November/December
2008
Universal preK brings new challenges for
public elementary schools
by David McKay Wilson
In 2005, when Boston mayor Thomas Menino announced
his plan to make prekindergarten available to all four-year-olds
in the city, parents and early childhood advocates applauded this
initiative to add a 14th year to the city’s public school
system.
Three years later, after preK classrooms were
established in 50 of the city’s 67 elementary schools, educators
say implementing the mayor’s vision has proved to be a major
challenge. There were facility issues: none of the classrooms had
running water or bathrooms, so administrators lobbied to build toilet
facilities in the rooms—at the cost of $35,000 each. There
were oversight issues: many of the elementary school principals
weren’t sensitive to the needs of four-year-olds, so Boston
established a professional development academy for administrators
faced with the prospect of educating preschoolers.
Then there was the impact on the elementary schools
where those four-year-olds were getting ready for kindergarten.
When those students turned five, they were so well prepared that
the district had to retool its kindergarten curriculum to keep pace
with children much more ready to learn.
The issues faced in Boston are similar to those
experienced by educators across the country as they grapple with
the flood of public support for preschool education. PreK is the
fastest-growing sector in public education, with scores of elementary
schools adding preK classes or developing early childhood centers
for young children. But adding another grade to a school isn’t
as easy as it sounds, especially when those being taught are three
or four years old.
“At the outset, elementary schools
are gloriously unprepared to serve preschoolers,” says Jason
Sachs, director of early childhood for the Boston
Public Schools, who is in charge of implementing Menino’s
vision. “With the district’s support, we’ve made
great strides. It has been a fascinating ride.”
Spreading the Benefits of PreK
Since the late 1990s, the push for universal preK
has caught the fancy of politicians and education leaders in many
states. Advocates tout high-quality preK as a crucial element in
comprehensive school reform, citing numerous studies that show a
variety of benefits, particularly for low-income students. Some
studies show that children with solid preK backgrounds are more
prepared for kindergarten, with bigger vocabularies, the ability
to recognize some letters, and a sense of how to interact with peers
and adults. Others provide evidence of long-term economic and social
benefits, in addition to academic gains (see Research
Points to the Long-Term Benefits of Preschool, HEL,
January/February 2006). Public preschool has also been a boon to
working parents in search of quality care for their children.
Critics, however, question whether research findings
indicate the likelihood of significant benefits for middle-class
children. And they cite evidence that some of the gains of high-quality
preK may fade out by third grade. A recent study by the Tennessee
Center for Policy Research, for example, found that the state’s
program failed to provide long-term benefits.
Nevertheless, public funding for preK continues
to flow to early childhood programs, and much of it has gone to
public school systems (see The
Many Faces of Universal PreK). Public spending for preK rose
to $3.7 billion in 2006–07, a 12 percent increase from 2005–06,
and two-thirds of the children attending publicly funded preschool
are in public school programs, according to the National
Institute for Early Education Research. State-funded programs
in Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Maryland are predominantly located
in public schools. In Oklahoma, school districts are required to
provide half-day preK, and by 2011 they’ll have to offer a
full-day program. Some states also provide funding for three-year-olds.
“Now it’s just another grade
in school, except that it’s voluntary,” said Ramona
Paul, assistant state superintendent of education
in Oklahoma, where 70 percent of the state’s four-year-olds
are attending preK in public schools.
In Yonkers, N.Y., a diverse urban district bordering
New York City, four-year-olds have attended preK in public schools
for the past decade. Students learn letters, numbers, shapes, and
colors, part of a curriculum map that’s linked to the state
learning standards. A 2008 study of student performance on state
English language arts and math exams found that 64 percent of students
in grades 3 to 8 who attended Yonkers preK classes attained proficiency
on the English exam, compared to 48 percent who did not attend preK.
In math, 72 percent who attended preK were proficient, compared
to 59 percent for those who didn’t.
At Scholastic
Academy in Yonkers, about half the preK students are English-language
learners. All instruction at Scholastic is in English. “We
see them coming in not speaking English, and in six months, they
are speaking it fluently,” says principal Taren Washington.
“They pick up so much through their interactions with other
students.”
