Think of the tens of BILLIONS nationwide being wasted on pre-k, like the $8 BILLION per year Head Start program that finally said it doesn't work.
Report: Poor children lag behind despite 4K
S.C. ‘not succeeding’ with at-risk students, though some districts are bridging achievement gap
03/21/2015 8:55 PM
03/25/2015 2:27 PM
The study found:
▪ Poor children in poor districts who enrolled in 4K were more likely to pass end-of-year exams in math and reading than poor children in those districts who did not attend 4K.
▪ But, even after attending 4K, the success rate of those impoverished students was no better than that of poor children in wealthier districts that do not have the state’s free 4K program.
▪ Success rates of students in the K4 program varied dramatically from school district to school district. Students in some districts did well, with almost 90 percent passing the state’s third-grade math test. But performance was dismal in others, with less than 1 in 10 passing that test.
▪ Poor children who enrolled in 4K had “consistently lower” achievement levels on state tests than did all students statewide. More... http://www.thestate.com/news/politics-government/politics-columns-blogs/the-buzz/article15758306.html#/tabPane=tabs-b0710947-1-1
▪ Poor children in poor districts who enrolled in 4K were more likely to pass end-of-year exams in math and reading than poor children in those districts who did not attend 4K.
▪ But, even after attending 4K, the success rate of those impoverished students was no better than that of poor children in wealthier districts that do not have the state’s free 4K program.
▪ Success rates of students in the K4 program varied dramatically from school district to school district. Students in some districts did well, with almost 90 percent passing the state’s third-grade math test. But performance was dismal in others, with less than 1 in 10 passing that test.
Just more of the same BS.
ReplyDeleteNotice that the "poor" children are treated as if they were all the same.
I can just about assure you that they are not. If they broke the "poor" down into subgroups by race and sex or even marital status of parents, I'm sure they'd see some more interesting results.
Also, why would they stop funding themselves? Success or failure isn't the issue. It's whether or not the educracy is being well-fed.
One of the things we usually hear whenever we say that spending more money on a problem won't solve it is "How do we know, we haven't spent all the money we possibly could yet".
These people are just detached from reality because they think they have an endless supply of funds for whatever failing projects they wish to support.
That, or they'll talk about all the "soft" results from these programs which mean those kids won't go to prison as often as the kids who didn't participate in the program.
These aren't usually based on actual longitudinal studies of actual results from actual students, but are typically based on some pinhead academics projections using bogus values for missing data.
That, of course, and the fact that the Perry Preschool project or some other carefully run experiment (which were ENTIRELY different animals from these programs) showed that black ghetto kids from the 1960's did better after being enrolled in them.
So they love to compare those apples to their oranges and say they will get the same results, because they're all "preschool". Oh, yeah, that works.
I wonder if they've thought about all the externalities involved in these projects. Such as the early introduction of "white" people into the lives of these young black, urban, poor kids at a time when whites and blacks did not mix much, especially in the "ghetto". Maybe these kids grew up with different attitudes towards "The Man" as they grew up that the more criminal element lacked. Possibility? Yes. Will we EVER know? No.
But it's too late to modify those experiments, so we'll never know if intervention by "black" professionals would have worked as well vs.
special attention by "white" professionals in changing future lives of poor black children of the 1960's.
After all, the Perry Preschool project was done at a time when black people were convinced that integration would solve all their problems.
Even black educators were convinced that their jobs were done once they could get their kids in front of white teachers in white schools with white students. That's how strong their belief was.
Maybe there was a placebo effect that wasn't considered. Or maybe actually knowing some helpful and caring white people really helped them adjust better to the larger society.
Maybe that's what REALLY happened. Better socialization through exposure to white professionals.
Which they could have controlled for by sending in some black professionals. Which I seriously doubt that they did at that time.
(I'm basing this on some documentaries I've seen of this from PBS. And I recall seeing a lot of WHITE female teachers who were in on that. You know, the same kind of teachers they don't want teaching black kids now.)
We'll never know because society has changed too much in three generations to faithfully repeat those experiments.
I couldn't imagine my 4 year old not going to pre-school because he does learn an awful lot, but and this is a big but, I think it has helped me more. We talk endlessly after pick up about what he learned, what the letter of the week is and reviewing words that start with that letter (if he wasn't in school I might not have realized how to practice this), picking up ideas on how to teach him to start writing, his teacher tells me he is really into counting patterns and copying them with Legos and we then do this same Lego organizing and building at home (and on and on about what we do with the information WE learn from his school). A fabulous, has it all together, natural teacher stay at home mom could do the same with her 4 year old at home, I am not so clever (plus I don't mind the break).
