Early last month, NPR published an article with the title, “A top researcher says it’s time to rethink our entire approach to preschool”. Maybe you saw it, or like me, maybe you had several people send it to you because they knew you’d find it fascinating.
The article featured developmental psychologist and researcher Dr. Dale Farran and her reflections on the most recent round of startling outcomes from the Tennessee Voluntary PreK cohort, which she and her colleagues at Vanderbilt University have been studying for more than a decade. The article struck a nerve, particularly its last line which said, “We might actually get better results, … from simply letting little children play.”
In this episode, I’ll be diving into some of the context around this article and the study it references. We’ll talk about what we can learn from these results and why these lessons apply far beyond the scope of the popular article.
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Notes from the Show:
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Here’s the popular NPR article referenced in this episode: “A top researcher says it’s time to rethink our entire approach to preschool”
And the NPR article from 2015: “The Tennessee Pre-K Debate: Spinach vs Easter Grass”
Must-Read article by Dr. Farran for DEY: “Early Developmental Competencies: Or Why Pre-K Does Not Have Lasting Effects”
Tennessee PreK study as fodder for opinion articles against and for government funding for preschools found in the Wall Street Journal.
Does quality early childhood education lead to more successful lives as adults? (National Academy of Sciences)
A look at the PreK program in Boston, along with the argument that program outcomes should be measured by more than just test scores. (National Bureau of Economic Research). (Commentary from Ellen Galinsky on this study found in the Wall Street Journal here.)
Dr. Heckman’s argument for strengthening the economy by strengthening early childhood programs (The Heckman Equation)
Sometimes something isn’t better than nothing— The Hechinger Report covers the Tennessee PreK results.
Brookings Institution Consensus Statement : What factors contribute to high-quality PreK?
Defending the Early Years: This position statement lays out what we miss by overemphasizing academic gains in early childhood.
Crisis in the Kindergarten makes a similar argument related to the misalignment of early chiodhood goals. (Alliance for Childhood)
The High-Scope Preschool Curriculum Comparison as well as this study from the University of Florida examined the long-term impact of emphasizing direct instruction and an academic perspective in early childhood.
Previous Posts from Not Just Cute:
The High Cost of Pervasive Passivity and Why Play Matters
The Danger of Performance Hang Ups in Early Education
Why We Play
Share the importance of play with the Why We Play letters! Learn more about Why We Play and sign up for the sample letter at the bottom to ensure you hear about any VIP discounts by clicking here!
Highlights:
(00:01) – Rethinking Early Childhood Education Results
(02:37) – Impact of Early Childhood Education
(07:13) – Quality Ingredients Matter in Education
(11:13) – Tennessee Pre-K Program Analysis Results
(16:53) – Reimagining Pre-K Education Quality
(23:38) – Preschool Education
Transcript:
Transcript produced by Podium.
00:01 – Amanda Morgan (Host)
Hi, I’m Amanda Morgan, and this is Not Just Cute the podcast where we discuss all kinds of topics to help bridge the gap that exists between what we know and what we do in early childhood education. We’re starting conversations with academics, authors, decision makers, educators and parents so that together we can improve the quality of early childhood education while at the same time protecting and respecting the childhood experience Early. Last month, npr published an article with the title A Top Researcher Says it’s Time to Rethink Our Entire Approach to Preschool. Maybe you saw it or, like me, maybe you had several people send it to you because they knew you’d find it fascinating. The article featured developmental psychologist and researcher, dr Dale Farron and her reflections on the most recent round of startling outcomes from the Tennessee Voluntary Pre-K cohort, which she and her colleagues at Vanderbilt University have been studying for more than a decade. University have been studying for more than a decade. The article struck a nerve, particularly its last line, which said, quote we might actually get better results from simply letting little children play.
