I read an article today which caused me all sorts of different emotional reactions. You might think that is what great writing should do, and you would be correct. The problem is that I don’t believe my reactions were the types the author might have hoped.
The headline that captured my attention alluded to the fact that the U.S. is falling behind other global superpowers in our education. This is nothing new and we all have heard and seen the warnings. But, I wondered if maybe we had taken a drastic downturn or maybe some new information had come to light that warranted this topic a front page placement.
You’d think by now that I might know better…that every time I read an article the chances are great that something is about to irritate me. It did (obviously). Oh…also, if you say obvi in lieu of obviously, there is a seat for you over there with people who use the term vacay.
Where was I? Oh…education, falling behind, world is leaving our kids in the dust…here is what the author of this piece (more on him in a second) believes. The U.S. is in danger of falling behind in the global marketplace because only 66% of our 4 year old children and 36% of our 3 year old kids are in preschool. Not child care or day care, actual school.
I see…apparently we are in danger of becoming a third world nation if we continue to allow our toddlers to enjoy a couple of years of just being little kids before we punt them into the seemingly interminable number of school years they already have ahead of them.
We all want our children to be fantastic…and most of them are. Problem is that just as people are competitive with cars, houses, income, etc…they seem to be even more so with their children.
Don’t tell me you don’t know this person: “Oh, your little Johnny walked at 1 year? How sweet is that. My little Cindy was already choreographing her own dance routines to songs she wrote and recorded by then.”
Soon our children will be expected to come slip sliding out of the womb with poetry journals and a complete rethinking of particle physics. We worry that they have to keep up and be just like the others. If the neighbor’s three year old is in school, then surely ours should be as well. We can’t let our children get behind. This headline will only serve to further that worry.
On a side note, why is it always “quantum physics”? It seems as though whenever someone wants to not so slyly let everyone else know just how gifted they are, they must reference their in depth knowledge of quantum physics. My theory? Quantum physics is a subject that won’t get many people challenging their knowledge. If they said how great they were at mathematics, they can easily be put to the test.
So easily sidetracked today…what was I saying? Ah yes…we are in serious danger! Dump the Paw Patrol toys and get these little ones in to school this instant! So says the author of the column. So why do I question him?
His data comes from the National Institute for Early Education Research. So far no problems…oh wait, he is the founder and and senior co-director of the very same institute. But that doesn’t necessarily mean conflict of interest. If there were any data in the article to back his statements, this might be a worthwhile read. Sadly, the only statistic given is the one about the 66% of four year old kids. I had to find the number for 3 year old children on my own. This is beginning to look like an ad to drive funding to his institute.
This article says that even with the new spending bill, there just isn’t enough money out there for preschool. How much isn’t enough you ask? $12 billion. $12 billion in grants and funds directly for early education (which is the euphemism for putting your 3 year old in school).
He goes on to say that “Building walls and raising tariffs won’t give us an edge on the competition; our best weapon is a solid preschool foundation.” I see…this is also political commentary. We aren’t going to read an article outlining the pros and cons of sticking your toddler behind a desk with a My Pal pencil and a vocabulary list. We are going to be subjected to opinions (presented as facts) in order to drive the funding of more grants, which, in turn, directs more dollars to him.
His institute is part of Rutgers University. The other point of his article is that “Multiple reports from the National Academy of Sciences recommend a four-year college degree for pre-K teachers to provide children the best start possible”. There it is…the big hit. Not only should we fund more money to his pet projects, more kids should come to his school to get degrees and become Pre-K teachers.
Sounds great, except in his attempt to try to drive people into his field of study, he shoots himself in the foot with, “Yet preschool teacher pay is notoriously low in most states.” Right! I will go to Rutgers. I will fork over $180K for a degree ($120 if you are from NJ) and go out and look for a $30,000 per year job. Certainly sounds sensible to me.
I get that he is passionate about education and maybe I am being a little cynical. But, when you post an article proclaiming that American workers are about to be non-competitive in the global marketplace, I expect facts and figures, not your university admissions sales pitch.
Thus began the hunt for other statistics about teaching our 3 year old children and what I found was alarming. Today I learned that our children no longer read, instead they decode. Kindergarten used to be for exposing children slowly to the idea of direct instruction. Now, 80% of kindergarten teachers expect their students to be able to read by the end of the year. So, no more naps, blanket time, macaroni art, or paste eating?
In one southern state, some counties had more than 10% of the kindergarten students held back. What?!? A major study in Tennessee showed that children with a stricter preschool background were certainly better kindergarten students, but by second grade, they were lower performing in literacy, language, and math skills.
One theory to explain this is that instead of discovering how to learn and solve problems, the mindless repetition and rote memorization slowed development of this ability. At the same time, the drudgery of class time appeared to drive away the enthusiasm for learning.
So, the Head Start program did a 15 year research study on its own success. Here are just a few of the findings:
- There is clear evidence that Head Start had a statistically significant impact on
children’s language and literacy development while children were in Head Start. These effects, albeit modest in magnitude, were found for both age cohorts during their first year of admission to the Head Start program.
That sounds promising, maybe there is something to this after all.
- However, these early effects dissipated in elementary school.
Oh…How did our 4 year olds fare by the time they finished 3rd grade
- No significant impacts were found for math skills, pre-writing, children’s promotion, or teacher report of children’s school accomplishments or abilities in any year.
That seems like a total waste. Maybe our 3 year olds did better:
- At the end of 3rd grade, there was suggestive evidence of an unfavorable impact—
the parents of the Head Start group children reported a significantly lower child
grade promotion rate than the parents of the non-Head Start group children.
Tucked away in a report that many people didn’t bother to read are the results of their programs. This is what we got for our money? Somewhere between zero and negative impact on our children. How is it that our co-director of the National Institute for Early Education Reasearch doesn’t know this?
