Picking a good preschool: Security cameras, check!
Seven tips for choosing a good daycare center arrived in the Hechinger mailbag today from Kelly Mayberry, director of a daycare in Dallas. Not necessarily bad points. But what’s missing are tips for how to judge what’s happening educationally in an early childhood setting, probably the area most difficult for parents to judge.
In the list below, Mrs. Mayberry warns against places that allow “just playing,” but in fact, children learn from both structured and unstructured play situations. Parents should also look out for what sorts of play materials are provided. Is there sand and water? Blocks? Materials to promote fine motor skills? Activities where gross motor skills can be developed? Do teachers read to children, and if so, do they lead discussions about the books as they read? The Hechinger Report offers a Go Deep section on early childhood education that includes other aspects of a quality childcare program.
Here’s what Mrs. Mayberry had to say:
1. The Center Should Have Qualified & Caring Teachers: The Center should have degreed or qualified teachers. If not – Beware!
2. Classroom Sizes Should Be At or Below State Teacher/Student Ratio: Some centers are private business and focus on profits, rather than the care of the children.
3. The Center Should Always Have Consistent Communication with Parents: Parents should be able to communicate with someone at the center about their child at any time.
4. The Center Should Be Safe and Secure: It’s best to choose a center with Control Access, CCTV, with DVR recording – as the minimum security standards.
5. Quality of Center: You should expect the center to be warm and inviting. It should be in good repair and condition – and conducive to a respectable learning environment.
6. Learning vs. “Just Playing”: Parents should stray away from daycares that just let kids play. These unstructured activities lead to many children getting injured.
7. Sanitation: The Center should have a daily cleanliness policy to reduce germs and viruses.
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder’s impact on children
A summer guest of EarlyStories, Susan Sawyers, had a chance to participate in a radio discussion recently that focused on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the lives of young children, and its impact on their behavior and ability to succeed in school.
It turns out that the younger the child is at the time of the trauma, the more likely the child’s nervous system will be reset to be extra-responsive to stress since the nervous system develops so fast in the early years. Things like dog bites and near-drowning are major causes of PTSD but child maltreatment is also near the top of the list.
PTSD can lead to impulsive behavior and learning difficulties. It may also affect his or her ability to concentrate, which has implications for success in school.
The experts on the BAM! Radio broadcast, including Dr. Patricia Van Horn and Susan J. Grosse, spoke with host Rae Pica about ways to identify and manage PTSD in children.
You can listen to the show here.
Lessons in early learning from Montgomery County
At a time when budget cuts are derailing public pre-kindergarten programs and other districts are trying to figure out how to integrate early learning, the Montgomery County school system in Maryland is touting a model for success they believe can be replicated to help narrow the achievement gap. The report is available on the website for pre [k] Now.
Montgomery County schools has been lauded by the Foundation for Child Development as an example of “a system that has successfully built bridges from prekindergarten through third grade by aligning standards, curricula, instruction, and assessments both within and across the early grades,” according to a U.S. Department of Education blog entry.
The Maryland school district says that creating clear and specific goals, with support from states and the federal government, is a model that all districts can use, and says that as a result:
- Almost 90 percent of kindergarteners [in Montgomery County] entered first grade with essential early literacy skills
- Nearly 88 percent of third graders achieved reading proficiency
- About 90 percent of 12th graders graduated from high school
- 77 percent of graduating seniors enrolled in college
- Achievement gaps between different racial and ethnic groups across all grade levels declined by double digits
What exactly took place in these schools and how did this district accomplish so much? Are parents clamoring to get their children into pre-kindergarten programs there as a result? It would be interesting to speak with parents in the district and find out how satisfied they are with pre-kindergarten in the county, and with the quality of the teachers and the program. It would be even more interesting to compare the offerings with neighboring districts to see how much the outcomes differ.
Could Title I fill in the early childhood funding gaps?
That’s the suggestion of Danielle Ewen of the Center for Law and Social Policy in an interview on the Washington Post today. She says Title I requirements are flexible enough for school districts to spread them beyond the elementary school years, where they’ve typically been spent.
It’s an interesting proposal: Should Title I dollars be dispersed to help children from zero to five, in particular, kids whose parents don’t make the income cutoff for Head Start but who are still too poor to afford quality care?
In places like New Jersey, where the state is saving money during the fiscal crisis by reducing eligibility for early childhood programs, this might be a possibility. Then again, we’re in a fiscal situation where both/and is hard to do: School districts are also scrambling to keep the elementary programs that Title I helps to pay for intact.
Preschool depression and poverty
The New York Times Magazine has a story about depression among preschoolers this week, which asks whether depression can be diagnosable among young children, and, if so, where it might come from.
The article suggests that maternal depression can play a role, but is not definitive. The author writes: “Despite the assumption that these kids must have experienced severe psychosocial deprivation, abuse or neglect, Luby says: ‘I’ve seen many depressed kids with nurturing, caring parents. We know that psychosocial stress is an important ingredient, but it’s not the only issue. And it’s not a necessary condition either.’”
