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Ready to Learn: What the Head Start Debate about Early Academics Means for Your School
The 4-year-olds at the Margaret H. Cone Head Start Center live in one of the most depressed and crime-plagued neighborhoods in Dallas. Most come from single-parent families, and many of their mothers and fathers did not graduate from high school.
But when these children leave the center, they're ready for elementary school. And they do some astonishing things when they get to Julia C. Frazier Elementary, a K-3 school that has earned exemplary ratings for the past two years despite a 97 percent poverty rate.
By third grade, the Cone graduates outscore their peers on local and national reading tests. In 2002-03, 90 percent of the third-grade Cone graduates at Frazier read at or above grade level on the national Stanford-9 exam. Two years ago, every Cone graduate third-grader passed the Texas assessment tests in reading and math.
How can children from such overwhelming poverty score so high on these standardized tests? Cone's literacy enrichment program, developed a decade ago, is at least partly responsible. LEAP, as it is called, does not focus on worksheets for 4-year-olds or require children to learn concepts and skills before they are developmentally ready.
"I don't want to push any child," says Nell Carvell, who designed the program and now serves as the director of the Language Enrichment Activities Program and Head Start Initiatives at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. "I do think that's inappropriate. But if you give them an opportunity under guidance to play with these things, it's amazing how much they learn."
An academic jumpstart
How much kids should be able to learn at 4 years old is at the heart of the reauthorization debate for Head Start, the federal program that helps about 1 million of the nation's poorest and most vulnerable children prepare for school. The Bush administration's proposal to emphasize literacy and academic skills in Head Start has raised new questions and renewed old battles about how young children learn -- and when they should be required to show it on a test.
Is this academic jumpstart good for kids? Should 3- and 4-year-olds be held accountable for their literacy skills? Or is the push for early achievement another signal that social and emotional development is taking a backseat to testing? Child advocates and early education professionals offer conflicting opinions. And caught in the middle of the debate are school districts whose preschool programs are performing the eternal juggling act between academics and the development of the whole child.
At least 40 states offer a prekindergarten program for 4-year-olds, mostly for low-income families and mostly modeled on Head Start. Two high-profile states, California and Florida, have proposed offering universal preschool for 4-year-olds, regardless of their families' economic status.
When Carvell developed LEAP a decade ago, teaching literacy and reading skills to children as young as 3 and 4 was unheard of in preschool programs. But groundbreaking brain research during the 1980s and '90s changed perceptions and beliefs about what very young children can learn.
This research, paired with the standards and high-stakes testing movement, has resulted in a pushed-down curriculum of sorts. Kindergartners who once finger painted, built with blocks, and napped through their days now are expected to learn the same concepts and skills that first-graders once did.
"What has happened in the face of this emphasis on literacy is that people have become negative about play," says Edward Zigler, a Yale University professor who is known as the father of Head Start. "Kindergartens no longer have blocks and dress-up corners. They see children playing as wasting time. That is a serious mistake."
Some child advocates and early childhood education professionals, however, applaud the increased academic emphasis for children served by Head Start. These children, they say, are exactly the ones who need an early introduction to reading and math concepts.
Deborah Stipek, dean of Stanford University's School of Education and author of Motivated Minds: Raising Children to Love Learning, says research shows that middle-class 4-year-olds outscore low-income 5-year-olds on cognitive skills. "Low-income kids start way behind," she says. "They don't catch up. It's foolish to say we don't need to worry about it."
Zigler and most other early childhood education professionals agree young children can benefit from exposure to early reading and math concepts. But some worry the emphasis on academics will edge out what is known about developmentally appropriate teaching. In preschool and kindergarten, much of the teaching looks like fun and games to adults, promoting the perception that children aren't learning.
But they are. "We have known for 75 years that an important determiner of growth and development is play," says Zigler, director of Yale's Center in Child Development and Social Policy. "Play is the work of children."
The importance of play
When Nell Carvell was asked to develop a literacy and phonics program for 4-year-olds, she found few precedents to draw on. She began by testing the children at Cone and found most were about 18 months behind developmentally in oral language. They were weak on vocabulary and weren't aware of sentence structure.
Carvell's curriculum was designed to address those areas while keeping the kids' attention. She brought posters of children doing different activities so the kids could talk about them and emphasized literature by putting multicultural, hardback books in the classroom. "They hadn't seen books in their home, so these books should hold up and look good," she says.
