You can bite this banana, but how do you spell it? Don't worry, you get two chances

In the days of high-stakes testing, it’s hard to imagine the stress for parents who want nothing better than to send their progeny to private school, starting in kindergarten or even earlier. Actually, it’s not at all hard to imagine: the insanity of the process in New York City was documented brilliantly a few years back in the documentary “Nursery University.”

Taking an expensive intelligence test known as the E.R.B.  is tough enough, but now the New York Times reports that some well connected pre-schoolers (well at least their parents) are finding ways for them to take the test twice, just in case they had a bad day. The test, along with letters of recommendations and interviews, are all part of deciding who gets admitted.

In the overall scheme of parents-who-will-do-anything to get their kids in, finding a way for them to get a second chance at the E.R.B., an intelligence exam, isn’t as extreme as say, bribing a nursery school director or offering to build a gym, pool or a playground. (which would come as no surprise).

Still, it raises issues of fairness, say some education consultants and parents who object  to the idea that some students are quietly getting a do-over to boost their chance of success. And those students tend to be connected to the school (via an alumni or sibling) or perhaps are offspring of a celebrity, the Times notes. adding that the second test can provide an edge because “more often than not, children fare better.”

The mandatory $510 exam “is among the most nail-biting experiences in a parent’s life, ” and it’s already under attack “because of widely available preparation materials,” the story notes.

Some might argue that charging $510 for an exam that helps a child gain admission to a school that will ultimately cost as much as $35,300 annually is already unfair.

The best solution, of course, would be to offer more free, high-quality pre-kindergarten to all children, regardless of income, with a fine public school system to follow.  But in New York City’s public system, as in the private system, the number of seats in the most coveted schools does not meet demand. And so the testing and the gaming continues.

Private school consultant Amanda Uhry is spot on when she tells the Times: “These are private schools –  it’s their rules.”

“A substantial number of Head Start programs are so ineffective that they do little or nothing to boost child development and learning,” said W. Steven Barnett, director of the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Ron Haskins, co-director of the Brookings Institution’s Center on Children and Families, co-authored the op-ed with Barnett.

Center leaders have not entirely welcomed the proposals. Some are worried that competition would be costly, and could create more uncertainty and possibly chaos.  Large centers have expressed concerns that they’ll be singled out simply because their size could lead to more problems.

The Post piece comes as a new, must-read collection of papers assessing federal policies for early childhood education and child care was released by NIEER,  entitled “Investing in Young Children: New Directions in Federal Preschool and Early Childhood Policy.”

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, once the star of "Kindergarten Cop,'' has signed bill raising the age students can enter

The motivation in the cash-strapped state is surely helped by an estimated $700 million in savings for delaying about 120,000 children each year, according to the Associated Press. However, the plan signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger also adds another grade level before kindergarten, out of concern for parents who were counting on a free year of public school instead of having to pay for childcare or a private preschool program.

The move was applauded by the advocacy group Preschool California, and its president Catherine Atkin . The new bill comes after numerous studies have shown that younger children aren’t ready for the academics of kindergarten.

“Study after study has shown that these younger kindergartners are the ones most likely to experience difficulty in schools, Atkin told the Associated Press. “We know that when you give them an additional year of preparation it helps them become confident learners.”

The state will phase the change in one month at a time over three years starting next fall, in a move to make sure all children are 5 by Sept. 1 instead of the current date of Dec. 2.

Hector Ramsammy, 5, spent his first day of kindergarten wandering the hallway. (Photo courtesy New York Daily News)

It’s often frustrating to read stories about mix-ups involving the littlest learners, especially when it’s hard to know exactly what happened and why.  Today’s New York Daily News, for example, carries a heart wrenching tale of a five-year-old boy wandering the hallways of his overcrowded elementary school in Queens after his mother fought to get him in the same zoned school where his three older siblings attend.

When school officials finally agreed to enroll the boy, they left him to wander the hallway with a teacher instead of putting him in a class.

“My feet hurt,” the boy told his mom after a day of walking instead of learning numbers and letters and meeting his new classmates.

There are plenty of other details in the story, and some are quite strange, including one that says the school inexplicably escorted the little boy home one day without reaching his parents first. The school did not answer questions about the incident, but the New York City Department of Education was spurred into action, the story notes.

Big push on in Minnesota to get more kids ready for kindergarten

Lots of states in financial stress are struggling with ways to maintain pre-kindergarten programs — or any publicly funded programs at all that help parents and children get the skills they need to start school. Minnesota is one of those states with a budget deficit and big ambitions.

A group known as Ready 4 K is pushing hard for a new policy plan they want lawmakers to consider in the upcoming sesison, according to a story in the Manakota Free Press. The plan is asking lawmakers and three candidates for governor to support a range of initiatives, from home visits and parent education for first time parents to community partnerships around early childhood investments and a statewide quality rating system for programs. They would also like to see a statewide early education department.

Similar efforts are going on throughout the country with mixed results. Often, what starts as a small grass roots movement turns into a larger, more effective campaign and then into actual public policy. But only with funding.

