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.

Suspend Tests, Not Students

California plans to suspend some of its standardized testing for certain grade levels while it develops new computerized exams for the Common Core Standards (CCS). The plan is projected to save the state $15 million, according to the Los Angeles Times.

While the temporary suspension of tests will be a welcome respite for the minority of teachers and students affected by the plan, it will do nothing to improve education funding since the implementation of CCS is projected to cost well over $1 billion. Additionally, State Superintendent Tom Torlakson has asked the state Board of Education to use the savings for developing higher-quality tests linked to the CCS, leaving little, if any, of the $15 million for hiring teachers, giving raises, buying classroom supplies or any of the myriad other needs of California’s schools.

The new tests are being touted as something that will foster critical thinking and sophisticated reading and writing skills. However, it is unlikely they will improve learning outcomes any better than any of the previous tests because all tests merely assess—they do not teach students anything. Furthermore, the new tests will be just as high stakes as the previous tests, thus perpetuating test anxiety, student stress and disillusionment with learning, and teaching to the test.

Torlakson said, “These new assessments will provide our schools with a way to measure how ready students are for the challenges of a changing world.” While this might be desirable for technocrats and their investor benefactors who expect to profit from the test results by selling snake oil remedies like digital learning aids, textbooks, tutors, and charter schools, it will do little to actually make students more ready for these challenges, let alone prepare them to be critical members of society with the skills and courage to challenge its injustices.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the fact that virtually all academic assessments correlate more strongly with students’ socioeconomic backgrounds than any other factor, including the quality of their schools and teachers. Therefore, simply implementing new tests, no matter how good they are, while continuing to underfund the schools and ignore students’ poverty, will not change the results. At the end of the day, reformers and critics of public education will still be able to complain that too many students are failing to meet academic expectations.

Lies and Damned Lies: U.S. Test Scores Actually Near the Top

For years, free market education reformers have claimed that the U.S. public education system is broken—some have even called it a threat to our national security (Reagan’s Nation at Risk report, 1983). They have used this “crisis” to justify everything from No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top to attacks on teachers’ seniority, tenure and due process rights. It has led to a decade of accountability and testing mania that has eaten up instructional time and replaced activities that foster creativity and critical thinking with rote memorization. It has taken away billions of dollars that could have been used for teacher training, recruitment and remuneration, and transferred it into the pockets of test and textbook publishers, private charter school operators, and online curriculum producers.

The claims that America’s schools are failing are grossly exaggerated, if not utterly false. For example, the number of students attempting and passing SAT and AP exams has been growing every year and in every ethnic and social group (see here and here). Furthermore, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, for the first time in history, more than 30% of Americans aged 25 or older—56 million people—have bachelor's degrees, while only 5% did 70 years ago—something that would be impossible if K-12 education was not successfully preparing its graduates for college. According to Good Education, more than one-third of these degrees are now in STEM fields. The data also indicates that gender and ethnic disparities are closing, with 30% of women now holding degrees (compared to 31% of men), while the percentage of Hispanic degree holders increased 80% over the past decade, with over 14% now holding degrees.

Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics

Free market reformers love testing because it seems objective and scientific (plus they can massage the statistics to suit their needs). Most people lack the time and expertise to disaggregate the numbers, examine the methodology, and identify biases and experimental errors that can skew the data and influence the validity of their conclusions. Consequently, the media typically report test results without such analyses, proliferating misconceptions and inaccuracies like the notion that U.S. students’ test scores are substantially lower than those in other wealthy nations (as measured by the PISA test).

However, as the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) correctly points out in a new report (that you can read here), lower income students in every country perform more poorly on the tests than affluent students. However, because economic inequality is greater in the U.S. than in virtually every other country with which we are compared, our national average appears comparatively low. To make matters worse, there was a sampling error in the most recent PISA test, resulting in an over-representation of students from the most disadvantaged U.S. schools, thus further depressing the average U.S. scores.

When EPI re-estimated PISA scores, adjusting for the disproportionate number of economically disadvantaged students in the U.S., it found that average U.S. scores in reading and math were substantially higher than the official numbers. Using EPI’s corrected numbers, the U.S. moves to sixth in reading (up from the officially reported 14^th) and 13^th in math (up from the officially reported 25^th) compared with other OECD countries.

Although U.S. students still performed worse than those in the top three countries (Canada, Finland and Korea), the difference was markedly narrowed when adjusted for socioeconomic differences. Perhaps more significantly, economically disadvantaged students in the U.S. performed better than their social class peers in most other countries, including in these three top scoring countries.

