Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Preschool Going Political
I'm surprised this topic hasn't made it on this board yet. As with other things, I think this should be something handled at a state level, if it's handled by the government at all. In addition, I'm not sure the level of education a child needs and can handle at this young age warrants it being paid for by the government. We're talking coloring, story time, basic learning like numbers, letters, shapes and colors, play time, snack time, nap time, and physical activity. I don't think the government needs to get involved here. Preschool programs, within reason are essentially the same, AND if the government decides to put money into education with our current blossoming debt, I'd rather it go to helping people pay for college or for better technology in the older grades.
"President Obama?s plan to provide free, high-quality preschool across the country is getting a mixed response, garnering broad support for helping poor children but raising questions about expanding entitlements and the success of similar programs.
The president announced the plan during his State of the Union address last week, arguing that America must begin preparing its citizens for the new, high-tech economy at the ?earliest possible age.?
?Study after study shows that the sooner a child begins learning, the better he or she does down the road.? However, less than 30 percent of 4-year-olds are enrolled in a ?high-quality? preschool program, he said.
Obama argued most middle-class parents cannot afford a few hundred dollars a week for private preschool and that poor children, who need help the most, could be at a disadvantage ?for the rest of their lives? as a result of not having access to such education.
While visiting a preschool Thursday in Decatur, Ga., the president provided more details about the plan, saying the federal government would match money spent by states to create high-quality preschool programs for 4 year olds from low- and moderate-income families.
The plan also purportedly would give extra federal money to states that expand their public preschool programs to middle-class families, which would pay tuition on a sliding scale.
Though the cost of the program remains unclear, the president is arguing money invested now in high-quality early education will in fact save Americans by increasing graduation rates and reducing teen pregnancy and violent crime.
Obama pointed to Georgia and Oklahoma where, he said, studies show such programs even help former students keep a job and maintain a stable family.
However, critics argued the country is already roughly $16 trillion in debt and point to a Department of Health and Human Services study that shows limited benefits after third grade for those enrolled in preschools under the $7 billion Head Start program.
?This isn?t a liberal or conservative thing,? said Kirsten Powers, a Daily Beast columnist and Fox News contributor. "I think everybody wants to help our children do better in school (but) this doesn?t seem to be the thing that?s doing it.?
Andrew J. Coulson, director of the Cato Institute?s Center for Educational Freedom, told The New York Times there's a big difference between touting a handful of small pre-K programs that may have had lasting and significant benefits? and replicating such programs on a national level.
The Center for American Progress estimates the Obama plan would cost roughly $98 billion over 10 years.
The liberal-leaning think tank also cited several studies that bolster Obama?s argument about the benefits of preschool education and said families making less than $1,500 a month must spend about 53 percent of their income on care for their children 4 years old and younger.
?With all these benefits, universal preschool shouldn?t be a partisan issue,? the group said. ?And indeed, Republican-controlled states such as Oklahoma and Georgia have become national leaders in early childhood education.?
However, Georgia Republican Sen. Johnny Isakson told The Wall Street Journal that his state?s program, which offers free pre-kindergarten to all 4 year olds, works because it ?started locally, is funded locally and doesn?t have a dime of federal money.?'
Re: Preschool Going Political
I agree and disagree with you.
I do favor the concept of quality and affordable pre-K being made available. Preschool programs are somewhat the same. However, the key to that concept is that a child is actually somewhere with preschool cirriculum versus a daycare that simply babysits. Preschool type daycares are vastly more expensive, making it out of reach for many working poor. Studies have shown that it does greatly benefit disadvantaged children.
That being said, how do we fund it? When we are already battling many other budget issues, how do we succesffuly add another program, not matter how beneficial it is. What do we cut in order to afford this?
Georgia is a successful example of using lottery money to fund education. But can we rely on individual states to do this successfully? Past trends show we can't. And it benefits the nation as a whole to have properly educated children.
So basically- I do think it is a vital program. I don't know how to go about the funding issue.
Our schools already suck, I don't see the need to put more money into making more schools suck.
(If anyone is interested in seeing how much their state already sucks, here's a fun map: http://www.edweek.org/ew/qc/2013/state_report_cards.html?intc=EW-QC13-TOC )
I also don't particularly buy the idea that preschool gives kids some magical up in life. It strikes me as more likely that kids who go to preschool succeed in general because they come from a family that a) can afford early education and therefore decent subsequent education (even if that just means they can afford to live in a public district that's better funded than regional alternatives) and b) is concerned with and invested in their childrens' educations.
I think it's worth exploring better ways to get younger kids from lower income families better affordable access to early education. But I don't think it's worth a national initiative to get all kids in preschool.