"I tried to make it fun," says Carvell, noting that the children played matching games and wrote letters in sand.
Making learning fun by including play is an important element in teaching young children. Early childhood professionals say it's nearly impossible to separate social, emotional, and cognitive learning in young children. As a result, educators say that programs are doomed to fail if they require young children to act like older kids -- sitting at desks or in rows for long periods of time, writing on worksheets, or listening to instruction in large groups. Treating young children like small middle-schoolers ignores much of what is known about the under-7 crowd and how they learn.
"If we try to structure preschool and kindergarten with a formalized approach to reading, social studies, and math, there's a school of thought that believes a large number of children would be hindered," says Mary Mindess, professor of early childhood education at Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass., and coordinator of the New England Kindergarten Conference. "There is a real danger in losing a lot of kids and danger in not producing the kind of thinking that is successful in today's world."
Barbara Warash, director of West Virginia University's Child Development Laboratory, says parents at her play-based preschool now ask for proof that their children are learning. "They agree in theory that play is important, but they say, 'Could you just throw in the worksheets, so I can see what they are learning?'" says Warash. "Worksheets are visible, tangible items. But they can't see that when their children are playing restaurant, the child is pointing out the letter D on the cereal boxes."
Research shows that certain types of play, especially role-playing, are the foundation for all types of intellectual, social, and emotional development. Focusing solely or even narrowly on academics often asks "too much and too little of children," says Barbara Willer of the National Association for the Education of Young Children, in Washington, D.C.
"If you provide meaningful opportunities for children, they can take on much greater depth than the drill-and-kill [worksheet]," says Willer, the association's deputy executive director. "If you're narrowly focused on letter recognition, you lose the opportunity for vocabulary building and broad base of language."
Not all play is created equal, however. W. Steven Barnett, director of the National Institute for Early Education Research, a nonpartisan think tank at Rutgers University, cautions that if play means recess, then it's not the kind of play that helps children acquire skills and knowledge.
"That's not what experts mean. They mean deeply engaged in role-play in which teachers are engaged and there is reciprocal activity between teachers and among kids," says Barnett. "Play is wasted if kids aren't learning."
The whole child
Children won't learn if they're hungry. They won't learn if a tooth hurts, or if they're angry all the time, or if they simply don't have any adults to connect with. This is true of all children, but especially of very young children.
It is also one of the basic tenets of Head Start, which was originally conceived as an anti-poverty program during the Lyndon Johnson era. Since the program was launched in 1965 as part of Johnson's Great Society initiative, parent involvement and social services have been at its core.
"We must help families through a myriad of problems," says Sarah Greene, executive director of the National Head Start Association, a nonprofit membership organization in Alexandria, Va. "It's just as important as what you do with that child."
Child advocates and early childhood educators are concerned that the Bush plan to increase academics in Head Start will force out or diminish other elements of the program, including social and health services and emphasis on social and emotional development.
"Most everyone knows that young children need to be challenged academically, and they need to be exposed to literacy, letters and sounds, and literature at an early age -- science, math, and social studies, too," says Samuel Meisels, president of the Erikson Institute, a graduate school of child development in Chicago. However, Meisels says, you can't teach cognitive concepts without also teaching social and emotional skills: "We really need to have an emphasis on all areas of development."
Zigler, who administered the Head Start program at the federal level in the 1970s, says the move toward an academic focus goes against the program's fundamental purpose.
"There wasn't any early intervention program before Head Start," he says. "All they had were the usual nursery school programs, designed for middle-class kids.
"The two hallmarks of Head Start are parent involvement and comprehensive services," Zigler adds. "You can't just teach phonemics if the kids are abused. I don't care how phonemics are taught, they won't learn it."
G. Reid Lyon, chief of the child development and behavior branch of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, says that the administration is not trying to do away with Head Start's nonacademic elements. "We are trying to recommend that we provide kids with integrated programs for social, emotional, and cognitive [skills]," he says.
Zigler and others say the new Head Start testing program, which assesses about 550,000 4-year-olds with standardized tests twice a year, will show only how well centers are doing with the academic part of the program. The testing also raises concerns about whether the scores will be used punitively.
"All they measure are cognition, literacy, and numeracy," says Zigler. "Where is comprehension? They will assess the value of the centers on the basis of testing -- not if the centers helped parents get jobs or a child inoculated. That's too narrow."