“This is going to have to be public money,”  Karen Kingsley, Ready for K’s director of policy and civic engagement, told the Free Press. “It isn’t cheap.”

All this is one reason why EarlyStories is taking note of a new report that calls for increasing the compensation of early childhood workers and providing bonuses, earned tax credits, and loan forgiveness programs. The Boston Globe wrote about the report, sponsored by the Bessie Tartt Wilson Initiative for Children, a  Boston nonprofit that works to improve early education, especially for disadvantaged students.

The report comes at a time when the majority of child-care workers in Massachusetts earn less than $25,000, and as the state — like many in the U.S. –  confronting a compensation crisis, causing many child-care workers to leave the industry. How are states and municipalities handling this crisis? How can we improve education at all levels if we don’t start with our littlest learners and those who guide them?

The readiness of kindergarten students for work -- and play -- varies widely

Children have always developed differently, but in kindergarten the differences are less physical and more about school readiness. That’s why it was interesting to read Emily Alpert’s exellent piece on the first day of kindergarten at Ocean Beach Elementary School in San Diego, for the website Voice of San Diego.

At first, it looked like it was going to be another in a long line of stories proclaiming kindergarten to be “the new first grade.”  And while there was some attention paid to the concept that kindergarten does come with new and higher expectations, the story did a good job at looking at the many differences between students who have attended pre-school before kindergarten and those who have not.

The differences can be vast.

“Some children had been prepped in preschool and some hadn’t,” Alpert noted, writing about the first day of school. “Some were six months older or more, giving them an edge in maturity and motor skills, while others, often younger, had trouble focusing on a task or froze up when given directions. When they sat down to draw self portraits, one boy took a single crayon and scribbled wildly — a sign that teachers monitor for motor skills — while a girl with pigtails neatly sketched a face and added pupils and eyelashes.”

In California, there’s much context to the debate, as lawmakers want to set new age limits for children entering kindergarten. They can now enter if they turn 5 by early December, but there’s movement to change the date to September and provide all the students whose birthdays fall inbetween to get an extra year of “transitional kindergarten.”

Cut-off dates for kindergarten entry in the U.S. now vary from state to state, and even from district to district. With all the talk about setting common standards, EarlyStories would love to hear some thoughts on what works best, and what the right age is for entering kindergarten. Would changing the dates help the U.S. in its goals to get more students to graduate from high school? If students entered kindergarten a bit later, with more preparation, would it ultimately help their academic performance? What kind of success have transitional programs had, and are there some good role models to exam?

Wendy Levey of the Epiphany School says she'll interview parents "all night" if needed

It might seem as if the push to get into one of  New York City’s most prestigious and pricey nursery schools is an old story, but quotes like these remind readers that it’s not just the city’s übercompetitive parents who are keeping the frenzy alive: “I will interview parents all night if I need to,” Wendy Levey, the director of the Epiphany Community Nursery School, told The New York Times. 

The school has just 150 students ages 2-5. Levey and her school became well-known to viewers of the hilarious “Nursery University,” a documentary that a New York Times reviewer wryly noted would be well-received by those who “thrill to the sight of a preschool teacher bringing an investment banker to his knees.”

Levey’s comment about interviewing parents came in a story that described an “annual rite of Manhattan education … the crush of applicants to private nursery schools and kindergartens” that won’t take applications or even phone calls requesting them until the day after Labor Day.

One look at the competition and the prices — the 92nd Street Y, for example, will set parents back just under $15,000 for a three-day-a-week program for 2-year-olds, and just under $26,000 for a five-day program for 4- and 5-year-olds — might drive more reasonable parents to move to, say, Brooklyn. They might hope to live near a free public pre-kindergarten program.

Turns out, that is easier said than done. A story in the New York Daily News last week proclaimed getting into public school prekindergarten in certain Brooklyn neighborhods to be “harder than getting into Harvard,” while another noted that a record number of children were squeezed out of Brooklyn’s most popular — and crowded — pre-k programs.

Lesson? There’s a huge need for more high-quality pre-kindergarten programs — both public and private — to serve the many New  Yorkers who want to raise their children in the city and give them the best possible start. Supply does not come close to meeting demand.

Time to test for giftedness?

EarlyStories had a chance to participate in an interesting conversation about gifted children recently on the BAm!radio network, where a number of views were presented.

Joan Franklin Smutny, the founder and director of the Center for the Gifted at National-Louis University, said gifted children express  creativity and a unique problem solving ability, and said she believes giftedness can be determined easily in the early years. “It’s very important to nurture their nature….there are so many expressions of giftedness.”

Smutny maintains that no test scores are needed to identify a gifted child, and said they are hungry for new challenges. She said giftedness should be identified early so special attention can be paid to their education, while Clara Hemphill, an author and editor, argued that there is no need to test and isolate gifted children.

Hemphill said the  focus should instead be on educating all children while giving them additional opportunities.  Hemphill had an interesting piece on the topic recently in the New York Times. “What happens to gifted kids is what often happens to all kids that don’t fit the mold,” Hemphill said. She said it’s most important “to work harder,”  to provide opportunties for all children.

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.