The preschool debate – is it a must-have experience?

Sue Shellenbarger , a journalist at the Wall Street Journal wrote an interesting article about research studies involving preschool programs and students. Here is an excerpt of her article:

An ongoing federally funded study of 1,364 children shows preschool time improves language and memory.

The few long-term studies undertaken so far, however, offer little proof that the academic benefits of an average preschool program endure. The federally funded study, by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, found that while time spent in the average child-care center or preschool is linked to better memory skills in third grade, compared to children in other kinds of care, the benefits shrink to insignificance in higher grades.

The only lasting effect of average programs documented so far for all kids is a modest increase in behavior problems. Sixth-grade teachers of children who spent a lot of time in child-care centers say they act up a little more than other kids, though their behavior is still within the normal range, the institute study shows.

But when researchers add high quality to the preschool equation, the research is more compelling. High-quality programs have low child-to-adult ratios, small classes and trained teachers who interact often, in a positive, sensitive and stimulating way, with children. The academic edge delivered by these kinds of preschools endures at least through fifth grade, in the form of superior vocabulary skills, the institute study found. For disadvantaged children in particular, several studies have shown high-quality preschool confers profound benefits into adulthood, including higher college attendance and income.

Certainly, preschool isn't essential. All children and families are different, and youngsters with attentive, educated parents and stimulating homes can do just fine without it. "If your child is participating in play dates and seeing other children," developmental progress "happens quite naturally" at home, says Kathleen McCartney, dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. "Do all children need preschool? Absolutely not. Would most children benefit from it? Yes."

With two-thirds of U.S. four-year-olds now attending child-care centers or preschool, many kindergarten teachers expect incoming pupils to know how to sit still at circle time and relate to adults, Shellenbarger concludes.

Parents that aren’t ready to unleash their little one into the wild world of preschool or corporate child-care continue to enjoy nurturing their children at home with programs like Play2Learn or for the more passive child, Hooked on Phonics. Home care providers are a popular alternative but make sure your child doesn’t spend most of those hours in front of a television set or placed in a play pen. The learning environment and teacher attention to the child are the most crucial factors in recognizing whether your child is in a high quality or average setting.

The early years are the learning years… don’t let the most valuable time for affecting brain development pass you by – get busy learning about child development and becoming your child’s first teacher. You are your child’s first teacher whether they go to preschool or not.

War on our kids - standardizing testing is killing their innovative learning spirit

If there is one thing about our education system that makes me sick and mad all at the same time it is standardized testing – especially when it cripples our youngest learners.

Will our children ever LOVE TO LEARN again? If we keep going down this path of standardized testing for the sake of the No Child Left Behind act’s accountability policies, no we will never have innovative and enthusiastic learners which will lead to an incompetent and dismal work force in the future.
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This article written by Brian Crosby, a National Board Certified Teacher and 20-year veteran teacher from Glendale, California was published on OhMyGov! in January.

Ever since No Child Left Behind left behind other ways to assess student learning beyond multiple-choice tests, the federal and state governments have gone giddy over standardized testing. And now it has reached a new low testing kindergartners, some of whom are four-years-old.

What are those in charge of educating children thinking when they come up with such ideas? Where is the parent outrage over such a misguided plan? Thank goodness only 10 percent of the elementary school principals have volunteered their students as guinea pigs for this experiment.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office reports "will spend between $1.9 billion and $5.3 billion to develop, score and report NCLB-required tests."

Just what was this money spent on before?

As a parent, I want the most highly qualified instructors teaching to my children. As a teacher, I want to be treated professionally so that I can meet the needs of parents and their children.

Meanwhile, whatever happened to the weight of the final grade in a class? Does all that day-in and day-out work of the student not count towards anything anymore?

The fact of the matter is that an accountability system is and has been already in place-it's called student work. It doesn't have a catchy name. One can't make an easy acronym out of it, and no politician can claim credit for it. Students learn significantly more from assignments that demand students to use higher-level thinking skills - assignments that go beyond the rote type of learning assessed on standardized tests.

Read more…

The Role of Parents in Early Education

The Role of Parents in Early Education

Education is an essential part of each of our lives – it aids the maturing process and helps each of us become independent and self-sufficient individuals. Education can be of different kinds, the most common kind being the one we’re imparted at formal institutions like schools and colleges. Education can also take on other forms – practical knowledge gained through experience, homeschooling imparted by parents or close relatives or formal training in creative arts like music, art, drama and the like. Whatever the form, education is necessary, and the role played by parents during the early educative years of the child cannot be emphasized enough.