Greene agrees. "They are only assessing in language and literacy, not looking at the other areas," she says. "I don't think it's the best way to find out how our kids and teachers are doing."
The impact on school districts
The increased emphasis on early academics in preschool has been reflected in an explosion in the number of all-day kindergartens. According to U.S. Census data, about 60 percent of kindergartners were in full-day programs in 2000. That percentage has more than tripled since 1974. But as school districts face a severe budget pinch, some feel universal preschool and full-day kindergarten are luxuries, not necessities.
Full-day programs that combine academics with social and emotional development are crucial but costly, early childhood advocates say. Many feel that academics taught in developmentally inappropriate ways could make children feel like failures at the age of 5.
"If the push-down curriculum demands that kindergartners are exposed to the same expectations and skills development, we already see a group of youngsters in jeopardy," says Jacqueline Haines, director of training and clinic services for the Gesell Institute, a child development research center in New Haven, Conn.
Carol Seefeldt, an early childhood education professor at the University of Maryland and author of Guidelines for Pre-Kindergarten Learning and Teaching, says she is concerned that children "aren't learning to think, and they are learning that a lot of school is useless."
"I worry that they are being turned off to learning," she says. "It's almost like we want to create an underclass. If we want them to drop out of high school, fail them when they are 4."
Edward Miller, who serves on the board of the Alliance for Childhood, an advocacy group in Waldorf, Md., attributes the reading problems that many children experience to "the unrealistic expectation that they will start reading at an early age." He notes that, until relatively recently, reading instruction did not start until first grade in many schools.
"Now children are supposed to start to read in kindergarten," Miller says. "It has a counterproductive effect. The child picks up on the idea that something is wrong. He gets anxious and hates the idea of reading."
Doris Fromberg, an education professor at Hofstra University and author of Play and Meaning in Early Childhood Education, visits 10 to 15 kindergarten classes a year. Increasingly, she sees time for imaginative play being cut in favor of rote learning.
"The opportunity to have in-depth conversations is a marker of literacy," Fromberg says. "If you are exhorted to be quiet and come up with a single correct answer, what you learn is how to satisfy adults and guess at what the adults want, rather than learning for its own sake."
In some states, the push-down curriculum has had other noticeable impacts. Fromberg says some kindergarten teachers have left the field because they are "very distressed" about the heavy emphasis on academics. And a number of parents have started "red-shirting" their kindergarten-age children, preferring to hold them back a year rather than have them face academic requirements at the age of 5.
The Gesell Institute, for example, encourages parents who have children with summer birthdays to give the kids another year until enrolling them in kindergarten. "We think children should be quite mature when they go to kindergarten," Haines says. "It's another reason why our kindergartens need to be flexible. Some of those youngsters won't be as old as other children chronologically, and they deserve success and a positive experience as much as other youngsters have."
A tough standard
Despite what brain research has found about young children's impressive capacity to learn, says Walter S. Gilliam of the Yale University Child Study Center, there is "a lot of normal variability in what age they can get prerequisite skills."
Children "can't read until they can verbally remember letters, recognize letters, pair with the visual, and synthesize letters and sounds," Gilliam says. "It's lots of different skills. If they haven't quite developed, they won't get it. Children are ready to do certain things at different times."
Jeff Poe does not have that luxury. A kindergarten teacher for 10 years at Millard Elementary School in Fremont, Calif., he has to teach his students how to write a paragraph by the end of the year. A tough standard? Yes, says Poe, but his students meet it even though they come to class for only half a day.
Last year, 18 of Poe's 20 students scored "exceeds expectations" on the writing sample, and the other two met the state criteria for passing. That's no small feat for a class in a district where many students show up for kindergarten speaking no English.
Poe, who also taught first grade for 10 years, does not object to the standards. Still, he admits that he used to have more time to work on readiness, socialization, and fine and gross motor skills. Because of the time restrictions, Poe depends heavily on parents to teach their children the nonacademic skills, and he wishes the district could afford full-day kindergarten.
"It would give us back that piece of the day where we can do music and physical education and the other things," he says.
— Kathleen Vail
Ready to Learn: What the Head Start debate about early academics meansn for your school
American School Board Journal
2003-11-
http://www.asbj.com/current/coverstory.html
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
Pages: 380
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