Obama's Pre-K Boot Camp For All

The evidence strongly supports the notion that quality preschool programs benefit all children, especially those from low-income families (click here to see some of that evidence). Thus, it is refreshing that President Obama has made this one of his goals and that he is getting some support from both parties. However, Universal Preschool for All is not a panacea that will erase the achievement gap or solve the nation’s economic woes.

Larry Cuban highlights some of these problems in his recent piece in the Washington Post. Let’s start with Cuban’s first point, “that one issue brings together both CEOs and educational progressives, political conservatives and liberals: investing in tax-supported preschool for three and four year-olds.”

The fact that conservatives are agreeing with liberals on anything should make one suspicious. While they may be asking for the same thing on the surface, their objectives and motivations are likely very different. Cuban alludes to this by suggesting that not all preschools are created alike. Should preschool be “boot camp for kindergarten,” he asks, “or a place where very young children, as Alison Gopnik put it, ’be allowed to explore, inquire, play, and discover?’” 

The answer to this question depends on the social class of the children, and the parents who are asking it. The wealthy can send their kids to elite private preschools that focus on play, art, music and movement as a way to develop their children’s social and cognitive skills. Most of the rest of America cannot afford this. Even President Obama said in his State of the Union speech that “most middle-class parents can’t afford a few hundred bucks a week for a private preschool” and the poor and working class are far worse off. Consequently, less than 30% of U.S. four year-olds currently attend a “high-quality” preschool (compared with over 90% in Mexico, France, Spain, and Netherlands).

This is a new education market, yet one that carries with it many of the same benefits of the K-12 market: captive, obligatory consumers; secure annual revenues from the state; subsidies; and the marketing magic of being able to say your business nurtures and protects America’s Innocent Children.

The question is, will the corporate education vultures looking for a piece of the supposed 70% increase in preschool consumers, provide a boot camp for other people’s children, or a “whole child,” Froebelian-Pestalozzian style preschool that nutures children’s creativity, curiosity and enthusiasm through play and social interactions, like the schools where their children attend?

The most likely answer is boot camp. These are not their own children, after all, so nurturing, coddling, fun and play are not their concern. Rather, these are the children of their employees, future employees themselves. They need discipline. They need to be prepared for the 21^st century workforce. This has led to a demand for “cognitively-driven” preschools with direct instruction in skills that give children a leg up in the competition for college and jobs. Driven by the national obsession with standards, testing and accountability, this has led to many private and public preschools now requiring cognitive skills tests.

It is important to note that Froebelian, play-based pre-kindergarten programs do not completely ignore the development of academic skills. They simply approach it differently. Rather than forcing children to sit still for extended periods of time and then repeat after the teacher ad nauseum, they let the children play and explore with provocative and intriguing toys, games, tools and nature, introducing the vocabulary, pre-reading skills, math and science as they go. The children take more initiative and responsibility for their activities and interactions, thus developing their social skills, as well as their reasoning skills, curiosity and self-efficacy.

It is true that lower income children typically enter kindergarten with vocabularies that are substantially lower than those of their more affluent peers. This is because affluent parents on average spend far more time reading to their children than do poor and working class parents. They also tend to use larger vocabularies with their children and introduce them to more complex words and ideas. Consequently, poor children start kindergarten with significantly smaller vocabularies and fewer literacy skills (see Burkam and Lee). This makes high quality prekindergarten programs all the more important for them.

It is not true, however, that low income children must be subjected to the same sort of rote memorization, accountability, testing, homework, worksheets and other nonsense they will likely get in the higher grades. They can still rapidly increase their vocabularies and pre-reading skills in a freer, Froebelian-style pre-K environment.

Pre-K Does Not Erase the Effects of Poverty

Lack of preschool worsens an achievement gap that is already in place well before children are even old enough for preschool (see Hart and Risely). Preschool has been shown to help mitigate this for some lower income children and provide skills that help many become school ready, but it does nothing to improve the conditions in their homes and communities that cause the achievement gap to grow over time, like hunger, illness and absenteeism, or lack of access to intellectually enriching summer activities. Thus, while preschool for all is a potentially positive education reform, it still suffers the same fundamental problem that all other education reforms suffer: It does nothing to reduce poverty and the wealth gap. And as long as these problems persist, there will continue to be an achievement gap.

Obama’s Pre-K for All Plan Leaves Out the Middle Class

Obama’s plan is to provide quality pre-K for all the lower income families who currently cannot afford it. But what about all the middle class families who cannot afford it, or those who are borrowing on their retirement plans to pay for it? Will they get any relief?

Probably not. Without relief, they will continue to borrow and save and spend more than they want to because they know the educational value of preschool (and they need day care for their children so they can go to work). Thus, the risk of middle class children missing out on preschool is less of a problem.