We’ve seen the struggle that orphans and abandoned children go through all their lives, simply because they haven’t had the parental edge during their formative years. Children who do well later on in life are those who are fortunate enough to have parents who:

• Facilitate: the learning process as much as they can. Besides the formal lessons that are taught at school, these parents supplement their children’s education with books, educational trips, sports, and other tools that contribute to the positive development of their children. They encourage them to engage themselves in activities besides schoolwork to enhance their all-round development and boost their academic performance. Children who are voracious readers have been known to have good writing and communication skills that stand them in good stead as they grow up and move into the adult world.
• Support: their children through thick and thin. They don’t punish when things go wrong or when their kids are lagging behind at school. Instead, they are supportive and help them get to the root of the problem rather than just shouting at them or using harsher forms of penalization. They know that positive reinforcement works best when it comes to cajoling children into showing greater interest in academics.
• Encourage: them to do well rather than forcing them to or threatening them with dire consequences if they do not perform well at school. They understand that grades are not everything and that as long as their kids are doing the best they can and living up to their potential, it’s enough.
• Guide: and do not spoon-feed. The best parents are those who give suggestions and ideas when their children are asked to complete assignments and projects that are beyond their regular school lessons, and not those who complete their kids’ work from start to finish themselves. Yes, the projects are so much better when the parents do them, and these kids get the best grades, but then, it’s the children who do their own work who learn the most valuable lesson of independence and who enhance and give vent to their creative instincts.
• Exhibit restraint: and are not overtly competitive. They don’t expect their children to be first in everything they do, and they don’t go overboard and overload the children with activities and lessons beyond their capacities. They understand that children are children, and that they deserve a normal childhood as opposed to being forced to become child prodigies that their parents can parade around.
• Are involved: in all their child’s activities, thus showing that they care about them and their interests. Their children know that they can approach their parents for any kind of guidance and support, and that they always have time for them.

Enough cannot be said about the importance of the positive role that parents must play in shaping their children’s academic future. And the mothers and fathers who realize this truth are the ones who have children who achieve greatness.

This post was contributed by Holly McCarthy, who writes on the subject of online schools.

Educational change - a systematic approach

In the Chronicle of Philanthropy, Mark Tucker, President of the National Center on Education and the Economy, writes "If education were a product and the United States were a corporation, we would try and figure out how other nations manage to succeed where we have clearly failed, and then beat them at their own game. Instead, many of America’s leading donors are lavishing their money on social entrepreneurs whose small, innovative programs don’t have a prayer of dealing with the problem at the scale that is needed."

Tucker goes on to outline a systematic approach to creating change in America's education system:

Other countries have not built highly effective and very efficient school systems by financing a handful of small, disruptive interventions. Not at all. They have developed policies that get results. It is the structure of those systems that account for their effectiveness.

To those of us who have studied these nations in detail for years, there is no mystery about what has to be done. America, too, needs to recruit teachers from the top one-third to one-fifth of college graduates. To get them, we need to pay them as much as the other professions they could just as easily choose to go into: medicine, law, architecture, accounting, engineering, and so on. We need to make sure the best of them can do very well for themselves without leaving teaching. We need to give them the same kind of control over the way their services are delivered to their clients as the other professions have over theirs, and that will mean turning virtually all of the decisions as to how the schools are run over to them.

By handsomely rewarding school faculties that produce smashing gains for their students and closing schools that fail to make strong progress, we can ensure that handing over the decision making is a wise move. But, if we do that, we will be making a big mistake if we continue to measure student progress with the cheap, minimum-competency tests the states now use. We need instead to adopt high-quality board examinations like those the most successful countries use, which can measure a student’s grasp of the concepts underlying the subject, the student’s creativity and capacity for innovation, as well as the student’s knowledge and ability to apply what he or she has learned to real-world problems. As many other countries have done long ago, we need to shift our financing system away from a reliance on the local property tax and toward a system that makes sure each and every student has the resources needed to get to internationally benchmarked standards.

That is not a list of modest changes; taken together, they constitute a major redesign of the American education system, a system that got its last redesign some 100 years ago.