An “Activity-Based” Curriculum
Early childhood educators say that a quality preK
experience can lay the foundation for learning in upper grades by
focusing on language development, fine motor skills, and social
and emotional learning. Many programs work on preliteracy skills,
teaching letter and number recognition as well as basic counting.
But just how much academics is taught, and how it is taught, is
a subject of considerable debate among early childhood educators
and researchers. Private preK providers say some public school teachers
and administrators aren’t in tune with the proper instruction
for this age group and may try to adapt lesson plans they’ve
used for kindergarten or first-grade students.
“It must be very activity based,”
says Oklahoma assistant superintendent Paul. “The children
need to be interacting with each other and [with] materials in the
room.”
Even more than their older peers in elementary
schools, three- and four-year-olds learn best by engaging in activities
through exploration and interaction with their agemates, early childhood
experts say. They don’t do well with direct instruction. Drilling
four-year-olds with flash cards doesn’t work. Neither do worksheets,
sitting at desks, memorization, or focusing on handwriting skills
before a child has the fine-motor skills necessary to write.
Lilian Katz, codirector of the Clearinghouse
on Early Education and Parenting at the University of Illinois,
says that preK students need activities that engage their minds
through investigation, exploration, and close observation of what’s
going on in the world. She says it’s premature to focus on
academics in preschool because the children first need to learn
about the world so they know what they are reading or writing about.
“Academic skills need to be put in the service
of your intellectual work,” says Katz, who taught in one of
the first Head Start programs in San Francisco in 1965. “The
purpose of reading and writing is to be able to represent what you
are thinking, observing, and finding out.”
In Boston, finding the right curriculum for preschoolers
in the elementary school setting involved some trial and error.
“There was a tendency to push literacy into preK in a way
that’s not developmental,” says Ben Russell, assistant
director of the Department
of Early Childhood. “Instead of watering down the curriculum
from kindergarten, we’ve found an appropriate curriculum.”
The arrival of preK at the Boston schools in 2005
brought the need for a citywide curriculum, which the district purchased
from publishing houses. The new instructional framework—adapted
from the Pearson Learning Group’s Opening
the World of Learning curriculum—replaced lesson plans
that had been developed on a school-by-school basis and that did
not always promote best practices for four-year-olds. The new preK
curriculum is organized around themes. One week, students explore
the concepts of wind and water, the next week shadows and reflections,
using literacy and math materials based on those themes.
The progress made by students in preK, however,
raised issues for kindergarten teachers, who were receiving students
with more preparation than they were used to. For example, to teach
the progression of numbers, Boston uses a “number line”
to show the ascending value of numerals. Before the city’s
preK initiative, the concept was introduced in the kindergarten
curriculum. Now it’s unveiled in preK, so kindergarten teachers
have to find new ways to deepen the approach to the concept with
students who have already seen the number line. “We still
have work to do at the kindergarten level,” Russell concedes.
A Step Ahead
The benefits of preK instruction in elementary
schools are often appreciated by the kindergarten instructors who
teach those students the following year.
School districts that include preK classes are
finding that students who have attended preK enter kindergarten
a step ahead of those who haven’t. In one recent study, Georgetown
University professor William
Gormley found that children who had been in preK for a year
had a 52 percent increase in letter-word recognition and a 27 percent
edge in spelling over children the same age who were just entering
preK.
Jenny Dorl, a kindergarten teacher at Charter
Oak Academy in West Hartford, Conn., says she noticed a marked
difference in her classroom in 2007–08, when the school’s
first cohort of preK students arrived. They knew how to take instruction
from their teacher, behave in a classroom, and find the bathroom.
They could share, wait for their turn, and be responsible for their
own belongings. They’d learned to follow through on a task
and use language to express their needs. The preschoolers had become
part of the school, fueling aspirations to take part in activities
they’d seen older children do.
School administrators knew the children too, making
kindergarten assignments much easier. “The kids coming into
kindergarten from preK understood what school meant, and in the
past that has taken some from six weeks to six months,” she
says. “And it took much of the guessing out of placement in
kindergarten classes. We were living next door, so it makes it a
lot easier to produce balanced kindergarten classrooms.”
