baby DVDs or videos, despite marketing claims to the contrary. In a study of infants age 8 to 16 months, researchers found that watching baby DVDs or videos may actually delay vocabulary development.

“The take-home message for parents,” said Dr Frederick J Zimmerman, “is that you can’t purchase healthy development — it comes from frequent conversations between parent and child starting at birth and continuing at least for the first 3 years of life.”

Zimmerman, from the Child Health Institute, Seattle, and associates interviewed 1,008 parents of children age 2 to 24 months about their children’s language development and how their youngsters spent their time, including the types of media they are exposed to.

“We found that among the babies 8 to 16 months old, the more time they spent watching baby videos, the worse was their language development,” Zimmerman told.

Some examples of baby DVDs/videos include Baby Einstein and Brainy Baby. Specifically, each hour per day of viewing baby DVDs/videos was associated with a 17-point decline in scores on an test that measures language development called the Communicative Development Inventory (DCI). This corresponds to a difference of about 6 to 8 words for a typical child out of the 90 included on the CDI, the researchers explain in a report in the journal Pediatrics this month.

The researchers also found that parents who read or told stories to their infants and toddlers at least once a day increased their child’s vocabulary scores on the CDI test.No other form of media categories that the researchers measured was associated with either better or worse language development in infants 8 to 16 months old. These categories were educational TV or DVDs like Sesame Street, Blue’s Clues; non-educational TV like Sponge Bob Squarepants and Bob the Builder; children’s movies like Toy Story and The Little Mermaid, and adult TV like The Simpsons, Oprah, and sports programming.

The apparent harmful impact of baby DVDs/videos on language development was specific to infants 8 to 16 months old, the researchers emphasize.Among toddlers 17 to 24 months old, there were no significant associations between any type of media and language development. Baby videos are now a $100-million business, “with a myriad of unsubstantiated claims being made about how they will improve intelligence and school readiness, writes Dr Victor C Strasburger in a commentary published with the study. Yet the current study, he points out, suggests ‘highly significant’ language delays in babies exposed to these videos.

“Both pediatricians and parents need to appreciate the power of the media — to educate, to entertain, and to harm,” concludes Strasburger, professor of pediatrics at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine, Albuquerque.

In the early 1990s, I was taken aback to overhear my 3-year-old son insisting to his 6-year-old cousin that he went to “ABC school,” not to day care, as she condescendingly referred to it. (He was spending a few sociable hours a week at a children’s center chosen because it was around the corner.) I had no idea where he got that term, or when he decided his educational credentials needed upgrading. And, given that alphabet drills weren’t in fact part of the program, I wasn’t sure what he was really boasting about.

But with universal prekindergarten (UPK) emerging as a campaign issue, it’s now clear to me that he was a kid ahead of his time. Hillary Clinton and John Edwards have recently joined a chorus of early-childhood-education advocates, governors, foundations and social activists who have been promoting the cause in notably wonky, rather than warm and cuddly, terms. Calling for an overhaul of the current patchwork of uneven preschool programs, UPK proponents invoke neuroscientific evidence of brain growth rather than child-care needs. They cite the long-term economic benefits of an early investment in boosting “cognitive skills” and “school readiness,” especially for low-income children. There is little mention of, say, pretend play in the pitch for government-subsidized
pre-K, which supporters argue should be affordable and available (though not necessarily mandatory) for all.

The hardheaded rhetoric conveys an important message: expanding access to early education is serious business, not baby stuff. The universal-preschool mission, too often dismissed as nanny-state meddling, capitalizes on the inclusive No Child Left Behind drive to close the K-12 achievement gap: the moment is ripe to reach downward to the post-diaper and pre-backpack stage, where disparities between white and minority students start. Yet aligning with an ethos of no-nonsense academics inspires uneasiness among UPK crusaders themselves, as the Berkeley professor Bruce Fuller points out in “Standardized Childhood: The Political and Cultural Struggle Over Early Education.” After all, for your bouncy 4-year-old — “wild and wonderful” is the epithet one classic parenting book applies to the age — how much ABC school do you really want?

It is a vexed question for liberal universalists, since the answer tends to vary by, among other things, economic class. In families at the well-educated top of the heap, where books and big vocabularies abound, parents have long gravitated to the “whole child” end of the pedagogical spectrum, as David Kirp notes in his recent manifesto for the cause, “The Sandbox Investment: The Preschool Movement and Kids-First Politics.” For their offspring, already steeped in ABC stuff, they generally favor an emphasis on individualized exploration and creative classroom collaboration to promote social and emotional growth. That entails having well-trained teachers at hand to comment and facilitate, like attentive parents, rather than overtly direct.

Not cheap, it’s what many child experts consider developmentally correct.

Yet such solicitously child-centered expertise doesn’t always sit so comfortably with families on the lower end of the income ladder or from other cultures. There, child-rearing styles tend to be considerably less chatty than the middle-class norm, Fuller and others note, and parents often expect more work than play in school. Bolstering kids’ deference to adults, not just boosting kids’ confidence, is also valued in many families. Early reading and math readiness often counts most of all, and teachers hold the key. It’s an invitation to “direct instruction,” which appeals to school administrators eager for a cost-effective jump-start on “skilling” for the No Child Left Behind testing that starts in third grade.

Nobody wants a two-tiered system, which isn’t likely to narrow the achievement gap, or a rigid one-size-fits-all system, either. But the UPK mission is an impetus to notice that at each end of the spectrum there are pedagogical lessons the other end wouldn’t get otherwise and that everyone could benefit from. Kirp and others pragmatically hope that in a universal system that includes well-off families, there would be built-in demand
for a developmentally sensitive preschool, which is arguably icing on the cake for the affluent but especially beneficial for those who lag behind. Those parents’ political clout, moreover, would make budgets harder to cut.

But the ABC side of the preschool spectrum — a more didactic emphasis on school readiness — also deserves its due, and not just because government financing may not always match liberal dreams. It helps give poor kids a cognitive boost early on, some research suggests, and it’s what their parents generally look to the classroom to deliver. For progressive purists, the bossiness may be a turnoff. Yet just as exposure to whole-child solicitude can benefit everybody, not least low-income kids and their families, surely so can a dose of the get-with-the-program ethos, unfamiliar though it may feel to the more affluent. Lessons in listening up and following routines deliver their own dividends. They can help convey a sense of belonging and fairness — and patience — that all kids need, not least the luckiest among them.

In retrospect, that’s what I think my son meant by “ABC school”: the challenges that felt important to him were learning not to cry when he was dropped off, not to bite other children, to wait his turn and to endure terrifying fire drills. They aren’t ingredients of future brilliance but maybe of something more important — a spirit of resilience.

Ann Hulbert, a contributing writer, is the author of “Raising America: Experts, Parents and a Century of Advice About Children.”