Moving Beyond Fears of Standards

A new two–part podcast on the BAM Radio network doesn’t shy away from what has been a long-festering debate in early childhood circles about academic standards and whether they are appropriate for the teaching of young kids. Let’s hope it triggers more pragmatic discussions about how to implement the standards in ways that recognize how young children learn, instead of feeding yet more fears that standards will reinforce a drill-and-kill mentality.

Forty-two states and District of Columbia have now adopted the K-12 standards that came out of the Common Core State Standards Initiative. These standards, which cover language arts and mathematics, are essentially lists of what students should be expected to know or be able to do by the end of the school year.

Rae Pica, the podcast’s host, opens the debate by asking: “Will they do more harm than good?” Then comes the face-off.In one corner is Ed Miller, senior researcher for the Alliance for Childhood, who questions whether standards lead to a child’s success in school and argues that they come at the expense of hands-on projects and make-believe play. He worries about the harm that he says is caused by didactic instruction and which seems an inevitable accompaniment to standards.  

In the other corner is Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation for Teachers, who argues that in kindergarten and the other early grades, children can be well-served when teachers have a clear set of expectations coupled with a focus on playful learning and social-emotional skills. For example, she says, it is important for young children to have some understanding of the “print environment” and a “sense of numeracy.” “Helping kids learn to count in kindergarten is not a bad thing to do,” Weingarten said. She adds, however, that she doesn’t believe in testing children in kindergarten.

I was fortunate to be part of the podcast as a guest commentator. This gave me a chance to point out that here at the Early Education Initiative, we see standards as important for improving early education settings in pre-kindergarten through third grade classrooms and for helping to overcome inequities between haves and have-nots in today’s schools. Many important debates are now on the horizon on topics like assessment (what tools will be used to determine whether children are meeting standards?) and whether teachers will gain adequate training on how to teach the standards in developmentally appropriate ways.

I hope that educators and parents read the Common Core standards closely, as well as the standards that are becoming part of common practice in many pre-k settings around the country. They are surely not perfect, and content and child development experts should continue to give them a hard look. But critics may find that the Common Core kindergarten standards for reading, for example, align with research on emergent literacy. And they are similar to what many parents already proudly point out to be common practice among their 5- and 6-year-olds.

For example, the standards say that by the end of kindergarten, children should be able to identify the back and front of a book – say, Are You My Mother? By P.D. Eastman – and retell parts of the story with prompting and support from a teacher. They are also expected to be able to comment on differences in illustrations within the book, again with help from a teacher.

And they should also be able to name all upper and lower-case letters of the alphabet and know the long and short sounds of vowels.

That last one — the identification of alphabetic letters and sounds — is a common sticking point. And in the debate on the podcast, Miller said he knows of no research that says children need to start learning such skills in kindergarten to be successful readers later in life. Yet a large study in 1998 showed that without some basic phonemic instruction in kindergarten as well as other skills necessary for literacy, many children will struggle and require additional help in the later grades.  Another key source is the extensive 2009 report from the National Early Literacy Panel which describes several studies that show how specific early reading skills predict a child’s reading ability in the later grades. Many critics rightly point out that the NELP report is too narrow and doesn’t emphasize the significance of other factors too – such reading to young children and giving them space and time to explore and play using language. But that doesn’t mean that we should ignore the soundness of the data on phonemic awareness and letter identification involved in early literacy.

In fact, within the Common Core, the language arts standards also include expectations for speaking and listening, along with a much-needed emphasis on K-3 teachers reading engaging books out loud and encouraging students to voice ideas about what they hear and see. (Many would argue that this oral language piece needs to be present in pre-k standards as well.)

From our perspective, the standards train has already left the station. So instead of endlessly debating whether standards make sense, we need to move on to the next problem: ensuring that teachers are given the support to implement these standards in appropriate and engaging ways. Play-based learning and standards should not be mutually exclusive; in fact, with the help of well-trained teachers, dramatic play and make-believe can be great opportunities for young children to experience the skills set out in academic standards. It’s well beyond time to give early childhood teachers, as well as their principals and directors, the professional development they need to make this kind of learning possible in their classrooms.