Sorry for the lack of content around here lately. This week and next are busy and a little bit odd for personal and professional reasons. Plus I've been busy watching the GOP meltdown over Foley and his enablers.
On Wednesday I had a chance to go see Gene Maeroff, the former education writer for the Times and more recently crusader for school quality in the lower grades. He has a new book out about PK-3, which is the somewhat modish grouping for pre-K thru 3rd as an educational unit -- sometimes even in a separate school or building. The underlying thinking is what I've written about a number of times before here, the idea that 1) children acquire life skills that serve as a foundation for later learning while they're still quite young, 2) failure to acquire these skills is hard to reverse, and 3) educational intervention (ie tax dollars) are better spent in the early grades than in high school or college. This thinking is backed up by study after study, but it's not (yet) reflected in policy, possibly because it's somewhat counterintuitive -- just looking at the term high school vs the term pre-school you can see that our educational system is conceived and constructed with different priorities. The point is that from a policy standpoint, we should be putting our money in pre-K thru 3rd rather than high school, and the big question is, how do we get that to happen? There was a lot of discussion of the details of PK-3 at the Maeroff talk, but this big question went essentially unanswered.
Post a comment