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The speaker defines modern Pre-K, contrasts it with nursery school and child care, and argues that it has increasingly become an academic school setting. She describes how this shift changes classroom expectations and daily experiences for young children.
okay so um as as uh you were told I I've been doing I've been doing this research in early childhood education for a long time I'd like to seriously retire but there's just so much to be done andthere's so much that's sort of threatening us right now I just can't let go so let me just talk to you about my research and uh and other and sort of conclusions that I've taken from it first isI don't think I'm going to surprise any of you by saying that there's a lot of confusion out there among policy makers about what Pre-K actually is at first it's not Nursery School it doesn't operate like Nursery Schoolit's really not preschool it doesn't really help families who need oral child care who need uh most pre I I think in California you're going to how many hours a week you're going to be it's it certainly may
not even be the full school day so it's not really a great Boon to families who might need care if they're going to work so increasingly what Pre-K has come to mean is it's the Academic Year academic dayclassrooms in public elementary schools typically administered by state Departments of Education in 2021 President Biden gave this address to Congress or he was calling for a a huge investment in pre-kindergarten programs and I quote him to when hesaid the research shows that when a child goes to school and he said not daycare they are far far more likely to graduate from school and go to college or something After High School okay so that this isputting four-year-olds in school and Pre-K then becomes another grade below kindergarten I don't some of you may be old enough to remember our kindergarten Wars which we lost um and there was a huge amount of debate when kindergarten
started to be full school day and universally offered in in States a huge debate about what kind of what would happen to kindergarten well we know what happened to kindergarten it became the new first grade and the prso Pre-K programs uh principles it had there's a recent publication where principals were interviewed and what they said was of Great Value about having a Pre-K in their school was that children learn to do school they learned theright School behaviors what does that mean that means that the kindergarten teachers didn't have to worry about teaching children to sit in the sit in a circle and walk quietly in the hall put a bubble in your mouthdon't touch your neighbor don't touch the wall because and and how to operate and get trays at the big cafeteria because they would already know how to do that so teachers in fact in kindergarten could spend all their
time teaching children how to learn how to read so the consequences when you when I had visited and taken data in hundreds of pre-K classrooms and what I see is didactic teacher-led instruction teachers talk all the time listthey listen to Children about nine percent of the time as Early Childhood Educators you would understand how problematic it is for a teacher not to be listening to children because how do you individualize instruction if you don't knowwhat your children know or don't know they focus on School Readiness skills which tend to be mostly ABC's and one two threes and those sorts of skills very concrete skills they train children to do school that is sitquietly crisscross applesauce sit for a long time in whole group instruction I've been in classrooms where children four-year-olds were expected to sit in whole group for as long as 50 minutes at a time a single a single whole
group session there's a lot of time spent in transitions because a lot of these classrooms don't have bathrooms or the teachers don't use the bathrooms that are attached to the classroom and the children go and have their lunchand their and their meals in the big cafeteria which requires a lot of Transitions and what happens when that transition happens is you get a lot of negative behavior disapproval from teachers teachers need to keep children in linesadly they also spend little time outside and um I observed several hundred classrooms in Memphis and uh those classrooms operate seven hours a day in Pre in their Pre-K classroom in their elementary schools and more than 50 ofthe classrooms the children never went outside and also never had an indoor play period that was gross motor foreign families don't choose this for their children why do we think we should subject poor children to these experiences
This section reviews the evidence on Pre-K outcomes, including short-term gains in kindergarten readiness and the lack of strong long-term benefits. The speaker explains the Tennessee randomized study and reports that later academic and behavioral outcomes were worse for Pre-K attendees.