ReplyDeleteBut what I am getting to, is it boils down to what the parent is teaching at home. My husband and I are great at picking up and embellishing what he is being taught at school and feel we have it together to continue this in grade school. So these poor kids in the above report do not have parents who know how to teach, don't care "because someone else is doing it", they are too ignorant to realized that teaching and play go hand and hand. I doubt the pre-school teachers are asking the parents to continue the learning at home. But we also just find beauty and knowledge in the most mundane things about the world and have always passed this thinking to our kids, so they both find beauty and awesomeness in the most mundane things. I think there is a big problem with these poor kids who parents never teach anything, not even simple things like "when we walk down the stairs lets count them together". It seems so natural to people like you and me that are on this blog, but how do you get this kind of mind set to these parents?
I read a report awhile ago, that kids who grow up with dads that count to 3 or 10 and then throw them up in the air, or pool ect, these kids excelled in math or at least always stayed at grade level in math during school. They think that counting and measuring of time/counting down did something to the babies brains and started the hardwiring of mathematics or....maybe just having a dad and not coming from a single parent household is a more simpler reason for good math skills in the future and not because their dad threw them in the air since they were a baby.
Maybe it's how some people's brains are wired.
ReplyDeleteHere's a simple analogy that just happened to my wife and I.
Both of our driver's licenses came up for renewal at the same time in the past month. We all drive, but when you have to take a sign test that you haven't had in 5 to 8 years, a little panic sets in.
You know the signs when you drive - or should - but to identify them looking through a stereo viewer in a DMV office is different.
I printed out the signs and began to study them and when we would be driving, I would point and say outloud what that sign was. My wife thought I was nuts. When time came for me to take the test, I aced it.
Since my wife still had a month before her time was up, I kept telling her she better study. Finally, about three days before the appointment, she started freaking out. I had numbered the signs, made a copy and began calling them out to her. She was failing miserably.
If my wife had taken my advice, studied the signs farther out and did what I did while driving and call out the names of the ones she came across, her life would have been easier.
We had sign class several times that weekend and she finally got them correct on a consistant basis. She took the test the next day and aced it.
Driving is such an automatic response for most people that it wouldn't surprise me that someone who is completely competent on the road would fail a test.
DeleteWhile there are some fairly decent road simulators out there, NONE of them are at the DMV, or involve looking through those weird viewers they have.
"They think that counting and measuring of time/counting down did something to the babies brains and started the hardwiring of mathematics or....maybe just having a dad and not coming from a single parent household is a more simpler reason for good math skills in the future and not because their dad threw them in the air since they were a baby. "
ReplyDeleteYou've hit on an excellent point, I think, that is missing from many of these studies. And that is careful thought about ALL the externalities. As you've noted, it may be the counting, or it may be the fact that there is a father to count.
Most of these studies don't do a good job of looking at placebo effects, either.
And nowadays, they don't even need to do a real experiment where actual students are put through an actual trial program with all the rigor that goes with such things.
They can just mine data and extrapolate curves and come to some conclusions and publish them as a "study".
If you really wanted to tighten something like the most famous study, Perry Preschool, you would probably also need to give some of the kids a "placebo" education. Something which looked like teaching in every way except what it was actually doing. So you'd need visits, some activity, people who looked and acted the part, etc., etc.
Without that, you don't know if just the fact that someone (most likely white and educated) showed up and cared made all the difference in those young, black lives. To some of them it could have been quite an inspiration, even if nothing of real significance was actually done.
If forces like that were in play, then it is very unlikely that similar programs would get the same results today as they did 50 years ago.
But no one wants to even consider those possibilities. They'd rather just ignore other external factors and give all the credit to the "program" and say that we need more like it.
Maybe a cheap placebo program would work just as well. Or maybe neither would get the same results today. We'll never know. It's just too politically incorrect to even consider today.
People really do not take seriously the effects of magic, mojo, placebos and expectations on experiments involving people. That despite numerous studies which show the most bizarre and often unexpected things can influence results.
ReplyDeleteIt may sound silly, but when social science experiments are done properly, those kinds of things CAN be accounted for. Some even become famous for showing exactly how these bogus factors can get tangible results.