Making Room for “The Babies”
Space considerations often dictate where preK
classrooms are located. Yet where they are placed can also have
an impact on all students in the school. Some districts place them
in preK–5 elementary schools, while others are included in
preK–8 schools, an increasingly popular configuration in urban
districts.
Carolyn Cobb, Ready
School coordinator for the North Carolina Department of Education,
says she has seen preK classrooms become isolated at elementary
schools. “There was one principal who told me he didn’t
worry about ‘the babies over there’ who were ‘doing
their own thing,’” she says. “We are working hard
to break that [barrier] down.”
On the other hand, having preschoolers in the
building offers new opportunities for older students. PreK classrooms
can provide an outlet for older children who need a break from their
classroom. In West Hartford, for example, struggling fifth graders
discover they can feel effective by nurturing cranky four-year-olds.
One emerging option is the preK–3 school
(see Bridging
the PreK-Elementary Divide, HEL, July/August 2005).
Ellen
Frede, codirector of the National
Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University,
says that having a preK–3 school forces the administrator
to become an expert in young children. She said principals in preK–8
schools can become preoccupied with behavior issues of the older
students or preparing students for the standardized tests, the results
of which can reflect on the administrator’s performance. Creating
a preK–3 school allows school leaders to focus on the younger
students while also integrating preK classrooms into the entire
school, Frede notes. Professional development at a preK–3
school can also be more focused on early childhood development.
“I have been in schools where the preK students
get marched down to the auditorium for a presentation on drug abuse
or the children are sent down to the cafeteria for lunch,”
she says. “That’s inappropriate.”
Educating Principals
Finding ways to educate principals about the needs
of three- and four-year-olds is crucial to integrating preschools
into public schools. Many administrators earned their certification
at a time when school began at age five or six. Others moved up
to the administrative ranks from roles as, say, high school athletic
coaches. They arrive at elementary schools to find preschool children
who are noisy, messy, and don’t want to sit at desks doing
worksheets.
Public school administrators can also be frustrated
because they’ve based their decisions about curriculum and
students on data generated by standardized tests and other assessment
measures, which don’t apply to preschoolers.
Researchers often use assessments such as the
Phonological
Awareness Literacy Screening or the Peabody
Picture Vocabulary Test, on which students respond to questions
to measure the progress of preschoolers in structured settings.
Classroom assessments, such as the Work
Sampling System, the Child
Observation Record, or the Developmental Continuum, allow teachers
to collect data from children in a more natural setting, as teachers
observe student behavior over time and then compare it to benchmarks.
To help instructional leaders adapt to new demands,
Boston created the Schott
Principal Fellowship program, which in 2007 provided a year
of professional development for nine elementary principals. Participants
discussed the social and emotional development of preschoolers and
learned ways to create classroom environments that encourage play
and exploration. The principals met six times over the year and
then visited the classrooms of other principals in the program.
Russell, who served as principal at Boston’s
East
Zone Early Learning Center from 2006 to 2008, prior to taking
his current position at the Department of Early Childhood, says
the fellowship program broadened his approach to engaging his four-year-old
charges. He learned they are quite different from the five-year-olds
in kindergarten, who readily engage with their classmates and play
together.
“Four-year-olds don’t have the same
back-and-forth with each other,” says Russell. “They
see the world revolving completely around them. They are with each
other in the same space but might not be aware of each other. It’s
not as simple as you think, and it takes some adjustment.”
David McKay Wilson is a New York–based
journalist who writes about education and other topics for the New
York Times and for university magazines across the country.
For Further Information
W.S. Barnett. “Preschool Education and Its
Lasting Effects: Research and Policy Implications.” Boulder,
Colo., and Tempe, Ariz.: Education and the Public Interest Center
& Education Policy Research, 2008. Available online at http://epicpolicy.org/publication/preschool-education.
National Institute for Early Education Research,
http://nieer.org/.
D. Olsen and D. Johnson. “Hard Lessons Learned:
Applying 40 Years of Government Pre-K to Benefit Tennessee’s
Children Today.” Nashville: Tennessee Center for Policy Research,
2005. Available online at www.tennesseepolicy.org/publications/studies/S2005_1.pdf.
(PDF)
Pre-K Now, www.preknow.org.
Schott Principal Fellowships, www.schottfellowship.org/.
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