The news from New Jersey is that the legislature is very close to banning using the Big Standardized Test on students in Kindergarten through Second Grade, which is good news, I guess.
Only there is no similar move being contemplated for the many New Jersey students currently required to take the Big Boys and Girls Version of the PARCC, despite the New Jersey landfill-sized mountain of evidence that such a move would be both beneficial and welcome. There is a mess of various proposals calling for everything from greater transparency to giving the commissioner power to open a can of state-level whoop-ass on any who dare to opt out (while simultaneous declaring that, hey, hardly anybody did that opty outy thing so it's just no buggy).
And anyway-- what does it say about the current state of reform foolishness that any such law is even a thing? Will the legislature also be considering a law again lacing school lunches with ground glass? Will the legislature legislate that school administrators may not administer swirlies to students? Do we need a law to tell schools that they may not have students spend recess playing in traffic? Is there a law saying that schools may not heat the building winter by burning the students' clothes?
The fact that giving BS Tests to kindergarten students is on anybody's mind in the first place is just a bad thing! If your brand new spouse looks over at you and says, "You know, you're so sweet, I think I won't sell your liver on the black market after all," that is not cause for either celebration or relaxation.
So while I guess this proposal is better than one which mandated ten mile runs for five year olds, I'm not prepared to applaud the NJ legislature for putting into law what anybody with even an iota of sense would know better than to vent think about. The fact that such a law seems like a good idea is just a sign of how many people without an iota of sense but with a great deal of power are roaming loose these days.
Showing posts with label pre-K. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pre-K. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 19, 2015
Monday, May 11, 2015
Arne Talks Pre-K; I Have Questions
Monday Education Secretary Arne Duncan was hanging out in a bilingual pre-school in Maryland and Lydsey Layton of the Washington Post was covering it because, reasons?
Duncan is unhappy with the speed of adoption of Pre-K. He has a whole shelf of the stuff, and people just aren't buying. He "unveiled" a new report (was he carrying it around prior to that all draped in a veil? what color was the veil? sorry, but sometimes I get to looking at words thinking, "What the heck." anyway, I guess that's why he was there and being covered-- so he could use children as a presser backdrop) from the National Institute for Early Education Research, a group attached to Rutgers that is not so much a research institute as an advocacy that uses research to support their position. Does anybody do research without deciding what they want the answer to be ahead of time?
Anyway, the report said only 29% of four year olds and 4% of three year olds are in pre-school.
Somehow, this is a surprise to Duncan. It has been many, many years since my children were three years old, but that's not long enough to make me imagine that I would have considered pre-school a worthwhile choice back then. Of course, as always, I am troubled by the nagging gut feeling that Arne really thinks that Those Poor Folks are the ones who need to get their children out of the home and into a pre-school ASAP.
Layton reminds us that the feds have been trying hard to get pre-K promoted to headline status in the ESEA rewrite. Duncan asked for full-out grants and got competitive grants instead (which, given the administrations previous deep wet-kissing-with-tongue love for competitive grants is some kind of poetic justice). But anyway...
And whether that bill eventually will be passed by the full Senate and the House and become law is unclear. And it is likely to make a small dent in a “tremendous, unmet need,” Duncan said.
See, here's one of my questions-- what unmet need? What exactly is the need that school for three year olds must meet? Because I'm deathly afraid that the "unmet" need is the need for three-year-olds to open their books and start studying calculus so they can take a Pearson-manufactured standardized test to measure their sentence-writing skills. In which case, there is no unmet need.
Duncan notes that it would take 75 years at this rate to kid all the children into pre-school. Arne's explanation for why things are moving slowly is, well, not a good one. “We need more resources. We need Congress to invest, to partner with states to expand access," he says. Yes, and the Edsel wasn't sold in enough car lots. And New Coke didn't have enough marketing support.
When people aren't buying what you're selling (or in this case, trying to essentially give away), doesn't that mean you need to look at your product and the market and ask yourself if you're not trying to sell something that nobody wants?
I'll admit to mixed feelings about pre-school. I am sure that there are many ways that it could be handled that would really enrich life for children and their families, but at this point, I feel in my bones that the USED would like to do pre-school in the wrongest ways possible, for all the wrong reasons, and do it badly.
But in the meantime, what Arne is complaining about is simply all those delightful and beloved market forces doing their thing.
The piece was not a total waste, however. Layton totally got a picture of Arne roaring like a lion. I'm pretty sure that was worth the trip to Maryland all by itself.
