Raymond and Dorothy Moore are not strange names to most home schoolers. Their 'Better Late Than Early' attitude towards learning/teaching, won me over with child #1 who would often nearly cry during a phonics lesson the first year that I tried to teach him to read. (This child who struggled at 5 and 6, tested at 10th and 12th grade levels by the end of 7th grade BTW.)
The Moores were likewise no strangers to "early childhood education" and the push that the government often will give it. They began their battle for homeschooling after "an article first published in Harper’s in 1972, at the time when California was considering a law to make school compulsory for children as young as 2 years, 9 months."
As election time nears, this issue is being brought up so I thought it appropriate to share the following study with you.
Below, if you feel like reading:-), you will find that the Early Childhood Education Program (aka "high quality program"- with certified teachers and the works!) that was pushed in my state, TN, had some interesting results.
It seems that the children who were in a ECE program fared better in K and 1st, but by the time the students were in 2nd grade, there was NO significant difference in the children who were in these programs compared to those children who were not.
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The Pre-K Now report praises Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen (D), calling him "among the
nation's leaders in high quality pre-K innovation and funding." They note that Gov. Bredesen's pre-K investments have increased by more than 200 percent since fiscal year 2006 and he's recommended another 31 percent funding increase for fiscal year 2009.
The Tennessee program is considered a gold-standard. It meets 9 out of 10 criteria for a high-quality program set by the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER)--such as preschool teachers with teaching credentials, small class-size, and comprehensive early-learning standards.
Yet, despite this extremely high quality program, an interim study on the program's progress done for the Tennessee Comptroller's Office finds no lasting academic value for Tennessee students who participated in the public pre-kindergarten program.
Two groups of students participated in the study. The first consisted of pre-K students who were identified in assessment records and then individually matched to the second group - other students with the same demographics who did not attend preschool. As the study's authors note "this rigorous precision matching technique was employed to construct a random sample of non-pre-K students that matched the pre-K group as closely as possible in all possible respects given the data available for the analysis."
The report conducted by Ohio-based Strategic Research Group finds that the advantages of participating in Tennessee's public pre-kindergarten program disappear by the time students reach the second grade.
The study shows that children who attended pre-K performed better in reading, language and math in kindergarten and in the first grade than students who did not attend pre-school. However, by the second grade, there was no statistically significant difference between those who went to pre-K and those who did not.
(*********Taken from the Reason Foundation.)
2 comments:
I like this post. I am planning to homeschool my children, but I did think about preschool just a couple of days a week (actually my husband wanted to). I talked with my pediatrician (whom I love) and told him we were thinking about it. He said, "Why? What is the point? He will just come home sick all of the time and it only gives them an advantage for the first few years anyway."
Enough for me - no thank you to early education except at home!
EOL,
Great thinking! So glad to hear that a pediatrician knew this kind of stuff!!!! I've met a lot who believed in such programs, who did not know about these other studies.
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