so what does the research say there's strong evidence of pre-K effects on kindergarten Readiness like basic skills so that's not that's not in question kindergarten the Pre-K children go into kindergarten they know more they're only 26 letters sothey know more of their alphabet they know their numbers there isn't despite what people say there is no credible evidence about long-term effects state legislators are legislatures are increasingly funding these Statewide Pre-K programs and they have a lotof very laudable and big goals reduce the achievement cap so you'll have a four-year-old in a pre-k program which is supposed to result in better academic outcomes when they get to High School they're supposed to reduce grade retentionreduce special education placement that is so both of those things saving school districts money and increase High School graduation and post-secondary enrollment there is no strong research evidence from currently implemented programs to support these goals the evidence that
people cite comes from programs that were started in the 60s and in the early 70sthe Tennessee VP it's called Tennessee voluntary pre-k program so it was a Statewide program started in 1998 it currently has 935 Pre-K classrooms and 100 going down sorry
um it Tennessee is not as big as California so we have 135 school systems 136 and 135 of them have Pre-K programs we're serving more than 18 000 children it's targeted which means that priority is given to familieswho are eligible for free or reduced price lunch 93 of these classrooms are in the public schools and it operates a full school day and a school year the requirement at the state is that there be licensed teacherswith an aide and those teachers are paid at parity with the K-12 system now what a licensed teacher means at in pre-k is often a person with an elementary certificate a K through 8 certificate or a pre-k throughfour but there although there are some states that have a nursery through K certificate that's not true in in Tennessee and it's not true in most States most States uh you'll have Elementary prepared teachers with a little bit
of Child Development thrown in who are those teachers in those Pre-K programs 20 children maximum and they have to operate on a curriculum from an approved list that the state has uh has posted although no one actually investigateswhether they um are implementing that curriculum when this when this program started uh it met in eight I mean nine of the ten near benchmarks now that's the National Institute for Early Education research out of Rutgers that monitorsStatewide Pre-K um and they've now in increased their benchmarks uh but um but most States that's what they had to go by where the near benchmarks which are more structural regulation type benchmarks uh the current Pro our currentprogram in Tennessee meets 25 of uh is in the top sorry and then the top 25 of near evaluation standards because of the parity pay and the fact that the teachers are uh provided health benefits and retirement so
what do we find first of all you have to realize there is no other randomized control trial of a Statewide pre-k program why is that important because you have to start with families that are in the same placesome of whom got Pre-K and some of whom did not you can't do this after the fact with trying to match people up in third or fourth grade you have to start from the beginning all the children inour study of the three thousand that we followed came from poor families all of them they were all met the purple guidelines all the families wanted their children to attend Pre-K they applied they knew about it so amongpoor families these are the more motivated poor families that is they were aware of pre-K in their Community they made the effort to go and fill out an application but there wasn't enough room for everybody so we worked
with oversubscribe programs and a lottery system determined who got into the classroom so that meant that our children who attended Pre-K and those who didn't get in were completely equivalent and that's the thing you cannot assure when youlook at these after the fact match studies California could do this same study now if it would do it drives me crazy okay so we we have been following these children through High School we've continued to get fundingto keep following them covet didn't help a lot but and the results have been analyzed and published through the sixth grade so what happened through the sixth grade first those children who attended Pre-K scored significantly higher than thosechildren who didn't attend Pre-K when they entered kindergarten and when we released those results because we were the only randomized control study of State Pre-K you would think we were Jesus coming into Bethlehem I mean people were very
excited they you know that strew roses and called us Heroes but we kept following them so all those differences were gone by the end of kindergarten all those advantages were gone by the end of kindergarten and children whodid not attend Pre-K 63 percent of them in Tennessee stayed home or were cared for by relatives or neighbors they were not an organized programs those children scored caught up very quickly in kindergarten and by the end ofkindergarten were equivalent on those School Readiness skills as the pre as as the children had gone to pre-k however by the end of third grade we started to see uh positive effects favoring those who did not go topre-k at the end of sixth grade children who attended Pre-K scored signifi those now these are the attenders and they're equivalent and we're comparing them to those children who did not attend who are exactly the same kind of
families and so forth the children who went to pre-k scored significantly lower on reading math and science state achievement tests they were significantly more likely to be suspended or expelled they more often had an IEP and they hadsimilar grade retention as non-attenders so all those things that the state legislature legislators were told would be be a benefit of attending Pre-K we did not find we found the opposite
The speaker argues that the problem is not pre-K itself but the school-like, punitive way it is often delivered. She introduces the idea that young children need caring, joyful, sensory-rich learning environments for gains to last.
so what what went wrong why do you think our expectations were not borne out I'm sure you're going to talk about that and you're going to talk anyway I'll to be happy listen in I think it's because theseclassrooms and the experiences children had looked like school and not like care learning takes place in care deeper learning may take place in care Biden is wrong children who are four years old need care they need learning experiencesbut they need them in a caring environment and I'm going to show you some pictures from a single School a single classroom which illustrates the kind of care our four-year-olds need along with some principles about why these experiencesare important that I've developed over my years of visiting Pre-K classrooms and actually doing analyzes of the kinds of experiences that matter socompare this to most School classrooms young children need warm and welcoming environments almost all to all adults and children learn better in a welcoming positive environment
now you might argue I mean it can be said that if you want to teach very concrete skills very fast you can make it a punitive environment and then people will learn those skills but they don't retain themvery long and they're not linked to deeper kinds of understandings that you really need to go forward in school young children same classroom young children need messy sensory experiences they need they young children as you I'm sure allof you know young children learn with multiple parts of their sensory systems not just through their ears but through what they touch what they feel what they what they experience um and how they move around they need joyin discovering we have good data that shows that the more involved children at work like this child like these two like this one the more involved they are in positive learning experiences though the moral the more they gain
and the long lastingness of their gains so they get these gains show up continuing into first grade based on the kinds of experiences children had in pre-K
This chapter emphasizes the importance of outdoor time, messy exploration, and learning from peers. The speaker explains how associative play supports social development and gives children more opportunities to talk and interact.