Duncan is unhappy with the speed of adoption of Pre-K. He has a whole shelf of the stuff, and people just aren't buying. He "unveiled" a new report (was he carrying it around prior to that all draped in a veil? what color was the veil? sorry, but sometimes I get to looking at words thinking, "What the heck." anyway, I guess that's why he was there and being covered-- so he could use children as a presser backdrop) from the National Institute for Early Education Research, a group attached to Rutgers that is not so much a research institute as an advocacy that uses research to support their position. Does anybody do research without deciding what they want the answer to be ahead of time?
Anyway, the report said only 29% of four year olds and 4% of three year olds are in pre-school.
Somehow, this is a surprise to Duncan. It has been many, many years since my children were three years old, but that's not long enough to make me imagine that I would have considered pre-school a worthwhile choice back then. Of course, as always, I am troubled by the nagging gut feeling that Arne really thinks that Those Poor Folks are the ones who need to get their children out of the home and into a pre-school ASAP.
Layton reminds us that the feds have been trying hard to get pre-K promoted to headline status in the ESEA rewrite. Duncan asked for full-out grants and got competitive grants instead (which, given the administrations previous deep wet-kissing-with-tongue love for competitive grants is some kind of poetic justice). But anyway...
And whether that bill eventually will be passed by the full Senate and the House and become law is unclear. And it is likely to make a small dent in a “tremendous, unmet need,” Duncan said.
See, here's one of my questions-- what unmet need? What exactly is the need that school for three year olds must meet? Because I'm deathly afraid that the "unmet" need is the need for three-year-olds to open their books and start studying calculus so they can take a Pearson-manufactured standardized test to measure their sentence-writing skills. In which case, there is no unmet need.
Duncan notes that it would take 75 years at this rate to kid all the children into pre-school. Arne's explanation for why things are moving slowly is, well, not a good one. “We need more resources. We need Congress to invest, to partner with states to expand access," he says. Yes, and the Edsel wasn't sold in enough car lots. And New Coke didn't have enough marketing support.
When people aren't buying what you're selling (or in this case, trying to essentially give away), doesn't that mean you need to look at your product and the market and ask yourself if you're not trying to sell something that nobody wants?
I'll admit to mixed feelings about pre-school. I am sure that there are many ways that it could be handled that would really enrich life for children and their families, but at this point, I feel in my bones that the USED would like to do pre-school in the wrongest ways possible, for all the wrong reasons, and do it badly.
But in the meantime, what Arne is complaining about is simply all those delightful and beloved market forces doing their thing.
The piece was not a total waste, however. Layton totally got a picture of Arne roaring like a lion. I'm pretty sure that was worth the trip to Maryland all by itself.
Friday, January 16, 2015
Maternity Leave and Federal Priorities
If you want a hint about how federal priorities are set, just take a look at parental leave.
Plow through this report from the United Nation's International Labor Office and you'll learn of the 185 developed countries in the world, the US is one of only two with no federally mandated paid maternity leave. (The other one, I think, is New Guinea) *
Iran, Georgia, Germany, and Mongolia all mandate a better maternity leave arrangement than the US. Estonia and Finland once again kick our red,white and blue posteriors. Within the US, only five states pick up the slack.
But on the federal level, the best we can do is mandate that if you work for a company with more than fifty employees, they must give you time off without pay. Because if there is one time in life when someone is in a good place to give up income, it's when they have a new baby.
I bring up maternity leave because we are, on the federal level, so very deeply concerned about the little people these days. On the federal level we've been pushing for lots of testing and plenty of school oversight because Arne Duncan wants to be able to look a seven-year-old in the eyes and tell him he's on the right path to college.
And we have been plugging the living daylights out of pre-school and how much the little children need that great start in life and high-quality schooling to get them started out well. The feds are working hard on that cradle to career pipeline, so why are they not more interested in doing something about the cradle end of it?
President Obama famously said that no woman should have to choose between being a mother and going to work, and you would think that could lead straight into a discussion of mandated paid maternity leave to make that choice unnecessary. The next sentence should have been, "So let's make sure that young families just bringing home a precious, vulnerable newborn don't have to worry about the support of that infant taking a huge financial chunk out of their lives. Let's give every young mother a financial cushion so that she can have twelve or fourteen weeks to get her family off to a healthy start." That should have been the next sentence. Instead, the next sentence was, "So let’s make this happen: By the end of this decade, let’s enroll 6 million children in high-quality preschool, and let’s make sure that we are making America stronger.”
So why all this emphasis on pre-school as a way of catching up with the world when there is a child-care are in which we clearly lag-- providing a federal mandate that mothers can afford to stay home for the critical launch of their children?
I suppose it could be that we don't take maternity leave seriously as a culture. Time has a fairly awesome piece by Belinda Luscombe -- "Please Stop Acting as if Maternity Leave is a Vacation"-- which addresses this beautifully.
