The Challenges of Public Pre-K: Organized Chaos or Standardized Childhood?

Despite tight economic times, the nation-wide push for universal Pre-K funded and supported by state and federal legislatures as an integrated program of the public system remains an item on the many agendas. As part of this push, early childhood educators anticipate new challenges helping lawmakers, superintendents, principals, and public school educators understand the unique period of human development that takes place in the years before Kindergarten. Many seasoned public school administrators and principals who have effectively used more traditional teaching strategies to guide and instruct students during the K-12 years based upon a school institutional model, will look at typical high-quality early childhood classrooms and hear only what sounds like noise, and believe they see no measurable learning outcomes and a “lack of classroom management.” The components we strive for in a high-quality early childhood environment may be viewed as a classroom in chaos.

Early childhood classrooms are messier, noisier, require flexibility in daily schedules and reflect a variety of discipline techniques that may seem quite different from those that are appropriate for older grade school children. In addition to these outward differences, Pre-K needs smaller class sizes, special materials and room furnishings– that look like “toys” to many principals, and additional staff in order to provide adequate supervision and care. Total all these factors up with the pressure school systems are under to get children “ready for Kindergarten” and then “Third grade testing,” and many administrators simply see the Pre-K years as race to get the children quiet, lined up and seated. With misguided – but honorable - intentions to bring the Pre-K classrooms and teachers “up to speed” and in-line with the quiet, independent seat-work model required take a standardized test, they risk making a critical blunder.

This is not a new dilemma – for decades the early childhood community has struggled against the introduction of “academic” content into early learning environments, now they will also have to resist the attempts to fit the early years into an “institutional model.” We’ve learned from conversations with supervisors of early childhood curriculum and instruction in school districts around the country that many administrators will adopt school-wide policies for conduct, class management, and evaluation of learning that may be very damaging to the youngest children in their schools. If this is a challenge for your early childhood staff, we’d like to offer a few rules that you can share with the principals and other administrators who visit your classroom to help them better understand the characteristics of a high-quality early learning environment and see the reasons we cannot just standardize expectations we hold for young children in the Pre-K years.

Golden Rules for Organized Chaos:

1. “Work & Play” appear interchangeable. Children are joyfully engaged in doing learning, practicing, and trying tasks in a variety of activities in meaningful ways during a time period or “center time.”
   
2. Listen to the “beautiful noise!” Children’s voices are heard! Children are talking, sharing, and interacting with peers and adults as they participate in the variety of activities.
   
3. All efforts are displayed and celebrated. Children’s work and “products” show a great deal of individual variation – and rather than being displayed with a “grade” or evaluative comment by an adult – the work includes the child’s thoughts about the process of what he did or learned.
   
4. Now you see it-now you don’t. A consistent framework is in place but, the expert planning of the educators is “flexible & invisible.” The children have choices and move about the room freely to places of both quiet reflection and interactive “work & play.”
   
5. Prove it works! Utilize a formative assessment program such as PreschoolFirst.com which weaves developmental learning behaviors appropriate for children 0-66 months of age into play-based curriculum activities to help educators evaluate the meaningful learning naturally inherent in high-quality early childhood classrooms so staff can share those outcomes with parents and administrators.

Share these resources with the decision makers in your district!

National Association of Elementary School Principals. 2005. Executive Summary Leading Early Childhood Learning Communities: What Principals Should Know and Be Able To Do. Alexandria, VA: Author.

Bredekamp, Sue, & Carol Copple (Eds.) 2009. Developmentally appropriate practice in early childhood programs: Serving children birth through age 8. Third. ed. Washington, DC: National Association for the Education of Young Children.