A Special Section on Personalized Instruction Accountability Shovedown: Resisting the Standards Movement in Early Childhood Education

Abstract

Mr. Hatch sees the proliferation of standards for early childhood settings as that threatens the integrity of early childhood professionals and the quality of educational experiences for young children. DURING THE 1980s, early childhood educators waged a battle to resist attempts to require more and more of young children at younger and younger ages. This movement to push expectations from the primary grades down into kindergarten and preschool programs was characterized as by the mainstream early childhood educators, who argued that young children were not developmentally ready for the academic emphasis of such an approach. David Elkind, an articulate spokesperson for the early childhood community, argued that young children were being miseducated in settings where they were experiencing stress from academic pressure for no apparent benefit. In The Hurried Child and Miseducation: Preschoolers at Risk, Elkind provided powerful indictments of curriculum shovedown and related attempts to make children grow up faster.1 My view is that the standards movement - so pervasive across educational settings today - is threatening children in early childhood in the same ways as the curriculum shovedown movement did in the 1980s. The point of attack has changed from curriculum to outcomes, but the consequences for young children may be the same. Standards for such federal programs as Head Start are already in place, and the discourse in many states and across the early childhood field assumes the inevitability of standards.2 After all, who could be against standards? Who would have the nerve to say that standards are not important? Who would try to build an argument toward the conclusion that standards are somehow bad? Not I, certainly. I am all for standards in early childhood education, unless they fail to pass muster in the 10 areas discussed below. 1. Pressure on children. I support standards for early childhood programs - except when the implementation of those standards puts children as young as 3 and 4 at risk of feeling pressured in the classroom environment. Elkind noted that young children experience significant and sometimes debilitating stress when they are expected to perform at academic levels for which they are not ready. Further, he argued that waiting until they are ready puts children at no real academic disadvantage in the long run.3 It is axiomatic in early childhood that children develop at different rates. Some young children will be ready to meet the challenges of the new expectations associated with the standards movement; many will not. Holding all children to the same standard guarantees that some will face failure. And just setting up a situation in which failure is possible creates stress for even the most capable child, who might be wondering if he or she is achieving high enough or fast enough.4 Getting children to do more sooner sounds like a logical way to cure the ills of education. But ask someone who has comforted a child who cries because she cannot distinguish between a 3 and a 5 or who has coaxed a child to keep trying when he refuses to demonstrate (once again) his inability to match the letters with the sounds. Those who know young children understand that putting them under stress is an unacceptable by-product of accountability efforts designed to achieve dubious educational advantages. 2. Pressure on teachers. I see standards as vitally important in early childhood education - unless they are used in ways that put pressure on teachers to abandon their mission of teaching young children in favor of teaching a core set of competencies. The pressure to accelerate achievement gets translated to teachers as Do a better job of getting your kids up to the standards - or else. If meeting the standards is what is valued in the school where they teach and if student performance provides the basis for how they are evaluated, teachers will feel pressured to meet the standards and to raise student performance. …