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Friday, March 14. 2014

The Pre-K Debate

Pre-K Can Work - Needy kids could benefit, but only if we use proven pedagogy and hold programs accountable.


Pre-K Dreaming - The push for “transitional kindergarten” is costly and evidence-free.


I tend to feel it's just one more cradle-to-grave scam, a government+union attempted take-over of the child care (aka baby-sitting) biz.

Posted by The Barrister in Hot News & Misc. Short Subjects at 13:55 | Comments (6) | Trackbacks (0)

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This has been pretty much exposed here as collusion between the Governor and the teacher's unions as a method to take over the child care industry and unionize it. The main result will be it will give the teacher's union even more power in the legislature.
#1 Jim on 2014-03-14 14:27 (Reply)
Pre-K Can Work - Needy kids could benefit, but only if we use proven pedagogy and hold programs accountable.

And Head Start might have worked if it hadn't morphed into Jobs for the Boys/Gals, which in effect used the vocabulary-deficient mothers of the Head Start children to enrich the vocabulary of the Head Start Children. By analogy, we should staff the Physics Departments of our universities by randomly calling numbers in the phone directory.And we wonder why for all the billions of dollars invested in Head Start over a half century, why it didn't work.


The gross ineffectiveness of Head Start is a very good reason why we should be very skeptical of Pre-K programs- especially Pre-K programs done on a massive scale.
#2 Gringo on 2014-03-14 14:46 (Reply)
The government wants to push Pre-K because it's a way to control the damage from destroying poor families by doing their best to get rid of standard morality, marriage before pregnancy, etc.

But nothing can fix that damage - so it will fail. Teaching people to stop having kids until they get married and refusing to pay for people when they do that is offensive to them. We don't need more teachers in schools - we need more kids with 2 parents and a few cops to deal with the troublemakers.
#3 RonF on 2014-03-14 16:01 (Reply)
I have a fond memory of Irish cops. As a little kid I thought they were gods from Mt. Olympus, I was in awe of them. Authority figures to the max.

I wish they were still around.
#3.1 Jim on 2014-03-14 18:39 (Reply)
Head Start, in my experience, starts starts teaching the children how to sit still and listen to their teacher, to pay attention to presentations on boards, and introduces them to the alphabet, counting, the calendar. They also get exposed to lining up and waiting their turn. How this helps is that the kindergarten teacher has students that set an example when the school year starts.
#4 ama on 2014-03-14 19:06 (Reply)
Really!!! $8 billion a year so that kindergartent teachers have a few students who know how to stand in line. That's it? That's all we get from our $8 billion a year? Head start is a total failure. I would embrace it if the children knew how to read after a year in head start. For that matter Kindergarten is a failure. They spend most of their time drawing with crayons and very few who graduate from kindergarten know how to read. Our schools actully were more successful before kindergarten. Let's be honest, the sole purpose of kindergarten and head start is to provide jobs for the favored groups and to satisfy special interest groups.
#4.1 GoneWithTheWind on 2014-03-15 11:23 (Reply)

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