Standarized Testing – Education – Schools – Test Scores – New York Times
In response to the [high-stakes] testing [now pervasive in the American educational system], kindergartens across the country have become more demanding: if kids must be performing on standardized tests in third grade, then they must be prepping for those tests in second and first grades, and even at the end of kindergarten, or so the thinking goes. The testing also means that states, like students, now get report cards, and they want their children to do well, both because they want them to be educated and because they want them to stack up favorably against their peers.
Is this really how we want our children educated, according what to some bureaucrat in Washington thinks your children should know? Do you really think that our children are getting the education that they need when the schools are simply teaching them to memorize the facts that they will need to know to pass the SOL tests? I don’t know about you, but I don’t want my child to only be able to regurgitate whatever someone tells them is fact. I want my children to be able to think for themselves, to be able to examine an issue from all sides and to be able to formulate their own opinions on the matter. In short, I want to teach them how to think, not how to memorize. A computer can spit back facts about anything you store in it, children need to be able to think and evaluate and learn in order to live.
All involved in increasing the age of kindergartners — parents, legislatures and some teachers — say they have the best interests of children in mind. “If I had just one goal with this piece of legislation it would be to not humiliate a child,” Dale Folwell, the Republican North Carolina state representative who sponsored the birthday-cutoff bill, told me. “Our kids are younger when they’re taking the SAT, and they’re applying to the same colleges as the kids from Florida and Georgia.” Fair enough — governors and state legislators have competitive impulses, too. Still, the question remains: Is it better for children to start kindergarten later? And even if it’s better for a given child, is it good for children in general? Time out of school may not be a gift to all kids. For some it may be a burden, a financial stress on their parents and a chance, before they ever reach a classroom, to fall even further behind.
Despite what they all say, their goal is not necessarily in the interest of the children, their interest is in how the school performs on the SOL tests. Some kids may do better going into kindergarten later than others, and that should be something that the parents decide, not decided by an arbitrary cutoff date.
So parents wait an extra year in the hope that when their children enter school their age or maturity will shield them from social and emotional hurt. Elizabeth Levett Fortier, a kindergarten teacher in the George Peabody Elementary School in San Francisco, notices the impact on her incoming students. “I’ve had children come into my classroom, and they’ve never even lost at Candy Land.”
Is this how you want your child to grow up, unable to cope with losing or failure? Children need to learn how to lose gracefully, and that they can’t win or succeed at everything they attempt. We as parents should not be shielding our children from anything that could hurt their feelings, that is doing them a disservice, because they will not know how to deal with it later in life. You see this same kind of thing with parents that go nutso with disinfectants. They buy the Chlorox wipes, the anti-bacterial soaps, they don’t want their children to touch anything dirty. How is a child’s immune system supposed to be able to develop to handle these things when they aren’t exposed to them?
[Jane Andersen] used to encourage parents to send their children to kindergarten as soon as they were eligible, but she is now a strong proponent of older kindergartners, after teaching one child with a birthday just a few days before the cutoff. “She was always a step behind. It wasn’t effort and it wasn’t ability. She worked hard, her mom worked with her and she still was behind.” Andersen followed the girl’s progress through second grade (after that, she moved to a different school) and noticed that she didn’t catch up. Other teachers at Glen Arden Elementary and elsewhere have noticed a similar phenomenon: not always, but too often, the little ones stay behind.
This is yet another symptom of our public schools, everyone in the class is given the same treatment, the same goals, and the same testing to determine if they are reaching those goals.
That the social skills and exploration of one’s immediate world have been squeezed out of kindergarten is less the result of a pedagogical shift than of the accountability movement and the literal-minded reverse-engineering process it has brought to the schools. Curriculum planners no longer ask, What does a 5-year-old need? Instead they ask, If a student is to pass reading and math tests in third grade, what does that student need to be doing in the prior grades?
This is exactly backwards, as the author of the article has stated, the schools are setting their goals by working backward from what the SOL tests expect the students to have learned.
In a report on kindergarten, the National Association of Early Childhood Specialists in State Departments of Education wrote, “Most of the questionable entry and placement practices that have emerged in recent years have their genesis in concerns over children’s capacities to cope with the increasingly inappropriate curriculum in kindergarten.”
This is a function of our having government funded public education. Do you think that parents would put up with their school failing their children to this degree if they were writing the check for tuition every month instead of getting “free” public education (where the costs are hidden in your state or local taxes)?