nothin Kindergarten Crisis Declared | New Haven Independent

Kindergarten Crisis Declared

Allan Appel Photo

Re-examine your curriculum from birth to third grade. Reduce your overreliance on testing. Increase creative free play.

That was the message delivered Thursday to the testing and evaluation-driven New Haven schools by the Gesell Institute of Human Development.

School officials and the mayor agreed in principal with the recommendations of Gesell Executive Director Marcy Guddemi (pictured), but said in effect, Hold your horses.

Mayor DeStefano said working on the early childhood front would have to wait at least until 2011, as a new citywide school reform plan ramps up and deals with tiering, evaluation, and tracking the success or lack thereof of New Haven’s high school graduates.

The occasion for this back and forth was a conference Thursday at the Omni Hotel marking the New Haven-based Gesell’s 60th anniversary and the release of its three-year study on early childhood education. (Click here for an article on another Gesell campaign: the importance of recess.)

Comparing reading to walking, Guddemi said, Some kids walk at nine months, some at 15 months, and we know that early walkers are not better. Age 4 readers have no advantage over those who read [for the first time] in third grade.”

Guddemi’s institute studied 1,300 kids ages 3 to 6 and determined that child development has not changed” in the past century.

What has changed is kindergarten, with so much academic content that it is now called the new first grade. And what used to be taught in kindergarten is now taught in pre‑K.

You can’t push developmental milestones until the brain is ready,” she warned.

Pushed kids tend to hate school. She said the study revealed pre-schoolers are being expelled at a higher rate than students in high school.

Our nation is experiencing a crisis,” as a result, she declared.

The evidence is that the No Child Left Behind Act has failed; the achievement gap has grown; and the high school graduation rates continue to fall, she said.

Why? For Guddemi the answer is simple: the failure of early childhood education as currently being conducted from sea to sea.

One of the conference’s keynoters, Joan Almon of the Alliance for Childhood in College Park, Maryland, said that her original research revealed nationally that kindergarteners are devoting two to three hours a day to literacy and math, with 20 to 30 minutes of that for testing.

Only 20 to 30 minutes a day are given to free choice and play activities, which she said are the main ways small children learn.

New Haven Supervisor of Early Childhood Education Tina Mannarino (at right in photo with Gesell’s Andrea Sambrook) essentially agreed. She said the city is poised to work with Gesell’s findings, especially the notion that early childhood” means birth through grade three or about 8 years old.

Our system isn’t set up to look at kindergarten in its own light,” Mannarino said.

It’s just one of ten grades now that a principal has to oversee, instead of being seen as the portal to later academic achievement, she said.

After hailing Oct. 14 Gesell Day” in the city, the mayor said that in the 1990s New Haven added many early childcare slots and made some advances regarding early childhood teacher training and certification.

The largest achievement gap between city kids and suburban counterparts on state mastery tests is in the third grade, he said. So he called it appropriate that we return [to reviewing with more scrutiny the quality of] early childhood.”

He added that not all local educators agree about how much free time to include in schedules versus how much time for academics.

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