Early childhood researcher Dale Farran says we failed to preserve kindergarten as a gentle introduction to school where play and child-led exploration set the agenda.
Now, she fears prekindergarten is traveling down that same path. Farran is an emerita professor at Peabody College at Vanderbilt University and the co-author of a well-regarded longitudinal study of Tennessee’s voluntary statewide pre-K program.
Vanderbilt researchers followed 2,990 Tennessee children from low-income households. They compared the outcomes of children enrolled in pre-K between 2009 and 2011 with peers who weren’t able to secure a spot and were primarily in home care with parents or relatives. The study was a randomized controlled trial, the gold standard of research for determining cause and effect. It’s the only such study ever of a statewide pre-K program.
The recent update found children who attended pre-K fare worse by sixth grade on academic and behavioral measures, and receive more special education referrals than those who did not. The results confirm early gains at the end of pre-K fade, for which several hypotheses exist — too much focus on easily taught rote skills and a failure in elementary grades to capitalize on what children learned.
The findings have prompted defenses of pre-K from advocates. Kevin Carey of New America said that while the study raises credible concerns, “It’s useful to start with what privileged people give to their own children. Where are their 3- and 4-year-old children educated? Many are in pre-K at tuition-free public schools.”
A distinction in Georgia pre-K is that the state funds programs in private centers and public-school settings. And, unlike Tennessee, Georgia pre-K is available to families regardless of income.
A developmental psychologist with a half-century of experience, Farran believes housing pre-K in schools has caused the programs to lose the central thread. The complexity and idiosyncrasy of 4- and 5-years-olds demand in-depth training in child development and the importance of play-based experience. Many high-achieving countries, in fact, don’t start formal instruction until children are 6 or 7.
“I became quite concerned that if we were to turn the care of 4-year-olds over to departments of education, we would really be doing the children a disservice. Because pre-K would become a grade below kindergarten,” said Farran.
That same fate befell kindergarten, Farran said, because of an assumption that an achievement gap in high school could be solved by pushing didactic instruction onto younger and younger children. So, rather than children being exposed to a range of creative options with teachers who acted more as guides, kindergarten began to resemble upper grades with large group activities and teacher-led instruction.
“I have a colleague whose 4-year-old child was getting ready to go to kindergarten and so they made a visit,” she said. “The child looked around the classroom and said there is all grown-up stuff in here — desks, pencils, notebooks.”
In observations of pre-K classrooms, Farran found teachers talk 80% of the time when addressing the whole group of students. In small groups, where the purpose is greater child participation, teachers talk 84% of the time. It’s essential for teachers to listen to pre-K students, she said, to figure out what they know and how to build on that.
“We have good neurological data that children actually learn language through conversation. We rarely see conversations in classrooms between adults and children,” she said.
Rather than asking young children open-ended questions, too many teachers pose what Farran called “knowledge” questions in which children are expected to respond with a one-word answer. “We also see a lot of behavior disapproval — children being told what they’re doing wrong, that they need to sit down, that they need to make better choices.”
The result, she said, is that while pre-K students learn basic readiness skills, they don’t develop the traits essential to school success — curiosity, self-regulation and independent problem-solving.
When the first phase of the Vanderbilt study in 2015 revealed declining academic performance in third grade, Tennessee improved its program with the Pre-K Quality Act of 2016. But Farran believes more needs to be done to steep teachers in the science of brain development.
“I am excited that our results have led to so many discussions because we weren’t having any discussions before, blithely going along saying pre-K is great without any real notion of what it meant or what pre-K was,” said Farran. “Our latest data have forced people to start talking. By talking about it, maybe we can turn things around.”
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