The government’s interest in providing free public education is to aid the employing class in providing their future employees with the basic skills necessary for work at the lowest cost possible. A small increase in expenditures to help the lowest achieving kids increase the chances that they’ll graduate might be considered a reasonable investment, but providing superfluous relief to the already self-sufficient middle class would be wasteful. More importantly, this subsidy will allow private companies to make large profits providing pre-K educational services to the poor, much like many urban charter schools are already doing at the K-12 grade levels.

Who Is Profiting From the Common Core Standards?

Common Core Standards (CCS) is one of the fastest growing Ed Deforms, with over 30 states already having adopted them in hopes of winning relatively small Race to the Top grants from the Obama administration. The basis for the “reform” is the presumption that all U.S. children should be learning the same things and all American teachers should be accountable for teaching the same things.

While this might seem a no brainer, it turns out that standards were already fairly consistent between states. On the other hand, imposing rigid standards stifles academic freedom, reduces opportunities for “teachable moments” and addressing student-generated questions, and it has a tendency to promote broad, superficial learning at the expense of critical thinking, creativity and learning material in depth.

Like most “reforms,” CCS is also a cash cow for corporate education profiteers like the textbook publishers (districts must buy new books to accommodate the new standards) and test publishers (who design and sell the new tests to districts adopting the CCS).  It has also opened the door for consultants and others who hope to make a fortune training teachers and administrators how to work within the new CCS.

CCS: A Cash Cow For Corporate Education Raiders

David Coleman is one of these consultants (see Schools Matter and Susan Ohanian) and the “chief architect” of CCS. Like many of the most well-known Ed Deformers (e.g., Bill Gates, Eli Broad, Walton Family, Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein, Mike Bloomberg), Coleman had virtually no real experience in the classroom. In fact, according to Schools Matter, his only pedagogical experience was a little tutoring he did while an undergrad at Yale, where he studied English. After this, he went on to work in business, making a lot of money with the Grow Network, which was bought by McGraw-Hill in 2005. In 2007 he left McGraw-Hill and co-founded the nonprofit Student Achievement Partners, which played a leading role in creating the Common Core Standards. He now leads Student Achievement Partners in their work helping teachers and policymakers to implement the Common Core State Standards.

CCS: Creating Passive and Compliant Workers and Consumers
Ohanian and Schools Matter both rail against Coleman’s crackpot ideas, like his claim that no one really “gives a shit about what you feel or what you think.” Thus, he argues, schools need to deemphasize fiction and rid themselves of the notion that students should critique texts or speculate about them, since no one gives a shit about what they think anyway. Therefore, he argues that the teacher’s job is to keep kids on the text, as if the text was some sort of pure Truth, closed to interpretation or criticism. This, he insists, is what will make children competitive in the Global Market.

In reality, this is what will further stifle their ability to think for themselves and kill their enjoyment of learning. However, this may indeed make them more competitive in the Global Marketplace since the majority of jobs will be low wage service sector jobs that do not require great levels of initiative, creativity or critical thought. It will also encourage passivity and servility, traits that are much sought after by employers.

CCS: A Trojan Horse for Union Busting?

If Coleman’s predictions come true and teachers become mindless servants of the “texts” and the “standards,” CCS will hasten the deskilling of teachers, making them even cheaper and more replaceable. Why bother with 2 years of graduate school when the teacher’s job is merely to test students on the absolute truth of the texts which have been created by the all-knowing experts at McGraw-Hill and Pearson?

This will surely reduce the teacher shortage, since anyone with a four-year degree can stand in front of a bunch of kids and tell them to read the passage on page 41 and answer the review questions at the end. It will also solve districts’ budget problems since a bunch of automatons are a lot cheaper than a bunch of unionized professionals.

One might be inclined to call me bombastic or paranoid. Yet the unions have mostly rolled over and let CCS pass in their states without a word of caution or protest. Many have actively collaborated with their governors or legislatures to get CCS passed, not only because of their desperation for some of the federal RttT crumbs being waved before their faces by the Obama Administration, but also because their typical response to almost any criticism of education is that that it must be correct and therefore, as professionals, we must lead the mob. The California Teachers Association was certainly in this category.

Does Zip Code Really Matter?

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

A new report from the Brookings Institution reveals a strong correlation between housing prices and school test scores. However, many are claiming a causal relationship between housing prices and school quality, something that is not supported by the data.

There is indeed a strong correlation between housing prices and test scores. The Brookings study examined state standardized test scores from 84,077 schools in 2010 and 2011 and found that the average lower-income student attended a school that scored at the 42nd percentile on state tests, while the average affluent student attended a school that scored at the 61st percentile. The largest disparity was in the northeast, where homes near high-performing schools were worth 2.4 times more than those near low-performing schools on average. Connecticut’s Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk region had the largest test score gap and income disparity.

