I don't talk much about my work here, but here's an article that presents essentially the same story about preschool that we're trying to advance with the research I'm involved in. The idea is that more and more preschool has been about cognitive readiness (ie letter naming, counting, vocabulary) rather than social and emotional readiness. This circumstance is thanks in large part to the No Child Left Behind Act, which mandates academic testing at various educational levels. For preschoolers it's not high-stakes testing, in the sense that the individual students never get held back based on their performance on the test; however, the results do affect the preschools themselves, particularly in the area of funding. This pressures teachers to teach to the test, likely at the expense of whatever they were teaching before NCLB came along. And in preschool this means social and self-regulatory skills -- skills that (according to the article) are vital for later academic success.
The project I work on puts mental health consultants in the classrooms, not only to work directly with kids on their self-regulation skills, but also to work with teachers and administrators on developing strategies for teaching these kinds of skills. My job is on the research side, managing various data collection efforts and doing the analysis to see what the effects are.
MORE: Allison makes the point that pushy parents might be partly responsible for overstressing academics and cognitive skills with young kids. This seems reasonable enough, but I'm guessing those kids who have parents who push them academically already have a lot of the social and self-regulatory skills the article is talking about (since, after all, they have supportive and engaged parents). I should have mentioned before that the research I do is only with disadvantaged kids in some inner-city Chicago neighborhoods -- kids whose parents are less likely to be supportive and engaged, for whatever reason. My sense is that these are the kids the article is talking about -- kids who might not be getting those preliminary behavioral skills at home, but are nevertheless pushed to perform academically so that their Head Start can keep its funding.
Interesting article. I definitely agree that there's pressure to push really young kids academically, although I don't think it began with NCLB. I posted my thoughts on the subject on my blog.
I think the pushiness of parents is a symptom of the disease -- parents want quantifiable results from a preschool, and taxpayers want quantifiable results from their government programs. I know standards are important, and school progress has to be measured somehow, but I do get frustrated that so much attention is paid to test scores and less to the development of the whole child, whether the child is yuppie spawn or a disadvantaged child from the inner-city.
Again, I'd love to see a study of the effects of a more child-centered curriculum on preschool kids (even better if they are disadvantaged, since most Montessori and Waldorf schools tend to serve the upper-middle class).
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