Here is an article that may interest you on this:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/03/does-preschool-matter/
For many kids, the most important years of schooling come before they can even read. Consider the groundbreaking work of the Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman, who has repeatedly documented the power of early childhood education. One of his best case studies is the Perry Preschool Experiment, which looked at 123 low-income African-American children from Yspilanti, Michigan. (All the children had IQ scores between 75 and 85.) When the children were three years old, they were randomly assigned to either a treatment group, and given a high-quality preschool education, or to a control group, which received no preschool education at all. The subjects were then tracked over the ensuing decades, with the most recent analysis comparing the groups at the age of 40. The differences, even decades after the intervention, were stark: Adults assigned to the preschool program were 20 percent more likely to have graduated from high school and 19 percent less likely to have been arrested more than five times. They got much better grades, were more likely to remain married and were less dependent on welfare programs. This is why, according to Heckman and colleagues, every dollar invested in preschool for at-risk children reaps somewhere between eight and nine dollars in return.
Why is preschool so important? The answer is obvious: The young mind is wonderfully malleable, able to develop new habits with relative ease. Furthermore, the benefits of preschool are not equally distributed. Rather, they seem to be particularly essential for those kids from the most disadvantaged households. A new paper in Psychological Science by Elliot Tucker-Drob, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, helps explain why this is the case. He wanted to tease out the relative contributions of nature and nurture, genes and environment, in the improvement of academic skills during pre-kindergarten education. His data set made these questions possible: Tucker-Drob used a national sample of 1,200 identical and fraternal twins born to 600 families of various incomes and ethnicities across the United States in 2001. Because he was comparing identical twins, who share 100 percent of their genes, and fraternal twins, who share 50 percent, he was able to calculate the relative genetic and environmental influences on achievement at age five, both for those kids who had been enrolled in preschool and those who went without.
His main finding might, at first glance, seem somewhat paradoxical. According to the twin data, family environmental factors ? the nurture side of the equation ? accounted for about 70 percent of the variance in test scores for children who did not attend preschool. In contrast, those same family factors only accounted for about 45 percent of variance among children who attended preschool.
How can preschool alter the relative contribution of nature and nurture? And why does pre-k education make genetics more important? The answer has to do with the constraints on mental development. When kids are denied an enriched environment, when they grow up in a stressed home without lots of books or conversation, this lack of nurture holds back their nature. As a result, the children are unable to reach their full genetic potential. (Razib Khan says it best: ?When you remove the environmental variance, the genetic variance remains.?) The gift of preschool, then, is that closes the yawning gap between the life experiences of wealthy and poor toddlers, thus making whatever differences remain more important.
This effect was clearly demonstrated by the standardized test data, as Tucker-Drob looked at changes in scores correlated with preschool. Not surprisingly, he found that preschool significantly closed the achievement gap between rich and poor kids. However, this winnowing of the gap was entirely due to the raised scores among those from disadvantaged homes. In fact, Tucker-Drob found that children raised in wealthier homes got no benefit at all from pre-k education, as their test scores remained flat. Because these kids were already receiving plenty of cognitive stimulation at home, it didn?t really matter if they were also stimulated at school. It?s as if their brains were already maxed out.
This latest study builds on previous work by Tucker-Drob showing that the impact of parents, at least relative to genetics, largely depends on socioeconomic status. Last year, he looked at 750 pairs of American twins who were given a test of mental ability at the age of 10 months and then again at the age of 2. As in this latest study, Tucker-Drob used twin data to tease apart the importance of nature and nurture at various points along the socioeconomic continuum. The first thing he found is that, when it came to the mental ability of 10-month-olds, the home environment was the key variable, across every socioeconomic class. This shouldn?t be too surprising: Most babies are housebound, their lives dictated by the choices of their parents.
Results for the 2-year-olds, however, were dramatically different. In children from poorer households, the decisions of parents still mattered. In fact, the researchers estimated that the home environment accounted for approximately 80 percent of the individual variance in mental ability among poor 2-year-olds. The effect of genetics was negligible.
The opposite pattern appeared in 2-year-olds from wealthy households. For these kids, genetics primarily determined performance, accounting for 50 percent of all variation in mental ability. For parents, then, the correlation appears to be clear: As wealth increases, the choices of adults play a much smaller role in determining the mental ability of their children.
There are two lessons here. The first lesson is that upper-class parents worry too much. Although adults tend to fret over the details of parenting ? Is it better to play the piano or the violin? Should I be a Tiger Mom or a Parisian mom? What are the long-term effects of sleep training? ? these details are mostly insignificant. In the long run, the gift of money is that it gives a child constant access to a world of stimulation and enrichment, thus allowing her to fulfill her genetic potential. The greatest luxury we can give our children, it turns out, is the luxury of being the type of parent that doesn?t matter at all.
The second lesson is that stunning developmental inequalities set in almost immediately. As Tucker-Drob demonstrates, even the mental ability of 2-year-olds can be profoundly affected by the socioeconomic status of their parents. The end result is that their potential is held back.