I was reminded of some of the research in Ellen Galinsky’s new book, which we wrote about here a few weeks ago, that looked at how maternal non-responsiveness can adversely affect infants. In particular this can be an issue among families living in poverty, where family stress can exacerbate the problem.
The Times story doesn’t really get into what role poverty might play in exacerbating depression among young children; she does write about the connection between anxiety and depression. This seems in part because the research is new, but common sense would say that children growing up in poverty would be more susceptible to early onset of depression and anxiety disorders, or at least would have fewer opportunities to combat it in the ways described in the story. I guess we’ll have to wait and see what the future research tells us.
By the numbers: Early education favored more by RttT losers
In defending the Obama administration’s record on early education, officials have occasionally mentioned early education’s role in the Race to the Top competition. But in an analysis over on the Hechinger Report, we found that mentions of early education were more associated with losing applications.
We counted the number of times that finalists in the second round included the terms early education, early learning, early childhood, preschool and prek (which also captured prekindergarten) in their RttT applications. On average, we found that losing states included those words 49 times. Winning states, on the other hand, included the terms about 46 times.
By contrast, other popular words, like charter or standards, appeared hundreds of times in most applications. Some states were more enthusiastic — we counted 84 early ed mentions in Hawaii’s winning application, for example. Rhode Island, which won, and Louisiana, which lost, included the terms less than 20 times.
Our little study was, of course, superficial — beyond counting words, we did not examine the other content of the applications when it came to early learning. So it will be interesting to see whether this trend holds out in the implementation.
Monetizing the work of preschool teachers
Preschool teachers make less than animal trainers; the average salary, at $27,450, is not much higher than the federal poverty level. While this is not news to those in the early education field, an entry in the “Economix” blog the other day has an interesting discussion about why.
The story jumps off the New York Times kindergarten column that went viral a couple of weeks ago, pointing out that early childhood work is a “girly” job, which means it’s a job held mostly by women who are mostly underpaid. And yet research shows that the work can be very valuable for the productivity of the larger society.
Nancy Folbre, the author of the post, seems to suggest that part of the problem is that women tend to be more interested in doing work that is meaningful and fulfilling, rather than work that pays well. (She also writes that “sometimes women don’t choose girly jobs, but end up in them because they face discrimination or harassment in other jobs.”)
As federal government and states push for higher quality early education, which means attracting effective teachers, is relying on the good intentions of women who want to do work that makes a difference even if the wages are low going to be enough to get the job done?
To delay kindergarten, or not to delay kindergarten: a new study tackles the question
USA Today has thrown a new log on the fire in the debate over whether delaying kindergarten is helpful to children. An article yesterday says nearly a million young children could have been misdiagnosed for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) because they’re simply too young to handle kindergarten.
The newspaper had exclusive access to a new study by Michigan State University, which found that younger kids in grades 5 and 8 tended to use Ritalin – the drug often prescribed for ADHD – more often than older kids in those grades. These findings will no doubt add fodder to the many parenting websites out there giving advice on whether to hold your child back from kindergarten to help them achieve in the long run.
This is certainly not the final word on the issue, however. While some studies have found that students do better on tests if they enter kindergarten later, others have found that delaying kindergarten can have detrimental effects on children. And as USA Today points out, often parents don’t have a choice: Preschool can be expensive, and kindergarten is free.
No Child ‘Left’ Behind
It’s International Left Handers Day, a time to celebrate the lefties among us!
It’s also a day to recall that lefthandedness was once stigmatized. One of my colleagues says she would have been left handed, but her kindergarten teacher forced crayons into her right hand until she got the hang of it.
Although some lefties say there is still a dearth of left-handed scissors and left-handed school desks, left-handedness now might actually be a desirable trait in a child. Or so suggest some of the folks promoting today’s festivities, who argue that some research shows left-handed children tend to have higher IQ’s than their right-handed peers.
Feds say early ed wasn’t left out of Innovation Fund
Education Secretary Arne Duncan got on the phone with early learning advocates today to talk about the Investing in Innovation Fund (i3) competition and what’s in it for children age zero to five. The Department of Education announced the competition’s finalists last week, and some advocates say the list gives short shrift to early education initiatives.
On the contrary, was the department’s message today. Duncan, along with Jacquelyn Jones, his senior advisor for early learning, and Jim Shelton, who ran the i3 competition, highlighted 13 out of 47 finalists that they say included early learning as a focus in their applications. The list includes the obvious candidates, like AppleTree and Parents as Teachers, which I wrote about in a previous post on i3. The DOE also included the Success for All and Knowledge is Power applications on the early learning list, however. The New America Foundation’s Early Ed Watch blog is not quite buying it: For a skeptical look at what these applications said about early learning and how they were scored, check out their analysis.
The DOE officials told callers they were “preaching to the choir” in their concerns that early education hasn’t gotten enough attention. They suggested that they would help “spotlight” early learning initiatives that didn’t win this round, perhaps helping them to win funding elsewhere. The rest of the winning applications, with their scores, will be released by next week, so stay tuned.