It gets worse. While parents reported much greater socialization skills when their children went through the program, the teachers (who have 20+ other children to compare them with) said just the opposite. This line should sum it up for you: “there was suggestive evidence of more problematic student teacher interactions.”
So No Child Left Behind dragged all of our kids down and Head Start produces little to no positive impact on children. What did this cost? About $7 billion per year…so over the 15 year study, we received absolutely no results for $105 billion dollars.
Certainly we are doing something about this, right? Something other than having Jennifer Garner speak to Congress about the issue? I mean, I’m sure that we probably all feel better knowing that a celebrity is talking to Congress…
Well, it was proposed that in 2018 we should reduce our Head Start spending. You can only imagine the outrage that came with that statement. How much of a cut did it take to bring on the cries of protest? The 2017 budget of $9.253 billion would be reduced to $9.168 billion. Oh the humanity!
Don’t you worry, your complaints were heard and we set aside $9.853 billion in 2018. A $600 million dollar increase…into a program where its own data suggests that not only are we not helping children, we may be doing them a disservice.
But try telling that to America. The media declares “education budget cuts” and the maelstrom of outrage tweets and shouting heads on the television begins anew. What if we presented a potential cut with the facts explaining what we actually get for that money?
Do you think that would help? Would it matter if the actual data about this abysmal failure were shared with everyone before we suggested cutting? I guess what scares me the most is that we have to even wonder. It should be a given. This program is failing therefore we are removing the funding…
Or…what if we stopped the program altogether and gave every public school teacher in America a $3100 per year pay raise? An average of a 5% pay raise per teacher.
Although, since the Head Start program primarily serves underprivileged youth, maybe we take those funds and create a simple day care perhaps with some low pressure learning involved? Parents can still work and kids are still cared for.
Look, while our parents worry that choosing the wrong preschool could dash our hopes of Harvard, maybe we take a lesson from our friends in Finland. They don’t start pushing reading until age 7, they take one standardized test, and they have the same curriculum for all (regardless of ability). Yet they have the smallest gap between strongest and weakest pupils and they are consistently in the top of the world’s educational rankings. (They also turn out some of the world’s best drivers…but that is a whole separate article)
In America, we focus on standardized tests and rate our schools only on this measure. Even our class grades are mostly based on our children’s capability for memorization, not on learning or thinking or problem solving. Our children aren’t at risk of becoming unemployable because they didn’t start learning their multiplication tables at 3. They are in danger because we aren’t educating them properly.
Teachers are seemingly handed a new style of curriculum every couple of years. Whatever the local board members were pitched as the latest and greatest (or whichever lobbyists bought the best dinners) goes into the classrooms. We then base our teachers’ success on how well the students do on standardized tests based on this curriculum. This forces the teachers to not only constantly alter their methods, but it hobbles their ability to use proven teaching methods to help those that need it.
I was all set to sign off with some call for action where we realize that our children should be afforded the best possible education (and we need to step in and fix it), and then California struck again. I need to get out of here. I can’t bear the thought of one more dollar of my taxes funding this ridiculous government.
A bill was proposed to create a committee that will provide guidance to the Superintendent on new regulations for home-schools. Why? Because 13 kids who were home-schooled were also mistreated. Hmmm…do we truly believe that these kids wouldn’t have been mistreated after regular school?
What does this bill propose to change with home-schooling?
- 1 – Health and safety inspections for homes involved in home-schooling.
- 2 – Additional content and curriculum standards.
- 3 – Certification or credential requirements for parents to home-school.
- This means that the government can choose to inspect a private citizen’s home at any time simply for their choice to instruct their own children? Fourth amendment violation, right?
- Most home-schools don’t use public curriculum for a reason. How many of you have met a person who was home-schooled? How many of them seemed pretty bright? Did you know that they score at least 15% higher than public school students on the traditional standardized tests?
- Studies show that home-school children of non certificated parents score better than children of teachers.
Approximately 200,000 children are home-schooled in California. The federal government contributes about $9,000 per student to the education budget. Oh, I see it now…There is about $1.8 billion being left on the table. Force the home-schoolers back into school and get more money.
Am I being too cynical? Surely the impetus for crafting this bill was strictly because .06% of Californian home-schooled children were abused and not for some transparent money grab, right? I guess it could just be the fact that every fancy new teaching method that comes along still loses to home-school and they are tired of looking bad.
Some serious pressure was applied (and hopefully some of the aforementioned statistics were presented) and the safety inspections were dropped from the bill. Wait a minute, that’s weird… if this is purportedly all being pushed through for the safety of the children, why was that the part that was dropped?
They also backed off on specific content to add to the curriculum standards, but still say they may need to add content. Really, the results aren’t speaking for themselves? Also, they changed certificated or credentialed to “minimum qualifications” for home school instructors. Great. A nebulous term to leave the door open to return the credentialed requirement.
Right here…this is the representation of all that is wrong with our society. We over administrate…we spend blindly on items that are failing our children. $9.8 billion on a Head Start program that by its own admission is failing the children. We no longer investigate for ourselves, so when cuts come around, we froth at the mouth and scream that the government hates our children.
We certainly do try hard to fix the things that don’t need fixing. Home-schooled children are better educated than public school children. That is a fact. Yet, instead of doing the hard thing and cutting the massive overspending on middle management from our public education system to try to fix this, we are going to bring the home-school system down to the same level.
This is why we will continue to tumble down the ranks of global education. It won’t be due to a lack of 3 year old students. Let your children be children. Allow them to fail and then learn from that failure. Teach them to think logically, ask questions, and solve problems. Require that your schools do the same. Let the teachers do their jobs and teach. Push all of our students to be better and stop holding back those that excel.
Above the Nonsense 