![]() Farran's study, where 70% of the kids were white, found interactions between race, gender, and discipline problems, but no extra effect of attending preschool was detected.Connecticut Public offers newsletters to keep you up to date on news, programming, contests, events, and fun educational items. Other studies have suggested that Black children are disciplined more often in preschool, as they are in later grades. We know from other research that the control of children's bodies at school can have disparate racial impact. In other words, regularly reprimanding kids for doing normal kid stuff at 4 years old, even suspending them, could backfire down the road as children experience school as a place of unreasonable expectations. And if anything, they're learning sort of an almost allergic reaction to the amount of external control that they're having, that they're having to experience in school." ![]() "I think children are not learning internal control. ![]() One of Farran's most intriguing conjectures is that this need for control could explain the extra discipline problems seen later on in her most recent study. You have to walk through the halls, you know: 'Don't touch your neighbor, don't touch the wall, put a bubble in your mouth because you have to be quiet.' " "And then, if you have to use the cafeteria, it's the same thing. You've got to take your children out, line them up and then they wait," Farran says. "So if you're in an older elementary school, the bathroom is going to be down the hall. Putting these same programs in public schools can make the whole day more inconvenient. And there is outdoor play space nearby with equipment suitable for short people. Children eat in, or very near, the classroom, too. There are bathrooms just off the classrooms. Private preschools, even home-based day cares, tend to be laid out with little bodies in mind. "One of the biases that I hadn't examined in myself is the idea that poor children need a different sort of preparation from children of higher-income families." Do kids in poverty deserve the same teaching as rich kids? In short, Farran is rethinking her own preconceptions, which are an entire field's preconceptions, about what constitutes quality pre-K. Even something as simple as where the bathrooms are. How teachers are prepared, how programs are funded and where they are located. So what went wrong in Tennessee? Farran has some ideas - and they challenge almost everything about how we do school. Boston's program spent more per student, and it also was mixed-income, whereas Tennessee's program is for low-income kids only. This study found that the preschool kids had better disciplinary records and were much more likely to graduate from high school, take the SATs and go to college, though their test scores didn't show a difference.įarran believes that, with a citywide program, there's more opportunity for quality control than in her statewide study. The study was a similar size to Farran's, used a similar quasi-experimental design based on random assignment, and also followed up with students for years. In May 2021, a working paper (not yet peer reviewed) came out that looked at Boston's pre-K program. The research on pre-K continues to be mixed. To put it crudely, policymakers and experts have touted for decades now that if you give a 4-year-old who is growing up in poverty a good dose of story time and block play, they'll be more likely to grow up to become a high-earning, productive citizen. About 7 in 10 4-year-olds now attend some kind of academic program. ![]() Preschool has been expanding in recent years and is currently publicly funded to some extent in 46 states. Federally funded universal prekindergarten for 3- and 4-year-olds has been a cornerstone of President Biden's social agenda, and there are talks about resurrecting it from the stalled-out "Build Back Better" plan. It's a bad time for early childhood advocates to get bad news about public pre-K. "This is still the only randomized controlled trial of a statewide pre-K, and I know that people get upset about this and don't want it to be true." Why it's a bad time for bad news But her study design was unusually strong, so she couldn't easily explain it away. A statewide public pre-K program, taught by licensed teachers, housed in public schools, had a measurable and statistically significant negative effect on the children in this study.įarran hadn't expected it. "In third grade, where we had seen effects on one type of suspension, which is minor violations, by sixth grade we're seeing it on both types of suspensions, both major and minor." "Whereas in third grade we saw negative effects on one of the three state achievement tests, in sixth grade we saw it on all three - math, science and reading," says Farran.
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