Thus, while U.S. educational outcomes appear worse than those of its trading partners (due mostly to its greater levels of social inequity), it is actually doing a better job than its trading partners at boosting the test scores of its poorest students. Furthermore, the performance of the poorest U.S. students has been improving over time, while the performance of poor students in other similar countries has been on the decline, suggesting that U.S. schools are doing a better job addressing the needs of their economically disadvantaged students.

California Abandoning Algebra for Eighth Graders

Image from Flickr, by ajaxofsalamis

California, which had some of the toughest academic standards in the nation, had to dumb down its curriculum and its expectations for students when it approved the Common Core Standards (CCS). One example is Algebra I, which used to be required for all eighth graders. Now, like other states that have adopted the CCS, California will allow students to take either Algebra I or an alternate course that includes some algebra, while the as yet unwritten new CCS exams will focus on content from this alternate course.

Many teachers and student advocates argue that this is appropriate since not all eighth graders are ready for algebra. When students are placed in courses for which they lack the requisite skills they are far more likely to struggle or fail, thus contributing to low self-efficacy and disillusionment with school—both reasons why some students later drop out of school. Furthermore, classrooms with large numbers of students who are not academically ready for a course can contribute to discipline problems and a poor academic environment in which a critical mass of students starts to believe there is no hope of passing, so why bother.  This can bring down the expectations, self-efficacy and motivation of the students in the middle (i.e., those who could pass with a little extra support), thus undermining their chances of success.

From the perspective of middle schools and school districts, delaying Algebra I allows them to improve their test scores (fewer students failing high stakes algebra tests because fewer would be taking them) and their graduation rates (fewer kids failing classes, in general). But this completely ignores the underlying reasons why so many eighth graders aren’t ready for Algebra I and merely passes the problem on to the high schools, where the kids may still lack the academic skills to succeed in the class. Studies indicate that 80% of students who retake algebra continue to fail the class (according to Inside Bay Area).

There are, no doubt, several factors contributing to this problem, but one is likely the social promotion that goes on in the lower grades, with students being passed from one grade level to the next, regardless of whether they have mastered their courses. One argument made in support of social promotion in the earlier grade levels is that holding students back is bad for their self-esteem and therefore harms their long-term success. However, if they are allowed to fail and move on, they continue to have low self-efficacy (i.e., “I cannot get good grades in school”) while picking up the mixed message that it doesn’t really matter (i.e., “I get to move on with my friends to the next level, regardless of whether I do homework, pass exams or classes”).

More significantly, success in math, like in reading, tends to correlate with students’ socioeconomic backgrounds and prior academic success in school. There are certainly some very bright children who are “math-challenged.” Einstein was said to be one. For these students, delaying when they take algebra may help them develop the academic maturity and discipline necessary to pass the course. But for those who are failing Algebra I, along with English and other classes, the problem is much deeper and more intractable. They may have numerous other problems (e.g., poor attendance, bad study habits, learning disabilities, low literacy, a history of failure and concomitant low self-efficacy) that will follow them throughout their academic career, regardless of when they take algebra and that have their roots in the students’ socioeconomic backgrounds (e.g., low income students often lack health insurance and, consequently, have higher rates of absenteeism).

Deferring the problem to high school has ramifications beyond students’ progress in future math classes. Basic algebra is necessary for high school chemistry and biology, courses students are likely to take in the ninth and tenth grades (and fail if they lack the essential math skills). Of course, even students who do take algebra, but fail it, may also have trouble in science, but at least there is a chance that they were exposed to enough algebra to succeed in science. Not taking algebra at all significantly decreases this possibility, as does ignoring the root causes of mass algebra failure.

Another concern is that the creation of two math pathways will allow schools to fall into past bad habits of tracking students based on race or socioeconomic backgrounds. Indeed, a recent report (see Inside Bay Area) showed that some schools were placing black and Latino students in lower level math courses even when they had the skills and prerequisites for advanced math classes. This could also lead to tracking in science classes and reduction of black, Latino and low income students taking college preparatory and ultimately Advanced Placement science and math classes.

Critics of the new Algebra I requirement argue that success in Algebra I is good predictor of future college graduation, while avoiding algebra in middle school may pull students off the college-bound track. When the 8^th grade requirement was implemented, black and Latino enrollment in the class skyrocketed—from 24% to 60% for African-Americans, and tripling for Latinos to 63%—(again, see Inside Bay Area). Even though pass rates for these groups are as low at 60%, there are still more black and Latino students passing the class than in the past (because more are taking the class).