The Change Mariner

Public Pre-School Demand

NYT:

... This is a moment of transition for American preschools. Parents, educators and politicians are focusing on how, in a world of escalating academic expectations, young children should be prepared to become grade-school scholars. In Congress, in state legislatures and in school board meetings, questions on the table include who needs to be in preschool, how much tots should concentrate on literacy and counting as well as purposeful playing, and how students should be evaluated. Because preschool remains voluntary, parents play a decisive role in shaping this universe, by choosing whether and where their children attend.

When parents go searching for a quality preschool, they are advised by experts to seek a low ratio of children to teachers, a stable and reasonably well-paid staff that doesn't keep quitting, individualized teaching and small-group activities. They're also told that the curriculum must help children develop socially and emotionally as well as intellectually. Most important is a qualified teacher who can do it all -- help 4-year-olds become readers, attentive learners and junior diplomats -- and that generally means a teacher who has at least a four-year degree. In America's patchwork of private, public and community preschools and day care centers, such teachers are the exception rather than the rule.

But all those qualities can currently be found in an unexpected place: public preschool classrooms like Brick's, which are actually designed for the benefit of special education students but invite children of typical abilities to attend. Here, teachers are highly qualified, instruction is individualized, and both social and cognitive development get their due. Responding to the demands of the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind law, with its emphasis on having every child demonstrate fluency in reading and math, as well as local demands to prep children for academic kindergarten study, teachers at Brick work letters and numbers into every session. But they also encourage children to play, and to try the kind of social experimenting that preschool experts fear is getting squeezed out of some programs. Here, teachers are specifically required to nurture social skills by the individualized education plans of some of their disabled students.

Posted by Norm M. Wada at November 8, 2003 12:09 PM | TrackBack
Related Categories: Area - Social - Education