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Illustration © Mario Noche |
THAT VARIATION on a cheery refrain could be the pint-sized
equivalent of the pep rallies some schools hold on the eve of
state test day. Go get those scores, kids! Attack those bubble
sheets! Remember the tricks we told you!
The Bush Administration will begin testing all students in Head
Start programs next September, not just to find out who needs
to learn how to hold a book right side up but to decide whether
a Head Start center should continue to be funded. (The director
denies this, while also criticizing the failure of Head Start
to properly prepare youngsters for reading readiness.) Each year
the pre- and posttests will provide data for making such decisions.
Certainly, a problem exists. When youngsters enter kindergarten,
the gap in cognitive skills is already evident between those from
low-income homes and those from middle- and higher-income homes,
according to the first results of a longitudinal study of young
children that makes use of data from the National Center for Education
Statistics (NCES). New kindergartners also come with different
experiences, including good and poor Head Start programs, good
and poor home care, and good and poor child-care facilities.
President Bush's Good Start, Grow Smart initiative, which includes
the Head Start testing, is aimed at bringing standards to this
disparate field. In a few months, all states must have "early
learning guidelines" aligned to their K-12 standards. Early
grants for Reading First are taking the recently promoted national
curriculum in reading (let's be frank about the matter) to lower
levels of schooling, and there is some speculation that the "early
learning guidelines" developed by the U.S. Department of
Education and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
(which is responsible for federal child care and Head Start) will
push the reading agenda widely into preschool experiences.
Despite the understandable goal of ensuring that all children
are ready to learn, this top-down strategy is troubling. Like
the test-based accountability in No Child Left Behind, the context
is missing. A very complex environment that is as much about values
as about specific skills is being reduced to a test, to a common
curriculum. And that reduction is minimizing other factors that
ought to be part of the conversation, especially the conversation
about young children.
Why is no one concerned that the Bush Administration plans to
cut Head Start and child-care funding, even though fewer than
half of eligible children currently have access to Head Start
programs? Would that federal officials were as concerned about
the background of Head Start teachers as they are about the performance
of the children. Most Head Start teachers have only a high school
diploma and earn about half the salary of a kindergarten teacher.
The low pay and high turnover rates in child-care programs for
the poor exacerbate the unevenness of the playing field and so
compound the differences in support received by children in low-
and higher-income families.
Why is so little attention being paid to differences in income
as the dominant reason why there are differences in reading readiness?
The study of NCES data, being conducted by Valerie Lee and David
Burkam of the University of Michigan, found that race and ethnicity,
family makeup, and home expectations for education account for
far less variation in the readiness scores of kindergartners than
does socioeconomic status. Another interesting statistic -- this
one from a General Accounting Office report -- shows that three-fourths
of the parents of Head Start children have high school diplomas,
which should change one's image of this parent group somewhat.
If their children own fewer books, take fewer trips to museums,
and have fewer computers at home -- as the data clearly show --
it may not be because the parents are uneducated but because they
must spend all their resources on survival. Poverty should not
be used as an excuse for children's lack of readiness for schooling,
but its overriding influence on children's readiness ought to
encourage policy makers, communities, and educators to broaden
their thinking about children's needs, not narrow them to a specific
prereading curriculum.
Lee and Burkam also point out that less than half of the low-income
children in kindergarten had been enrolled in either a center-based
preschool or a Head Start program. Yet nearly two-thirds of the
most affluent kindergarten children came from center-based preschools.
They do advocate "some academic content" in preschool
programs for disadvantaged children, but they also insist that
the programs be well designed and adequately financed.
Why is no one asking why the gap between the performance of children
from different income levels widens, rather than narrows, during
the kindergarten year? One would think that kindergarten would
add some value and help narrow the gap. However, Lee and Burkam
note that, beginning with kindergarten, low-income children attend
lower-quality elementary schools where there are fewer resources
and fewer qualified teachers and where teachers' attitudes toward
poor children's abilities tend to be low. The NCES data, for example,
found that kindergarten teachers begin to label trouble-making
children by race, even though parents did not have the same opinions.
Why has there been so little attention to the transition from
preschool to kindergarten? Studies beginning a decade ago pointed
out the lack of articulation between what children and parents
are accustomed to in prekindergarten programs and what they find
once they enter formal schooling. This is a particular concern
of Head Start people because the strength of the program is its
attention to parent involvement, social supports, and preventive
health services, none of which are guaranteed once a child enters
kindergarten. The upcoming federal guidelines could help to ameliorate
this issue, but many fear they will focus exclusively on academic
skills.
The strong state interest in early care and education so evident
in the past few years may give way under the pressure of severe
budget cuts. But even before the current budgetary crisis, some
state policy leaders were cautioning against too narrow a focus
on one developmental aspect of early childhood, namely literacy.
State programs have tended to be comprehensive, addressing all
the elements of healthy development for young children. Hawaii,
for example, defines school readiness broadly, according to an
Education Commission of the States publication. It means that
"young children are ready to have successful learning experiences
in school when there is a positive fit among the child's developmental
characteristics, school practices, and family and community support."
Why aren't we even asking the kinds of questions posed by one
of the most prominent advocates for young children, the late Ernest
Boyer? In his book Ready to Learn: A Mandate for the Nation,
he laid out a plan through a series of questions: How can
we ensure that all children have a healthy start? How can we see
that every child lives in a supportive, language-rich environment,
guided by empowered parents? How can we make available to all
children the high-quality child care that provides both love and
learning? How can work and family life be brought together through
workplace policies that support parents and give security to children?
How can we give to every child a neighborhood for learning, with
spaces and places that invite play and spark the imagination?
The answers to these questions will not be found in test results.
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Kappan Professional Journal
Last updated 25 February 2003
URL: http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/k0303lew.htm
Copyright 2003 Phi
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