So if we are being advised to wait until age 6 to begin school, and the first-grade curriculum is now taught in kindergarten, the kindergarten I once knew has effectively been eliminated. No wonder there is a drive for universal preschool. Preschool is the new kindergarten.
The reason schools have pushed down the curriculum to younger students? Higher test scores mean more cash, because the state pegs teacher bonuses to academic performance index improvements. So now children are being prodded to work at a level above what may be developmentally appropriate -- especially for those children with "late birthdays" who actually start kindergarten at 4 -- so the schools can earn bonuses for improving performance. But at what cost to the kids?
It seems that advocates of universal preschool believe the solution to problems in our schools is to simply add more school. Yet if the funds proposed to create universal preschool were used to boost teacher salaries and hire more classroom aides, it could make a big dent overnight in the so-called teacher shortage.
Teachers need to spend less time chasing bonuses and more time considering the problems inherent in pressuring children to read a year earlier than they used to, before the existence of API scores and the cookie-cutter Open Court reading program.
If school is drudgery from the start, it's no wonder that the Los Angeles Unified School District has a high dropout rate. I'm hopeful that kindergarten will one day be a hazy memory for my son, but I'm fearful that it will set the tone for the remainder of his school years.
