Money, money, money...

I was recently reading another blog, "Education on the Brink" (educhange.blogspot.com) about funding issues in education. Right now the discussion is centered on temporary financial assistance to the hurricane-ravaged South. A plan is necessary to get the thousands of displaced children back in school.
I think this situation has a lot to do with our crisis in early childhood education. We seem to throw money toward "quick fixes" to temporarily help certain early childhood sites. The fact remains, as I mentioned in an earlier entry, that early childhood educators and workers are grossly underpaid. This creates a serious situation when we expect these early childhood care-givers to guarantee the child is prepared for kindergarten. Somehow we need to provide long term financial assistance for early childhood educators to obtain a college degree and acquire the skills to understand the development of children. Teachers with these skills tend to create classroom atmospheres that are developmental and support the skills research indicates are appropriate for preschool children. Money placed in early childhood programs will reap rewards throughout the education system.

Appropriate Preschool Standards

In my last entries, I mentioned how preschool assessment is here to stay. Knowing that assessment or monitoring must occur, it is also appropriate to know what skills are being assessed. Most states have recently created or updated their preschool standards reflecting current researched practices, particularly in language, literacy and mathematics. Through checking many current state standards, I find that the required skills are generally the same for preschool throughout the country. Occasionally an off-the-wall standard appears, but usually the indicators are very similar. The one problem I see in some state standards, as well as federal Head Start standards, is that many times the skills are not listed in the devleopmental order that they should be introduced and mastered. Hopefully, state school programs, early childhood organizations and early childhood curriculum authors will provide some guidance on skills that have a developmental order of mastery.
I had a 'reality check' while visiting a Head Start classroom. The teacher was having the children sponge paint a pattern. It was evident to me, after observing for 30 mintues, that the children had no idea about creating or repeating a pattern. I asked the teacher if she had done any classification/sorting activities (a necessary skill in order to create a pattern). She replied, "No. We will do some classification activities sometime this year." When I looked at her curriculum plan it was evident that the skills were all randomly placed within each domain. This is why I think it is necessary to make sure any standards are placed in the appropriate order and sequence.

Assessment will continue

Whether early childhood experts like it or not, we will be forced to continue to assess preschool children. As I mentioned in the last entry, I think it is appropriate that we are accountable for helping children with school readiness skills prior to entering kindergarten. One of the hindrances in assessing preschool children has always been the fact that many early childhood educators are poorly paid and poorly prepared educationally to create effective and authentic assessment tools. As long as early childhood programs continue to have low wages, teachers without educational degrees will be filling the positions. This leads to a lack of expertise when it comes to evaluating the progress of individual children. When this happens, assessments that are not developmentally appropriately administered creep into the system. In this day of fairly homogeneous early childhood performance standards, the appropriateness of an evaluation is not in what is evaluated, but how the evaluation occurs within the early childhood setting.
I believe that the beginning of a good preschool assessment system begins with good assessment tools. Using these tools in a developmentally appropriate way is what makes the assessment authentic and accurate.

Leave No Child Untested

With No Child Left Behind (Leave No Child Untested), there is increasing pressure being placed on preschool programs to prepare children to enter kindergarten. In fact, the current National Head Start Test (NRS) is an excellent example of how government is insisting that preschool programs be accountable for preparing children to enter school. In discussing reauthorization of Head Start, Congress recognized that the NRS is poorly designed and has ordered scientific researchers to analyze the assessment and make it a more effective tool. Unfortunately, Head Start Agencies must continue to administer the poor assessment until it is analyzed and made more appropriate.

While I have no problem with being accountable for early childhood services, I am concerned about our ability to place a national standardized assessment on a four year-old child. Early Childhood professionals recognize that to paint an accurate picture of a child’s school preparation, there must be observation, analysis and formal assessments within the classroom environment to authenticate the information. Can a standardized assessment really do that? Are we going to be able to develop a system that will give us an accurate picture of the child’s learning? Given the track record of other standardized tests, I am not sure we can create an accurate instrument.