Teachers say NCLB's impact reaches K and pre-K classrooms

It's not your grandmother's kindergarten

by Ron Whitehorne

Most of us have fond memories of kindergarten. There were toys to play with, snacks and naps, and everybody seemed pretty relaxed.

But with the pressures generated by the No Child Left Behind law (NCLB), the toys are increasingly being put away. Pressures to raise student achievement have made kindergarten - and even pre-K classrooms - more stressful places.

While school readiness remains the overarching goal, emphasis has shifted to more explicit literacy instruction. Much of what was traditionally taught in first grade is now realized in kindergarten. And high-stakes testing has reached down into pre-K, with all Head Start children now given a test, called the National Reporting System, on vocabulary, letter recognition, and early math skills.

Head Start - standards and testing

Theresa Willer-Grinkewicz, a Head Start teacher and academic coach with two decades of classroom experience in Philadelphia, sees the coming of clear standards for early childhood education as a necessary and positive development. “The curriculum gets teachers focused on what kids need to know,” she said.

But Willer-Grinkewicz also sees in its implementation many practices that she characterizes as developmentally inappropriate. She cites as examples eliminating dramatic play, children sitting in circles for more than 45 minutes, and teachers complaining that children “talk too much.”

Willer-Grinkewicz and many researchers believe that children learn through active engagement with their environment, a process that involves varied physical activity, problem solving, and negotiating with other children and adults.

Willer-Grinkewicz also echoes many critics who doubt that the National Reporting System renders an accurate assessment of preschool learning because of the great fluctuation in development at this age. The data from this test are used to evaluate the effectiveness of Head Start programs.

Speaking about her own experience in administering the test, Willer-Grinkewicz says children often don't attend to the question but go off in directions that are of interest to them.

“You might show them a group of letters, for example, and ask them which one they recognize, and they will ask why some other letter is not there or explain that the letter C is the first letter in their name even if C is not on the list,” she explains.

Kindergarten teachers face new pressures

In an interview with Julia de Burgos School kindergarten teachers Hillary Oyer and Betsy Ortiz, joined by Liz Gomez, first grade and former kindergarten teacher, all three describe how even in kindergarten the bar is being raised for literacy instruction. Students are regularly assessed to gauge their reading levels and grouped accordingly.

“Last year we had to get the children to 'Level C' by the end of the year. Now we have to get them to 'Level D,'” Ortiz observes.

This expectation for kindergartners, which teachers are hearing from administrators, goes well beyond the stated objectives in the School District's Core Curriculum, which calls for kindergartners to be at Level B. According to the teachers, moving from Level C to D is a big jump. A typical text at Level C consists of a picture and one sentence with two or three sight words and one word where students need to use decoding strategies or the picture to figure it out. Level D involves independent decoding and more sight words, while introducing vowels, chunks, and blends.