It’s been a busy month for zero to five in the news, but here are a few good picks for your reading pleasure. Please let us know what you’re reading!
"An Industry of Mediocrity" (The New York Times)
“Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. And those who can’t teach, teach teaching.” Bill Keller starts his column with these harsh words, but he quickly contrasts them with his experience in a Harlem classroom and possible solutions for the challenges facing our nation’s teacher education programs. He advocates investing in teacher training—making teachers' colleges more selective, providing students with more rigorous study, and mandating sustained, intense classroom experience accompanied by master coaching. At Teachstone, we’ve been following this issue closely, particularly after the National Council on Teacher Quality Teacher Prep Review, which found “an industry of mediocrity, churning out first-year teachers with classroom management skills and content knowledge inadequate to thrive in classrooms."
With the introduction of CAEP’s new standards, and the alarms being sounded by this report, there’s hope that we may see change in the short term. We’ve found that there are many programs looking to integrate a stronger focus on interactions as a key way to improve teacher preparation. To support these programs, we’ve put out a series of resources to support professors and their students. I’m currently running a working group of teacher education professors and deans, and I’ve heard the message loud and clear: we want to be developing effective teachers, and classroom interactions are a key factor in creating high-quality educator preparation programs.
"Preschool Quality Can Be Measured, but States Aren’t Getting It Right" (Daniel Willingham Blog)
In preparing for a webinar with Terri Sobel, lead author of the study "Can Rating Pre-K Programs Predict Children’s Learning?" published in Science in August, Terri shared this blog post. It’s a great summary of the Science findings as well as a nice introduction to QRIS and how experts measure quality in early childhood education. There have been lots of articles as a result of the findings in Science, but this post does a great job of distilling the issues and explaining why we’re missing the mark. If you like the post, I hope you’ll join our webinar with Terri on January 23rd (details coming soon on our webinar page) to learn more about this study.
"Language-Gap Study Bolsters a Push for Pre-K" (The New York Times)
A new study out of Stanford showed that children from higher income homes have a significant language advantage over children from lower-income homes. This isn’t surprising given what we know from previous studies, but what is remarkable is how the difference in language exposure can make such a huge difference at such a young age. By the age of two, "affluent children had learned 30 percent more words in the intervening months than the children from low-income homes.”