Barbara Beatty, professor of education at Wellesley College, recently wrote a piece Huffington Post. Her article, The Looming Fight Over Obama’s Pre-K Plan: It’s Not Just About the Money, looks some of the critical issues that DEY is working on.See below:
“Some educators now worry that Obama’s pressure on states to adopt the new national Common Core State Standards that mandate academic content and accompanying tests — which win points in U. S. Department of Education Race to the Top grant applications — will harm young children. Members of the Alliance for Childhood, Defending the Early Years, and others protest that forcing what they see as developmentally inappropriate academic content onto five-year-olds will turn kindergarten into the new First Grade. Teaching and testing academic skills will be pushed down even further, into pre-kindergarten. Already on the wane, time for unstructured “free” play from which children thrive educationally and learn important social lessons about cooperation and sharing, values necessary for citizens in a democracy, may almost disappear.”
Click here to read the entire article: The Looming Fight Over Obama’s Pre-K Plan: It’s Not Just About the Money.
“Some educators now worry that Obama’s pressure on states to adopt the new national Common Core State Standards that mandate academic content and accompanying tests — which win points in U. S. Department of Education Race to the Top grant applications — will harm young children. Members of the Alliance for Childhood, Defending the Early Years, and others protest that forcing what they see as developmentally inappropriate academic content onto five-year-olds will turn kindergarten into the new First Grade. Teaching and testing academic skills will be pushed down even further, into pre-kindergarten. Already on the wane, time for unstructured “free” play from which children thrive educationally and learn important social lessons about cooperation and sharing, values necessary for citizens in a democracy, may almost disappear.”
Click here to read the entire article: The Looming Fight Over Obama’s Pre-K Plan: It’s Not Just About the Money.