However, the main cause of both high test scores and exclusionary residency is familial wealth. It should be obvious that greater wealth allows one to purchase a more expensive home in a more affluent neighborhood. So long as neighborhood schools are attended primarily by children who live near those schools, they will continue to be segregated by class.

Wealth also leads to better health outcomes because wealthier people have greater access to healthy foods, cleaner environments, comprehensive health care, and less stressful working and living conditions. This results in affluent children having significantly lower rates of chronic disease and absenteeism, which can have a significant impact on academic success. They are much less likely to be born premature or with low birth weight, suffer lead poisoning or anemia, and numerous other conditions that can impair cognitive development or cause learning disabilities.

Affluent children have many other advantages growing up that improve their educational outcomes. For example, they have substantially larger vocabularies and pre-literacy skills before they have even entered kindergarten (see here and here) because they hear a greater variety of words at home as they grow up. They are also more likely to have enriching extracurricular opportunities like summer camps, travel, private arts and music classes, and they are more likely to have access to tutors, personal computers and educational toys and games growing up.

Of course affluent schools also tend to receive substantially more in donations from parents and community members than lower income schools, allowing them to retain arts programs, athletics and librarians. But the main reason for their higher test scores are the numerous life advantages their affluent students have enjoyed since the time they were still in the womb.

The report suggests that ending exclusionary zoning practices would significantly reduce the test score gap by making schools less segregated by social class. Desegregation of the schools might help raise test scores for some lower income students, particularly those who already have sufficient academic skills, motivation and familial support. But students who are far behind in credits and reading and math skills will need far more than the inspiration of being surrounded by higher achieving students or access to a librarian to bring them up to speed. There is nothing intrinsically better about affluent schools that would cause low performing students to suddenly excel.

If all schools were fully desegregated by class, with equal numbers of affluent and poor children, it is indeed likely that the gap in test scores between schools would decline. This is because the scores in the once predominantly affluent schools would likely decline with the influx of lower performing students while the scores in the hitherto lower income schools would rise with the influx of affluent children. However, desegregation should not have any significant effect on the test score gap between students of different socioeconomic backgrounds since their social class and life experiences would remain more or less unchanged.

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

 It is also hard to imagine a scenario in which affluent parents would allow their privileged schools to be diluted with rabble from the other side of the tracks. These are the parents with the most political clout and the money to back it. They resist spreading parental donations equally throughout their school districts. They resist changing school funding rules to ensure that districts with lower property tax bases receive the same resources as their districts. They like their high test scores, Advanced Placement courses, arts electives and trouble-free campuses.

Yet if push came to shove and social class desegregation was imposed on them by the courts, they have the resources to transfer their children to elite private schools and many would likely do so.

The One Laptop Per Child Deception

Audrey Watters, writing in Hacked Education, provides an interesting critique of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) movement, starting with the recent study by the Inter-American Development Bank in rural Peru which indicated that providing laptops does not improve test scores.

This should be no surprise. Test scores and academic success are influenced most significantly by socioeconomic factors that affect children well before they have even started school (see here and here), like malnutrition and poor health; exposure to smoke, lead and other environmental insults; and lack of early exposure to reading.

Nevertheless, one might wonder why anyone would believe that computer technology would provide more bang for the nonprofit buck than investing in nutrition- and poverty-reducing programs or building water treatment plants. These investments would not only save children’s lives but help improve their health and nutrition, thus reducing premature births, cognitive impairment and learning disabilities. Furthermore, when one considers that the laptops were not allowed to be taken home, that many of the families lacked electricity and internet access anyway, and the teachers were provided little or no professional development on integrating technology into the classroom, the program seemed doomed from the start.

The mission of OLPC was never about raising test scores or even improving learning. Rather, they believe that providing low-cost technology will “empower” children, make education more “joyful” for them, and provide them a “brighter future.” As with testing, there is no evidence that laptops do any of these things.

The idea of placing fancy, high tech toys (er, tools) into the hands of disadvantaged and marginalized people has the same sort of appeal as winning a shopping spree or the lottery. It’s exciting to imagine computers in the hands of children for whom classrooms and slate and chalk are luxuries. It is absurd, however, to think that this will erase years of hunger and privation or replace quality teaching.

Now let’s move on to the U.S., where the notion of a laptop (or tablet or iphone) in every hand is also a popular notion. Will this save districts money? It depends on whether they are maintaining and replacing the hardware and if students treat the hardware with the same carelessness and abuse with which they treat their textbooks. It will bring in millions of dollars to the big four textbook publishers—Harcourt Educational Measurement, CTB McGraw-Hill, Riverside Publishing (a Houghton Mifflin company) and NCS Pearson—which will be producing the majority of the ebooks, and tech companies like Apple, which will gain greater access to public K-12 revenues and which will lock districts into lucrative service contracts.

