Kindergarten

Data from a survey of kindergarten teachers in California's Santa Clara County adds to the mounting evidence that kindergarten readiness is not as simple to define as you might think.

Contrary to popular conceptions of what it means for a 5-year-old to be ready for kindergarten, most kindergarten teachers are not wishing for rooms full of children who can already identify the letters of the alphabet. What they want instead are children who have learned how to regulate their impulses, follow through on a difficult task and have the self-control to listen to the teacher's directions for a few minutes.

This was one of several messages that emerged in Sacramento last Thursday during a presentation of recent data from the Santa Clara County Partnership for School Readiness, a collaborative of public, private and non-profit organizations in Silicon Valley. The presentation was part of the forum at which the New America Foundation released our report on early education in California. (For more about the report, see last week's post, the executive summary and the full report.)

Paul Tough's article in yesterday's New York Times Magazine puts the spotlight on Tools of the Mind -- a teaching strategy that encourages children to engage in make-believe play in the classroom. The idea is that by letting young children adopt and act out roles -- whether it's doctor or daddy or doughnut maker -- these children will be indirectly learning skills of inhibition and self-control. They must stay in character and plan out their next move. What's more, they have to work out how to share the "stage" with their classmates and adapt to the movements and desires of different characters around them.

In an op-ed for USA Today that came out this morning, I wrote about kindergarten -- a topic of heightened interest over the past six months as news stories, magazine pieces and research reports have sounded alarms about  classrooms for 5-year-olds becoming pressure cookers. 

In the piece I outlined four imperatives for improving the experience for all children, not to mention teachers:

Anthony D. Pellegrini, an educational psychologist at the University of Minnesota, has been studying the whys, whens and hows of children's playtime for decades. He is an authority on recess, helping to remind all of us of why it's crucial for academic and social growth. And he just published a new book, The Role of Play in Human Development, that explores the role of play in our evolution as a species.

So when Pellegrini pens an article titled "Research and Policy on Children's Play," it's time to perk up and pay attention. The piece was just published this month in Child Development Perspectives, a semi-annual journal of the Society for Research in Child Development.

The piece makes two important points. It starts by reminding us that the word "play" needs to be defined more precisely before educators, parents and child development specialists can have a fruitful conversation about what is missing in children's school routines. And it ends by pressing for more research on exactly what kinds of benefits children derive from play at various stages of their young lives.

The economic crisis exacted one of its biggest casualities on state pre-k programs last week when Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland signed into law a biennial state budget that zeroes out the state's full-day pre-k program and chopped funding for its half-day program by one-third.

The budget also slashed reimbursements for child care providers that serve low-income children, cut back on the number of poor families that can qualify for child care and reduced funding for the state's birth-to-three program by 25 percent.

The Early Learning Initiative, which funds full-day preschool for some 13,000 children, was one of 61 items that Gov. Strickland struck from the budget last week using the power of his line-item veto. The initiative was designed to bring community-based providers into the state's fledgling early education system by providing them with funds to train teachers. In fiscal year 2009 the program received $128 million, and in an observational study published last month, its teachers showed improvement in literacy instruction and classroom management since its launch four years ago.

Conventional wisdom often paints a picture of the poorly behaved student as the future flunkee. Even in early elementary school, we're led to believe, the kids who get in trouble will be the ones who struggle academically and eventually come home with failing grades.

Now new research is scrambling that image and bringing a few new culprits into focus. Two of them -- low levels of math and reading skill at early ages -- have received a lot of attention in early childhood circles, driving the movement for academically oriented pre-K programs. But something else may be to blame as well: the inability to pay attention. 

A study in last month's Pediatrics shows that the greater a child's attention problems at age 6, the more likely that child will perform poorly on tests of math and reading in the last few years of high school. Contrary to some of their own expectations, researchers found no connection between achievement and behavioral problems, whether they were aggressive actions (such as children pushing classmates or lashing out at the teacher) or issues like depression or withdrawal. The study examined data on nearly 700 children of varying family backgrounds.

A new report from California’s Children Now calls on the state to implement a comprehensive system that provides policymakers, educators and parents with better information about the skills of California’s youngsters when they enter kindergarten.

Play through learning. Play = Learning. Play is learning. These are the variations of the play mantra that was repeated by researchers and early childhood educators last week at the annual professional development institute held by the National Association for the Education of Young Children. 

More than 2,000 people attended the institute, which was held in Charlotte, N.C. Several of the presentations are now available online in a searchable directory on the NAEYC web site, which, by the way, received a major face lift last week to make it easier to navigate. Here are a few of the sessions that caught our eye (they cannot be directly hyperlinked but you can get to them by searching by author's name):

In Sunday's New York Times Magazine, Peggy Orenstein voices the worries that many middle-income parents are having about kindergarten: Have we gone overboard in trying to make sure our students are academically prepared? In her piece, "Kindergarten Cram," Orenstein asks: "What was the rush?" "How did 5 become the new 7, anyway?"

As the mother of two daughters -- one in 1st grade and another about to enter kindergarten in a Title I public school -- I often have the same thoughts. Not to mention my own nostalgia for those few kindergarten days I remember myself, apple-picking under a blue sky and dipping a brush into a gooey vat of paste during art projects.

But I also have high regard for research that shows the benefits of introducing academic concepts related to literacy, science and math skills in pre-k and kindergarten classrooms. Kindergartens that fail to support these developing skills, that take a lackadaisical approach to teaching and learning, can be harmful too, particularly for children from disadvantaged backgrounds who do not have access to a lot of books or curiosity-provoking conversation at home. Intentional, purposeful and thoughtful teaching -- not just watching from afar, but guiding and prompting questions -- is critical.

You voted. We investigated. In a blog post earlier this month, we asked you to choose what research most piqued your interest among 10 relevant posters released at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development. The top 3 vote-getters: Research on "fade-out" in the elementary school years; social behavior in preschool; and early academic outcomes for children in family-based care, center-based or public pre-K, which we wrote about last week. Here's report number 2, on social behaviors. Stay tuned for the final installment in May.

Can a preschooler's ability to play well with his classmates tell us about something about his chances for success in kindergarten? New data from Arizona State University provides some hints in that direction. The research has provided some of the first evidence to link academic skills to positive social behaviors at such young ages.