they need to be outside in all weathers so I do a lot of work in Sweden and I've learned their Mantra which is there's no such thing as bad weather there's only bad clothing so we need children tocome to school prepared to get messy to go outside you must some of you must remember from your own childhood the fun of being outside in the mud and learning about the natural environment from being able to engagewith it I I can't tell you the number of classrooms I'm in where they don't go outside at all or they go to a very sterile pre uh playground that was invented for fourth graders and is not inthe least attractive or even usable by children who are four years oldit's just another outside picture a different different different weather different clothing young children learn from each other I just it's a it's a it's I just have to tell you you I mean you may not believe these data
but it's true we call this associative interaction so these children are engaged in associative interactions they're they're both playing with the same material they're engaged with they're clearly positively engaged with each other and the more associative play thatchildren engage in in preschool the more social and the more positively social their first grade teachers rate them this experience of learning how to get along with and be with other peers is CR is crucial second more talkhappens when children are in associate of play than happens during whole group because in whole group the way you get to talk is by choral responding the way you get to talk with a peer is by talking andlistening and interacting and children love to talk but they just don't get much chance to talk and they don't get much chance to be an associate interactions we see in most classrooms less than 10 percent of the day
you spent in associative interactions it's just astounding this is another associative interaction how am I doing on time Alondra keep going it's great
The speaker calls for a broader definition of school readiness that includes curiosity, vocabulary, confidence, and social participation. She argues for classrooms that connect language to experience and end by urging California to do better with Pre-K design.
and mean and you know I I I I don't know what you're going to do about these public schools that you're going to have to have programs in that will not have appropriate places for children to play toexplore I mean a huge part of childhood is being outside and finding out about worms and rocks and being with other children and feeling the grass underneath your feet and and not this sterile plastic or metal playground thata lot of children are limited to which is just tragic yeah so could preschool programs Pre-K programs be like that be like the pictures I just showed you only if they change their focus radically
they we have to broaden the idea of School Readiness we have to get Beyond constrained skills such as ABCs and one two threes and school Behaviorwe need to focus our programs on knowing how to develop these underlying competencies foreign children
so that they are excited about learning just I mean think about the interactions that you have with their when you're with your own children when they get so excited about something they know that they want to tell youabout that they've figured out or that you you tell them I have I work with a colleague now in um in Australia who who teaches her children to what what she calls to engage children in wonderings she callsthem wonderings and what that means is the teacher says to the child what do you wonder about tell me something you're wondering about in other words initiating having a child raise issues that are of interest to the childwhich is helpful because sometimes you you kind of miss an opportunity so being able to encourage children to come to you with their wonderings we need deeper wider vocabulary linked to experiences I am terrified by the new move
towards science of reading yes we definitely need to teach phonics but we cannot do it at the expense of having children not learn about the world and Link vocabulary to it and how do they learn about the worldthey have experiences in their classrooms outside they have projects they get messy but the person but the teacher who's there links language with those experiences so children learn language in the context of the things that they're doing andthey'll retain it we need to encourage curiosity we need our children to leave our Pre-K programs confident in their learning ability confident in theirs in themselves as human beings I think what happened in the pre-k program in Tennesseewas that children did not leave the pre-k program feeling confident in fact they over time they became allergic to school which has led to those greater expulsions and greater suspensions we need children to develop social interaction capabilities I
work as I said with my friends in Sweden and sweet sweet the sweets have adopted a whole set of principles about child care that the that the country has adopted I know we can't do that but I'm justsaying the country's adopted and their top one for young children before they hit formal education which doesn't start till age six is part what they call participation you should have an opportunity to and learn how to participate withother children it's important to learn how to be part of a group the way we've got our Pre-K structured now there's oddly even though you have 24 year olds in a room there's oddly not much chance to learnsocial interaction skills because you're either in whole group instruction or you're in individual work or you're in you may have a little bit of time in centers but you tend to be by yourself and there's nothing that in
that really encourages you or enables you to be interactive with your friends in those centers but maybe California can get it right huh thank you