Will it improve learning? Not likely. The bulk of the material that will be available will be the same or similar to what is already produced by the big 4 publishers (i.e., digital versions of their existing textbooks). Will students suddenly improve their vocabularies and reading comprehension by virtue of having ebooks and tablets? Also unlikely.

Will it be a boondoggle that will hamstring districts and cut into scarce resources? Most definitely. They will have to purchase the laptops or tablets AND new ebook licenses, with an initial cost that will likely far exceed that of new textbooks alone, even though new textbooks are not even necessarily needed in electronic or hardback versions.

Obama Throw’s More Money at the Wrong Problem

President Obama has unveiled a plan to spend $100 million to train 100,000 new science teachers over the next decade, according to the Washington Post. During his State of the Union speech he said that “Growing industries in science and technology have twice as many openings as we have workers who can do the job,” a problem he blames on the dearth of quality science teachers.

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

 Yet training is only a tiny piece of the picture. With low (and declining) pay for teachers and difficult (and worsening) working conditions, why should science majors want to go into teaching in the first place when they could earn so much more with so much less stress and aggravation working as scientists?

Standards Undermine Scientific Inquirey and Comprehension

At the same time, what are we doing about the poor state of science education among existing teachers? Even the best science teachers are hamstrung by an overwhelming number of standards—most of which emphasize rote memorization of facts over actual scientific inquiry and analysis—and high stakes exams that dictate a narrow curriculum and limit depth. Consequently, many good science teachers rely on the expedients of multiple choice exams, worksheets and “cookbook,” proof-of-concept labs which allow quick and easy assessment of the standards, but which also dull students’ curiosity and turn many off to science completely.

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

 This is true even in states like California, which was the only state in the nation to earn an “A” for its science standards by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s “The State of Science Standards 2012.“ In many states, the science standards go much further to undermine students’ understanding of science concepts and their ability to develop their critical thinking and analytical skills. Ten states, including Alaska, Oregon and Wisconsin, earned an F in the survey

Many states earned their D’s or F’s because their content was minimal, poorly written and/or contained errors. Some states, like Louisiana and Texas, have undermined or discredited solid science with legislation requiring the teaching of creationism or mandating that teachers provide “both” sides of the evolution or climate change “debate.” Others failed to emphasize the link between math and science.

No Child Left Behind and the “accountability” mania that has swept the nation over the past decade have also contributed to the poor state of science education in the U.S. Many schools have forsaken science entirely at the K-5 level either to make room for more test preparation and English and math support, or because the multi-subject credentials required for teaching K-5 do not emphasize science standards, labs, and inquiry-based activities sufficiently for teachers to feel confident and competent teaching them. Some middle schools have also jettisoned science curriculum for similar reasons. Every year I get a handful of 9^th graders who say they never took science in 6^th-8^th grades and their background knowledge and success in my class often reflect this.

Poverty Undermines Academic Achievement in All Disciplines, Including Science

The biggest cause of U.S. students’ poor showing in science has little to do with the quality or quantity of science teachers. U.S. students rank poorly compared to students in most other wealthy nations in numerous disciplines, not just science, while their poverty rate is among the highest. Placing more good science teachers in the classroom will have little benefit for students who come to school hungry, homeless, sick and several years behind their affluent peers in literacy and prerequiste skills.

A class-based achievement is already firmly in place before kids have entered kindgergarten, (see Burkam and Lee and Hart and Risely) and it worsens over time. This leads to significant differences in vocabulary and pre-reading skills which can reduce children’s self-efficacy and confidence and limit their ability to access high level content, especially science.

Though good science teachers can make science engaging, fun and tangible, even to students with low literacy and prerequisite skills, they will have only limited effect on students’ perseverance, ability to concentrate for sustained periods and study habits, all of which are correlated with social class.

Obama’s plan is just another example of blaming teachers for low student achievement while ignoring the larger societal causes. Students are struggling in science primarily for the same reasons they are struggling in other disciplines, with teacher quality being one of the least significant causes.

Nevertheless, more money for the training of good science teachers is not a bad thing. On the contrary. We should be spending more to train teachers in all disciplines and especially in science, but not at the expense of other investments that could provide a bigger bang for the buck in terms of educational outcomes for children, like programs and policies that reduce poverty, support low income families and promote early childhood education.

We should also make sure that once we have invested millions of dollars into training new teachers we also encourage their continuation in the profession with generous pay and benefits packages, on-site mentoring, professional development, respect and academic freedom. Otherwise, high attrition rates will continue and the investment will be a waste. Likewise, we need to give these professionals more autonomy and decision-making authority and not quash their motivation and creativity (nor that of their students) with high stakes exams and lousy standards, or their expensive training will be for naught.