Even recently, there has been a study which showed that Parkinson's patients who simply thought they were receiving a more expensive drug did better than those who thought they were receiving a cheaper drug.
http://www.medicaldaily.com/parkinsons-patients-perform-better-when-they-think-theyre-taking-expensive-drugs-319844
Now, with those kinds of results for real medical conditions, then why can't something similar be happening in education?
Just make those poor ghetto kids think they are getting some help from a highly paid "expert" and they might feel better about themselves for decades.
We'll never know. Because no one dare asks. Or dares to do the study.
Obama is the one person who could make the most simple minded, uneducated or undereducated people understand, that ensuring your children go to school everyday, listen to their teachers, don't disrupt class and do what it takes to capitalize on seizing every opportnity in school to succeed and have a better life.
ReplyDeleteBut he hasn't and probably won't.
All he wants to do is expand government and make pre-K universal.
I think we've seen enough of Obama to know that he's mostly more of the same. It's the classic "field" vs. "house" mentality still at work.
ReplyDeleteThe blacks at the top get more benefit from trotting out the sad tale of woe of "field" folks when they want sympathy and more goodies for the themselves. And they have benefitted from all this. It's just that the "trickle-down" hasn't.
I really do not think they care. Even with the president's "bully pulpit" you won't hear much to encourage people to help themselves instead of letting big "bro" do it for them.
Instead, Obama and his group seem more interested in making things worse for those at the bottom by excusing their misbehavior and making it even harder for them to achieve mainstream success outside of government largesse.
They want those people to stay at the bottom where they have no choice but to support their enablers and handlers.
Unfortunately, it's what our "democracy" has become. It's just another way to get those votes.
I hear what you're saying but preschool is one of those things that I have to ask myself, "What would Mr. Rogers do"?
ReplyDeleteIf I were a public official, I'd have a difficult time denying children a quality preschool experience. It's the mommy in me.
Alicia
Here's the problem as I see it.
DeleteOur son was in "daycare" for the first 4 years of his life, with a friend of ours keeping him for almost 3 years.
She read to him, did flash cards, etc. So did we except we spent more time teaching him to read and to love to learn to read.
We paid for his daycare, no one else, not the government.
Since data is now showing pre-K does no better than what we paid for after first grade, then why spend all that tax money on those programs?
Well, I always found Mr. Rogers to be just a bit creepy. I wouldn't doubt, though, that his TV shows do as much as most pre-schools do.
ReplyDeleteThe other problem with these studies is that they will do a really intensive preschool experience for a study, get some "success" then everyone uses those results to say ALL preschool will get similar results.
Preschool is really all over the place. Often not really that different from simple babysitting.
Also, I might mention that pre-school here in Hong Kong is not free.
ReplyDeleteBut the government does provide vouchers to help pay the costs. The vouchers are around US$2500/yr. Not sure how far that goes towards paying preschool costs, though, since costs vary from reasonable to ridiculously high. I don't think it gives anyone free preschool.
Singapore has done a slightly better job, though, and Hong Kong is looking at their system.
Still, though, people here are willing to pay A LOT for education. It is a MAJOR expense for most families, often competing with rent and far surpassing utilities, food, and even clothing for most. People truly sacrifice for the education of their children.
Expats such as ourselves have absolute NO viable "free" alternatives for education in English, for example. And are lucky to even find a school in many cases.
There are some English schools for "English-speaking minorities" such as the Nepalese, but their standard of English and instruction in general is not very high, considering the usual demographic they serve.
The Cantonese schools (vast majority) are a no-mans land for anyone who did not grow up in Hong Kong speaking Cantonese. Only a very few expats dare send their children to these. Also the teaching style is very rigid, so most get to other schools as soon as they can.
Hong Kong, though, does NOT try to educate "everyone" in the same school, as the US tries. If you are disabled, for example, you go to a school which specializes in the disabled.
I've been trying to figure out what they do with the kids who are "discipline" problems. As far as I can determine, they just kick them out of the private schools. I know our school threw out a few, and they were really not that bad by US standards. Just your standard bullying and cheating stuff.
Probably not even a "suspension" warranted by today's standards.
Not sure what the government schools do with them.
Most kids just do not seem inclined to misbehave in school or much of anywhere else.
We live near a "squatter's village" here and it's very safe. So are the public housing projects all around the area. It's not exactly "crime free", but it is extremely safe.
I think the money HK spends on public education is probably a good investment. For one thing, the people here really care about education, so I don't think it really goes to waste.
I'm not as sure about the US.