School daze

What do you think the following list of skills represents?

- Knows first and last name, age, birth date, address and phone number.
- Knows the letters of the alphabet.
- Knows some rhymes, poems, and songs.
- Identifies objects in picture books.
- Prints own name.
- Counts to 10.
- Knows size, position, and directions; for example, big and little, up and down.
- Uses alternate feet going down stairs.
- Completes simple puzzles.
- Throws and catches a ball.
- Draws and colors beyond scribbling.
- Cuts with scissors.
- Recognizes and names colors and shapes.
- Names body parts.
- Dresses self.
- Follows one- and two-step directions.
- Stays on task.
- Cooperates and interacts in group experiences.
- Speaks clearly and uses sentences.

According to the First 5 Sacramento Commission, a Sacramento County (CA) board concerned with early education, it's the skills that children should develop in order to succeed in kindergarten. Not that are to be developed in kindergarten, but that children should have when they enter kindergarten. You want to know what they're supposed to know coming out? Look here.

The Sacramento Bee for April 7 writes on the changing nature of California kindergartens.

Driven by an era of accountability, curricular requirements have teachers and students moving at a more demanding pace, one that can overwhelm many children - especially those who lack preschool experience or enriching home lives.

The changing environment is setting off alarms. Educators fear the pressure will turn children off to school at an age when it's crucial to introduce the joys of education. Parents, who for years have debated whether their emerging 5-year-old was socially ready for kindergarten, now fear academic failures and even labels.

This is madness, utter insanity. Five-year old children being labeled academic failures? Failing kindergarten?

Pressure to have students ready for standardized tests at second grade essentially has shifted curriculum standards up a year. Where kindergarten once accustomed children to socializing with others and preparing them to read and do math, it now has them learning complex concepts, teachers say. The days of "graham crackers and naps" are gone. ...

Faced with a changing environment, educators have crafted several solutions. Some districts have lengthened the school day for 5-year-olds, created a "junior kindergarten" program that simplifies the curriculum for struggling students or provided a midyear kindergarten-prep option for students who are not 5 years old by ... the cutoff for kindergarten.

Longer school days. Kindergarten-prep. And did you catch the meaning of the middle one? Remedial kindergarten!

Not enough? There are moves on to make kindergarten mandatory (only 15 states now do) - and even go beyond:

[M]any [educators] believe in publicly funded universal preschool for all 4-year-olds. They say it will lay the foundation for demands of the new kindergarten classroom. Advocates hope to place an initiative calling for universal preschool on the June 2006 ballot.

So we're already talking about going beyond mandatory kindergarten to mandatory pre-school. And then what? Pre-pre-school for three-years olds to prepare them for pre-school so they won't fail kindergarten and be labeled academic losers for the rest of their lives?

I say again, this is utterly, utterly insane and, I dare say, doomed to failure. Instead of helping to develop the "life-long learners" we hear about, these sort of exponentially-expanding demands couldn't do more to take the joy, take the pleasure, out of learning than if they'd been consciously designed to do so. They will only succeed in creating even more frustration and discouragement in more children - children whose rate of development does not match the numbers in this sort of tick-off-the-checklist education. It will turn school into even more of a chore than it already is for many, ultimately into just one more competition to be won or lost.

And, I suspect, in some minds that's the point. So let me amend what I said to "doomed to failure at its claimed intent."

Just over 10 years ago, George Will declared "'Back to 1900' is a serviceable summation of the conservatives' goal." (Boston Globe, January 2, 1995) "Back," I replied at the time, "to a time when the elite were in their mansions and the rest of us were expected to know our places, live lives of servitude without complaint, and then die without making a fuss." And a time when education beyond the basics was still unavailable to many and higher education almost exclusively a privilege of the rich. The notion of free, universal public education has stuck in the craw of many elite conservatives who don't like the fact that it can give the lower orders disturbing ideas that could upset the natural order of things.

So I can't help but wonder how much of this drive for "higher standards!" measured by standardized tests, with more and more demands placed on younger and younger children, is a very welcome, warmly encouraged, development for the elite among us, who know that the rich home environment their wealth allows them to provide, a sort of environment that everyone agrees improves the chances for early educational achievement, gives their kids a leg up in the academic competition school threatens to become, one during which, they imagine, the lower sorts will be weeded out, leaving the upper rungs of the educational ladder again a function of privilege.