Early Childhood care and education is receiving more and more attention on the national level. Many organizations like the National Center for Children in Poverty, Children's Defense Fund, and others are working continuously on making better lives for children and families. They do this by promoting the benefits of good health, education, and overall well-being for children. Through their research, data is reported to states to help develop policies and laws affecting the early care and education of children.
One strategy that I think that is being used is to promote school readiness in children. Various research has proven that children who are school ready, have fewer academic, emotional, and behavioral problems. They achieve more later in life and become an asset to their communities. Organizations and advocates are promoting school readiness by the development of early learning standards. These standards say exactly what a child should know and be able to do within an age range. Although I am not in favor of "cookie cutter" child care programs, I am in favor of having a strong basis on which to begin the work in early childhood education. I am not in favor of dictating how the standards should be met or a mandated curriculum. By allowing teachers to develop their own lessons and activities, he/she will be able to meet the individual cultural, and academic needs of her/his students. I do not think that all children from all demographic areas learn the same way. When I visualize using standards, I think of traveling on a journey. If you have no plan or map, you will drive around aimlessly not getting anywhere. The same is true for teachers in an early childhood classroom. The standards present a plan from which they can develop a path for the journey.
In Louisiana, early learning standards have been developed and child care programs are starting to be trained on them. By 2015 all early learning programs including public PreK, Head Start, and private child care will be mandated to use these standards. I do think this is a good idea. All programs will be working from the same plan so that the end of the journey is school readiness. Not all children will follow the same path in getting there but the end result should be school readiness.
Miss Jo, the more I get to know you, the more I want to sit down and share a pot of coffee with you. If we meet in the middle of the country, that brings us close enough to Chicago to call it good. Do you ever think we will have a national definition of "school ready"? I sometimes feel like all this talk is just a mask we wear in the US to cover up poverty. Would it make more sense to spend our efforts to pull as many kids out of poverty instead of standardizing early childhood to meet the needs of testing companies? I don't expect you to have the answers to those questions but I do think we would have a lot to talk about over coffee!
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