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What Is It Going to Take to Return Sanity to the Kindergartens?

SAN DIEGO -- Blocks, dolls and the toy kitchen were banned from Mary Lauren Tenney's kindergarten classroom last year in Knoxville, Tenn. But Tenney kept the blocks in defiance, arguing that, "For years, we told parents that children learn through play."

The children in Patti Lochner's kindergarten classroom in Ft. Myers, Fla., took standardized achievement tests last month, and some cried or put their heads on their desks in exhaustion.

More pupils in Betsy Chamberlain's kindergarten classroom in San Diego cry, wet their pants and act out, behaviors she believes stem from pressure to achieve.

"They see other kids [reading] and they know they should be doing it, and they know they can't--not because they don't want to, but because they're not ready," she said.

Kindergarten teachers nationwide say the test-driven education reform at state and federal levels is leading to changes in kindergarten that set unrealistically high achievement goals. Among them: expecting all children to learn to read, which sets up more pupils for failure in the year that serves as their introduction to formal schooling.

Four weeks into the school year, for instance, Chamberlain sent letters home to parents of her kindergarten pupils, telling them that their children should write their names legibly, distinguish each letter's name and sounds, and read some words such as "the," "said" and "you." Otherwise, she warned, they would not meet the San Diego public school district's new and higher achievement standard, a milestone only one child in her class achieved two years ago. . . .


"Most children at the age of 5 are not developmentally ready to be decoding in the manner one needs to be reading," said Dominic Gullo, professor of early childhood education at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. "If they can't do it, they're perceived as having a problem in learning. That sets up an expectation about the child that follows. They have a self-perception of having difficulty too. They start not liking school."

The emphasis on early reading will be particularly detrimental to boys, who generally are slower to begin reading than girls, said Dick Clifford, co-director of the National Center for Early Development and Learning at the University of North Carolina. And, he said, kindergarten's increasingly academic orientation is beginning to lead more parents to consider "red-shirting" their children, waiting a year to send their children to kindergarten. . . .



— Karen Brandon
Kindergarten Less Playful As Pressure To Achieve Grows
Chicago Tribune
10/20/02
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0210200395oct20,0,4863357.story?coll=chi%2Dnews%2Dhed

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