If it helps, think of family leave not as a vacation, but as a job swap. The new parents are swapping the jobs they know for shift work in an excrement-making factory with a co-worker who cannot communicate except by weeping or kicking. Plus, the shift never ends. And the chances of promotion are zero.
Sadly, I don't think it's an attitude problem. I suspect it is simpler and sadder than that.
The launching of nationally mandated and funded pre-K (complete with testing to check for that high-qualitiness) will make a bunch of corporations a ton of money. Paid maternity leave would cost corporations a ton of money. The Pre-K initiative will divert a ton of tax dollars into corporate pockets. Paid maternity leave would divert corporate dollars into the pockets of moms. Guess which way the lobbying wind blows on these issues.
If we really, really cared about getting babies a great start in life, and if we really worried about lagging behind the world in things that matter, we'd be pushing for federally mandated paid maternity leave like crazy. Instead, we use concern about children and our international standing as excuses to direct a lot of money to corporate interests. It's just one more of those little things that leads me to conclude that when the feds talk about Our Children, I shouldn't take them seriously.
*We should totally be talking about paternity leave as well, but the US is not exactly alone in failing to recognize the importance of the father in the early weeks, so I'm going to stick to maternity leave in this piece.
Plow through this report from the United Nation's International Labor Office and you'll learn of the 185 developed countries in the world, the US is one of only two with no federally mandated paid maternity leave. (The other one, I think, is New Guinea) *
Iran, Georgia, Germany, and Mongolia all mandate a better maternity leave arrangement than the US. Estonia and Finland once again kick our red,white and blue posteriors. Within the US, only five states pick up the slack.
But on the federal level, the best we can do is mandate that if you work for a company with more than fifty employees, they must give you time off without pay. Because if there is one time in life when someone is in a good place to give up income, it's when they have a new baby.
I bring up maternity leave because we are, on the federal level, so very deeply concerned about the little people these days. On the federal level we've been pushing for lots of testing and plenty of school oversight because Arne Duncan wants to be able to look a seven-year-old in the eyes and tell him he's on the right path to college.
And we have been plugging the living daylights out of pre-school and how much the little children need that great start in life and high-quality schooling to get them started out well. The feds are working hard on that cradle to career pipeline, so why are they not more interested in doing something about the cradle end of it?
President Obama famously said that no woman should have to choose between being a mother and going to work, and you would think that could lead straight into a discussion of mandated paid maternity leave to make that choice unnecessary. The next sentence should have been, "So let's make sure that young families just bringing home a precious, vulnerable newborn don't have to worry about the support of that infant taking a huge financial chunk out of their lives. Let's give every young mother a financial cushion so that she can have twelve or fourteen weeks to get her family off to a healthy start." That should have been the next sentence. Instead, the next sentence was, "So let’s make this happen: By the end of this decade, let’s enroll 6 million children in high-quality preschool, and let’s make sure that we are making America stronger.”
So why all this emphasis on pre-school as a way of catching up with the world when there is a child-care are in which we clearly lag-- providing a federal mandate that mothers can afford to stay home for the critical launch of their children?
I suppose it could be that we don't take maternity leave seriously as a culture. Time has a fairly awesome piece by Belinda Luscombe -- "Please Stop Acting as if Maternity Leave is a Vacation"-- which addresses this beautifully.
If it helps, think of family leave not as a vacation, but as a job swap. The new parents are swapping the jobs they know for shift work in an excrement-making factory with a co-worker who cannot communicate except by weeping or kicking. Plus, the shift never ends. And the chances of promotion are zero.
Sadly, I don't think it's an attitude problem. I suspect it is simpler and sadder than that.
The launching of nationally mandated and funded pre-K (complete with testing to check for that high-qualitiness) will make a bunch of corporations a ton of money. Paid maternity leave would cost corporations a ton of money. The Pre-K initiative will divert a ton of tax dollars into corporate pockets. Paid maternity leave would divert corporate dollars into the pockets of moms. Guess which way the lobbying wind blows on these issues.
If we really, really cared about getting babies a great start in life, and if we really worried about lagging behind the world in things that matter, we'd be pushing for federally mandated paid maternity leave like crazy. Instead, we use concern about children and our international standing as excuses to direct a lot of money to corporate interests. It's just one more of those little things that leads me to conclude that when the feds talk about Our Children, I shouldn't take them seriously.
*We should totally be talking about paternity leave as well, but the US is not exactly alone in failing to recognize the importance of the father in the early weeks, so I'm going to stick to maternity leave in this piece.
Sunday, February 23, 2014
What's Not To Love About Pre-K
One of the most recent ed-issues du jour is Pre-K. There's a great deal of political and public support for earlier childhood education these days, but I find much of it far more troubling than encouraging. While the data on the success of pre-K programs could be called mixed, there are a motivations behind the current push that indicate it should be feared and resisted.
