You Won't Hear Me Cheering

Tonight, President Obama in his State of the Union address is expected to announce that his administration is going to make early childhood eduction a priority in his second term. According to speculation this may mean adopting all or part of a plan by the Center for American Progress to create universal preschool with a price tag that could reach nearly $100 billion in the next decade.

Holy cow! What's not to love about that? I'm guessing this will be met with cheers right across the political spectrum, at least judging by recent efforts by both Democratic and Republican governors to expand preschool access for their citizens. There will be naysayers, of course, but achieving his goals on this will not likely be among Obama's biggest headaches. 

But it has me worried. Despite the exciting prospect of that much money being directed toward early childhood education, and despite how critically important these early years are, this administration doesn't have a particularly inspiring record when I comes to education policy. I've written extensively on this blog about how the education department under the leadership of Secretary Arne Duncan has adopted much of what I call "the corporate education reform agenda" including increased standardized testing, an over-reliance on direct instruction, longer classroom days, larger classes, de-professionalized teachers (e.g., union busting), privatized schools (e.g., charters/vouchers), reduced access to arts, music, humanities, and physical education, and a desire to push increasingly academic and developmentally inappropriate curriculum standards into lower and and lower grades. It's an agenda that is being driven not by data and research -- because if it was the administration's policies would have a vastly different look -- but by the greed of for-profit enterprises pushing policies that will most quickly fill their coffers.

I'm quite certain that with $100 billion on the table, these corporate "reformers" will be the ones clapping the loudest.

Nowhere is this corrupt influence more evident than in what is called the Common Core State Standards, and particularly those being forced upon children in the K-3 early years. According to a critique written by Edward Miller (teacher and co-author of Crisis in the Kindergarten: Why Children Need to Play in School) and Nancy Carlsson-Paige (professor emerita of early childhood education at Lesley University and author of Taking Back Childhood) that appeared recently in the Washington Post:

Recent critiques of the Common Core Standards . . . (have) noted that the process for creating the new K-12 standards involved too little research, public dialogue, or input from educators . . . Nowhere was this more startlingly true than in the case of the early childhood standards -- those imposed on kindergarten through grade 3. We reviewed the makeup of the committees that wrote and reviewed the Common Core Standards. In all, there were 135 people on those panels. Not a single one of them was a K-3 classroom teacher or early childhood professional.

In other words, it was a committee packed with politicians and business executives, many of whom working for or investing in companies that produce text books, standardized tests, and curricula. This has been this administration's pattern on education policy on every front, listening to the sales pitch from salesmen, while totally ignoring research:

The promoters of the standards claim they are based in research. They are not. There is no convincing research, for example, showing that certain skills or bits of knowledge (such as counting to 100 or being able to read a certain number of words) if mastered in kindergarten will lead to later success in school. Two recent studies show that direct instruction can actually limit young children's learning. At best, the standards reflect guesswork, not cognitive or developmental science.

I will go farther. I don't think it's guesswork at all. It looks to me like these people are quite certain that these standards will redirect large chunks of our education budgets into their own pockets. And now it appears there will an additional $100 billion pot into which they cannot wait to get their greasy hands. Rest assured, if states are going to see a penny of this money, like with "Race To The Top" funds, it will only be if they agree to spend it on what these guys are selling. And what they're selling is bad for children even while it's good for profits.

So you won't hear me cheering when the president speaks of universal preschool tonight, even while I support the concept in principle. I will, instead, be digging in for what will most certainly be a fight to prevent corporations from using our own money to turn our children into a drill and kill labor force in the service of profit over education.

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