Social entrepreneurs are no match for such a comprehensive approach. Imagine if the United States relied on elite, committed, but mostly short-tenured twenty-something volunteers to help solve comparable national crises such as the search for sustainable energy, or if the nation had done the same thing in response to the challenge posed by Sputnik. The idea is laughable. Yet that is precisely how we have dealt with the problem of our inadequate education system.

Entrepreneurs are not the solution. The solution is to completely change our education system in the United States as we know it today.

21st century jobs - prepare your children today!

When I think about how schools are developing a plan for teaching to the 21st century skills all children will need, I often wonder whether the teachers - and students/parents for that matter - even know what jobs will be needed.

We are loosing jobs to the overseas markets at an alarming rate. Americans are going to have to work but do you know what kinds of jobs you may need to have training for in the 21st century job market?

Listed at Resumagic.com you will find a this list of Emerging Jobs:

Although mostly unheard of today, the following careers are expected to be in high demand in the years to come:

information broker
job developer
leisure consultant
bionic electron technician
computational linquist
fiber optic technician
fusion engineer
image consultant
myotherapist
relocation counselor
retirement counselor
robot technician
space mechanic
underwater archaeologist

Do our teachers have the training necessary to prepare our children in these fields? Is it solely the teacher's job to prepare for this kind of work? I always say we have to "begin with the end in mind." If this is the end, where will we begin and what are our plans for achieving knowledge in the areas that matter tomorrow - instead of yesterday?

Early education is the key!

21st century skills, the brain and Google

Twenty first century skills are the backbone to innovation in business and competitiveness in global markets. Our children have to be taught how to think outside of the box and become creative thinkers. Textbooks aren't producing the types of employees innovative companies need. We must change course...rethink the way we train students to think and learn.

In my opinion, this begins at birth. The brain is ready to make connections and lots of them the day a baby is born. We have to stop telling ourselves that babies aren't "ready" for experiences and learning (because they are 'just babies'). Repetitive language, experiences and activities over time are necessary for hard-wiring the brain to think at a high level and in an innovative fashion.

Google has mastered the brain's formula. The brain makes associations to develop memory. For the brain to make associations it must have an infinite number of experiences by which to attach prior knowledge to make a new association. For example, if you are searching in Google or your brain for that matter, for information about poetry, you will retrieve information on poetry and other material that is associated with poetry. You will probably be connected to or reminded of famous poets and writers. You will recall or be directed to information on how to write, writing styles, penmanship, rhyme, classes being offered for poetry, music and art. All of these topics are associated with poetry.

However, in our current education system we teach in a linear fashion where students learn information a mile wide (lots of unconnected concepts, skills and information) and never connect most of that learning in a deep way to other concepts or apply it in a real world fashion. The brain doesn't retrieve information from memorized lists, charts or textbook questions which is the exact way most children are being taught to learn (and hopefully retain) skills and information today.

According to a recent survey conducted by Harris Interactive for the American Society for Quality (ASQ)- a professional association that offers training and tools to educators and businesses - adults agree with educators that schools are not making 21st-century skills a priority.

In fact, 96 percent of adults believe that students today need to improve upon the skills needed to succeed in the 21st century. Skills listed by adults and parents as needing more development include organizational skills, communication skills, problem solving and reasoning, creativity, teamwork, and science and technology skills.

Early education is the key!

Parenting in 2009

How are parenting trends going to change in the new year?

Perhaps, parents will spend more time creating an environment full of joy for learning and exploration for their kids in the home instead of worrying about overstimulating them with every possible toy and extracurricular class.

So in a time of recession, could it be that parents invest more of their own time with their children instead of money? Could this economic recession bring the end to "keeping up with the 'Jones'?" Could this economic recession help parents across our great country once again embrace the idea that "less is more?"

For young children, less toys, less scheduled classes away from the home and less at birthdays. While giving less to the things that don't really matter for long-term happiness, success (school and life) and relationships you have many other things to offer more of: love, time, conversation, exploration and nature. All of these things are what will make your child great! They also create in your child less whining, less selfishness, less wants, less anger and less depression.

I believe we will see a greater sense of community and less concern about giving kids every thing they want but more of what they need.

Let's society work together in 2009 to spend more time with our children to develop stronger literacy, emotional health and higher order thinking skills that children will benefit from in the long run. Let's stop thinking about this semester or this year when it comes to life and understand life is journey. We make choices on that journey that last a lifetime - good or bad! Early education is the key to happiness and success.