And this is why we need good preschools. They are not a panacea, and their impact varies depending on quality, but early childhood education is still an essential first step toward eliminating the achievement gap. Life is unfair; some kids will always be born into households that have much less. Nevertheless, we have a duty to ensure that every child has a chance to learn what he?s capable of.
I have mixed feelings about Obama's preschool proposal. But there is lots and lots of evidence showing that preschool - at least for low income kids - is incredibly important and has a great deal of societal benefit.
My biggest worry about the preschool proposal is that I'm afraid of the 'academicization' (yes I made up that word) of preschool and I'm afraid that we'll end up with preschools that suppress the way small children learn best, which is through play. Small kids need to play - not in a "oh play is so fun!' kind of way but because biologically and neurologically, kids literally NEED play for their development. There is a lot of science on this, and I worry about the possibility of standardized tests for 3 year olds.
Also, I would not want to see preschool become mandatory for all kids, but I do want to see it made available to those families who want it but who can't currently afford it. I am also concerned about the quality of these schools.
But on the other hand, there are a lot of positives to making preschool more widely available, provided those schools are high quality. I just don't know.
*sigh* I hate it when Geraldo destroys my attempts at cynicism.
But LOL at "19 percent less likely to have been arrested more than five times."
When five arrests is your benchmark for achievement in being a law-abiding citizen...
This part here fascinates me: In children from poorer households, the decisions of parents still mattered. In fact, the researchers estimated that the home environment accounted for approximately 80 percent of the individual variance in mental ability among poor 2-year-olds. The effect of genetics was negligible.
The opposite pattern appeared in 2-year-olds from wealthy households. For these kids, genetics primarily determined performance, accounting for 50 percent of all variation in mental ability. For parents, then, the correlation appears to be clear: As wealth increases, the choices of adults play a much smaller role in determining the mental ability of their children.
And I think after reading, I still stand by my latter point- it's worth finding ways to get poorer students access to such programs. Not something that needs to turn into some regulated national endeavor to add an extra year of schooling for all kids.
(confession: I didn't go to preschool- but I've only been arrested four times, so we're good.)
(Kidding. I've never been arrested. But I still didn't go to preschool.)
My kids went to a wonderful Preschool. At the time, I lived in a working class neighborhood and didn't have a lot of money. The Preschool (through a church) offered a sliding fee scale and there were kids from all walks of life who attended.
I don't believe the federal government needs to get involved with this. This is a matter of family involvement. There are programs out there if someone is willing to put some effort into research - and heck when it comes to my kids I am willing to do anything to help them.
Not in every area. You were lucky to live somewhere that offers such programs. You need to acknowledge that not every city and state will offer many of the priviledges you may assume is available everywhere.
This is a very naive statement to make. Laziness isn't always a factor when it comes to disenfranchisment. Sometimes there simply aren't available resources or at best limited resources. It goes back to funding. Not every locale can or choose to fund such programs.
This. All of it. I think if this happens there could be an "overthinking" of preschool education. All the books on education I have read simply state that up to the age of 5 kids learn through playing and hands-on activities.
I would also worry that they would get plopped down in front of computer screens all day (in an attempt to make our students 'technologically savvy' from a young age). In fact, most/many kids already get enough "screen time" at home.
Lastly, I do know that many churches and other religious communities run preschool programs some of which are excellent and have been around for decades with great reputations. No parent should be forced to send their child to a church for preschool, but if a parent wants to, then I think they should be able to. I would worry that the government getting involved would limit where kids could go when it should be a parental decision based on the program, child's needs/personality, and proximity to parents' work or home. In addition, I would hope some type of stipulation would be placed in such a program to prevent parents from using these funds toward regular day cares that just "babysit" as a PP stated.
I am afraid you misunderstood me, I was not calling anybody lazy. I was only speaking of my experience.
My point is there is a bigger problem here, one that government cannot fix. My hope is that families could be more involved with their children regardless of whether they live in a Section 8 apartment or a mansion.
I appreciate what you're saying here, I think that we all would hope that families could be more involved with their children.
The problem when it comes to low income families is that there are a lot of factors that lead to their children needing preschool more. The stress of poverty, combined with the lack of parental education and resources leads to more stressed out children. When children are under stress their learning is shut down. Parents who are struggling to feed their families tend to have more difficulty engaging with their children in a productive manner, leading to fewer social skills and a smaller vocabulary.
Truthfully, I think that there is sufficient evidence that preschool benefits children, and it should be more accessable. I have wondered for a long time why preschool is an optional and, in many cases, a very expensive program, when there are now cases where kids will be facing entrance exams when they hit kindergarten age.
Obviously, funding is a problem. At this point in time, I think that the proposal is admirable, but I honestly think that this is just an initial attempt to get this issue some public attention. I think this is also a tactical approach to make some gains in early childhood education. I think he's throwing out the most liberal proposal so that it can be negotiated down to something that is still progressive, but not that drastic.