The New York Times takes a whole new approach!

THURSDAY, MARCH 13, 2014

Concerning pre-K education: Over the last two months, the New York Times has spilled with reports about pre-K education.

This morning, the paper takes a whole new approach to the subject, in a lengthy report on pre-K.

Here’s the way Kate Taylor started. Can you see what’s different?

TAYLOR (3/13/14): The teacher held up a card with a number on it, then looked at the 4-year-olds waving their hands eagerly in front of her. “Anderson,” she said, calling on a small boy in a blue button-up shirt and a sweater vest.

“Five,” Anderson said, correctly.

“Good boy, Anderson,” the teacher said. Then she turned to the rest of the class. “Are you ready?” she said, and then, “Go!” At that, the children jumped up and down five times as they counted: “One! Two! Three! Four! Five!”

This exercise, which held a prekindergarten class in Brooklyn riveted one morning last week, was not an effort to introduce high-impact aerobics into preschool. It was part of an ambitious experiment involving 4,000 children, lasting more than six years and costing $25 million, and designed to answer a fundamental question: When it comes to preschool, what actually works?

Good God! Week after week, the Times has written about pre-K education—or rather, about the funding of pre-K education. These reports have tracked a political dispute between Governor Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio about possible funding mechanisms.

Obviously, the Times is right to cover that topic. Week after week, though, we’ve wondered this:

Do readers notice that a larger question is being ignored?

As the Times covers possible approaches to funding, the public discourse skips a larger question. What can be done to ensure that pre-K education will work—that it will provide the largest possible benefits for the largest number of kids?

What might make universal pre-K work? Today, the Times devotes a report to this foundational question. We doubt that many such reports will follow. On MSNBC, such questions will barely be discussed at all.

Yesterday, we thought about this general question when we read Salon’s interview with Diane Ravitch. Here’s one of the Q-and-As we have in mind:

QUESTION (3/12/14): What is the policy agenda, then, that the Democratic Party should be putting forward on education?

RAVITCH: The policy agenda should be one of equity, which is to direct resources from the federal government to the neediest schools, where the kids have the highest needs.

To insist that every school offer children a full education that includes not only the basics of reading and writing and mathematics, but science and the arts, and for language and history and civics. Make sure that every school in this country is appropriately funded. That is, that it has the resources that it needs for the children it enrolls. That’s just basic. We don’t do that now.

Ravitch is fighting a very strong fight against privatization and in favor of appropriate funding. In our view, her weakness involves classroom practice.

It’s easy to say you want to give each child “a full education.” But what sorts of “full education” work best for kids who come from low-literacy backgrounds?

Ravitch rarely discusses this point. In fairness, you can’t ask Ravitch or anyone else to pursue every possible question. But within our observable national discourse, no one else discusses these questions either.

Here’s another Q-and-A from the Salon interview:

QUESTION: In a piece earlier this year critiquing high-stakes testing, Randi Weingarten maintained her support for the Common Core standards themselves, on the grounds that they are “a set of standards designed to help make the transition from just knowing and memorizing information to having the skills and habits to apply knowledge, which is critically important in today’s world.” Why do you disagree?

RAVITCH: Well, we don’t know that. The fact is, we have no evidence that the Common Core standards are what we say they are until we’ve tried them. They haven’t been tried anywhere, they’ve been tested—and we know that where they’re tested, they cause massive failure. So I would say we need to have more time before we can reach any judgment that they have some miracle cure embedded in them.

I know, and a lot of teachers know, they’re totally inappropriate for children in kindergarten, first grade, second grade and third grade, because when they were written there was no one on various writing committees who was an expert in early childhood education...They’re also totally inappropriate for children who have disabilities— they can’t keep up. There’s an assumption in the Common Core that if you teach everybody the same thing, everybody will progress at the same speed. And that’s not human nature. It doesn’t work that way.

We don't have a particular view about the Common Core. According to Ravitch, the Common Core standards are “totally inappropriate for children who have disabilities—they can’t keep up.”

Question:

How do the standards work for kids who may be several years behind traditional grade level? More generally: Given the wide disparity in achievement among American kids, how can any set of standards work for all kids in a single grade?

That last question is amazingly basic. We’re not sure that we have ever seen the question discussed.

It’s relatively easy to talk about pre-K funding questions. If you read the New York Times, you seen many reports on pre-K funding in recent months.

You’ve seen very little about the kind of pre-K which will actually work. In truth, that question is light-years too complex for our floundering, low-skill discourse.