Investment Opportunity
One of the appeals of Pre-K for investors is that there is no pre-existing institution that has to be bulldozed first.
Turning public education into an investment opportunity has been a long, arduous process. Discrediting public schools, buying up enough political clout to dismantle the public system, aggressive marketing to steal public ed "customers"-- it has taken a lot of time to break down a cherished American institution in order to create investment opportunities.
But the Pre-K landscape is only occupied by a handful of relative lightweights. It's the difference between building your new Mega-Mart on an empty lot and having to condemn and clear a residential neighborhood. Easy pickings!
Brand Extension
Yes, I see what you did there. We've stopped calling it Pre-School because that would indicate that it isn't going actually going to be school. But that's not where the push is going.
Instead, we have politicians deciding that since Kindergartner's are having trouble meeting the developmentally inappropriate standards of CCSS, the problem must be that they aren't "ready" for kindergarten. So we have the spectacle of people seriously suggesting that what four-year-olds need is some rigorous instruction, and of course THAT means that we'll need to give those four-year-olds standardized tests in order to evaluate how well the program is going.
It's like some sort of unholy alliance between people who won't be happy until they're selling eduproduct to every child in this country and people who won't be happy until we've made certain that no child in this country is ever wasting time playing and enjoying life.
More Pipeline
The Big Data machine needs more data. Right now we can only plug your child in when she reaches age five. Oh, but if we could only get our hands on those children sooner. Even a year sooner would be an improvement. Pre-K programs will allow more data collection and fatter file for each child.
Don't you want to know what career your four-year-old is best suited for? Don't you want to be certain that your four-year-old is on track for college? The let us add another link to the Big Data Pipeline.
There's no question that, done correctly, Pre-K can be a Good Thing. Anecdotally, I tell friends who are obsessing over it that I could never look at my eleventh grade classroom and tell you which students had pre-school and which did not. But, still, putting a small child in a rich environment to play and socialize and learn a few things couldn't hurt.
However, I'm convinced that a vast number of the people currently pushing Pre-K have no intention whatsoever of doing things right. Instead, what many politicians and thought leaders and hedgucators are supporting is an extension of CCSS/reformy stuff baloney to four-year-olds.
So support Pre-K if you wish, but be damn sure that the people you're agreeing with are people you are actually agreeing with.
Investment Opportunity
One of the appeals of Pre-K for investors is that there is no pre-existing institution that has to be bulldozed first.
Turning public education into an investment opportunity has been a long, arduous process. Discrediting public schools, buying up enough political clout to dismantle the public system, aggressive marketing to steal public ed "customers"-- it has taken a lot of time to break down a cherished American institution in order to create investment opportunities.
But the Pre-K landscape is only occupied by a handful of relative lightweights. It's the difference between building your new Mega-Mart on an empty lot and having to condemn and clear a residential neighborhood. Easy pickings!
Brand Extension
Yes, I see what you did there. We've stopped calling it Pre-School because that would indicate that it isn't going actually going to be school. But that's not where the push is going.
Instead, we have politicians deciding that since Kindergartner's are having trouble meeting the developmentally inappropriate standards of CCSS, the problem must be that they aren't "ready" for kindergarten. So we have the spectacle of people seriously suggesting that what four-year-olds need is some rigorous instruction, and of course THAT means that we'll need to give those four-year-olds standardized tests in order to evaluate how well the program is going.
It's like some sort of unholy alliance between people who won't be happy until they're selling eduproduct to every child in this country and people who won't be happy until we've made certain that no child in this country is ever wasting time playing and enjoying life.
More Pipeline
The Big Data machine needs more data. Right now we can only plug your child in when she reaches age five. Oh, but if we could only get our hands on those children sooner. Even a year sooner would be an improvement. Pre-K programs will allow more data collection and fatter file for each child.
Don't you want to know what career your four-year-old is best suited for? Don't you want to be certain that your four-year-old is on track for college? The let us add another link to the Big Data Pipeline.
There's no question that, done correctly, Pre-K can be a Good Thing. Anecdotally, I tell friends who are obsessing over it that I could never look at my eleventh grade classroom and tell you which students had pre-school and which did not. But, still, putting a small child in a rich environment to play and socialize and learn a few things couldn't hurt.
However, I'm convinced that a vast number of the people currently pushing Pre-K have no intention whatsoever of doing things right. Instead, what many politicians and thought leaders and hedgucators are supporting is an extension of CCSS/reformy stuff baloney to four-year-olds.
So support Pre-K if you wish, but be damn sure that the people you're agreeing with are people you are actually agreeing with.
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