01:15
In this episode I’ll be diving into some of the context around this article and the study that it references. We’ll talk about what we can learn from these results and why these lessons apply far beyond the scope of the popular article. Before we jump in, a quick heads up that the why we Play letters will be on sale through March 19th. These letters will help you jumpstart important conversations in your learning community about the importance and power of play in your early childhood setting. People don’t value what they don’t understand. If you want to help parents and colleagues understand the value of play, the why we Play letters were created just for you. Learn more and grab a free sample letter at notjustcutecom. Forward slash why we play a free sample letter at notjustcutecom. Forward slash why we play. What could we possibly learn from a program where participating children actually displayed negative results? Why shouldn’t this study be used as evidence that pre-k programs just don’t work? We’ll jump into all of that and more in this episode. You can find show notes and, by the way, they’ll be full of article links I’ll be referencing all throughout this episode. You’ll find those notes at notjustcutecom. Forward slash podcast. Forward slash episode 50.
02:37
If you want to know what current research is telling us about what young children need in early childhood education, this episode is for you. Let’s jump in. For the past decade or so, dr Dale Farron and her research partners have been studying the Tennessee Volunteer Pre-Kindergarten Program. The cohort they followed was notable because not only did it include a large sample of children entering a statewide pre-k program, but those participants were assigned by a lottery system which gave the researchers something close to a randomized controlled trial, a research standard that is hard to find in preschool studies. They’ve been following this particular group of Tennessee children for years after their initial pre-K year, and they’ve been analyzing the data in an attempt to tease out any impact that this program might have had. When talking about those results, farron told Anya Kemenetz of NPR quote people get upset about this and don’t want it to be true. Before we talk about what this is that people wish wasn’t true, and break down what happened in the Tennessee study, we have to go back a few decades and give this research some context. I like to tell people that there are landmark studies in early childhood education that I can guarantee that they’ve heard of, even if they think they haven’t they haven’t. That’s because these studies show up in almost every literature review and many conversations surrounding any request for funding for early childhood education Programs like the Perry Preschool Project, the Abyssidarium Project, the Chicago Child Parent Center Program and others like them provided longitudinal or long-term studies to examine the impact of high-quality early childhood education on young children and their families from disadvantaged, high-poverty populations.
04:32
In the short term, these programs saw a respectable increase in academic outcomes, but what was more exciting was the long-term impacts. With these longitudinal studies, researchers found differences between the participant children and non-participant children that extended all the way into early adulthood. Participants in these high quality programs were more likely to graduate from high school, go to college, be gamefully employed, and they were less likely to require remedial services or be involved with substance abuse problems or have behavior issues or be arrested. Most recent installments of this decades-long research suggest that some of these benefits continue to ripple through subsequent generations as well, and that makes sense. If you improve long-term outcomes for a child, you eventually improve the environment that their children are born into. This is how we literally change the future.
05:28
Nobel Prize winning economist James Heckman, who has worked with some of these model programs, estimates that when we look at the benefits to society, both through the positive contributions of adults with these benefits of being better educated and more upwardly mobile, as well as the absence of costs from the remedial and judicial or correctional problems that are avoided. The return on investment for high quality early childhood education is 7 to 10% annually. For context, stock market investors look for about 10% as a good long-term investment and government bonds offer about 5 to 6 ROI annually. So, according to Heckman, a high-quality birth-to-five program so not just pre-K but a birth-to-five program would provide a 13% ROI annually. Heckman, who, by the way, received his Nobel Prize in part for his approach to evaluating public policy, says quote the best investment is in quality early childhood development, from birth to five for disadvantaged children and their families. So, armed with these studies and this analysis, states and cities have set out various proposals for early childhood programs, hoping for funding and for the opportunity to create the same results that came out of these model programs, but on a larger scale.
06:55
Now here’s the catch Heckman didn’t say that these results and returns on investment were the result of preschool programs. He said they were the result of preschool programs. He said they were the result of high quality preschool programs, and that distinction is key. Let’s say for the point of discussion that chocolate pies are empirically shown to be delicious. You may or may not agree with that, but let’s just say that it’s fact, if I set a gourmet French silk pie down on the table next to a mud pie built in the backyard, you might be able to convince people that they’re the same. They might even look pretty similar, but the ingredients are totally different and those ingredients matter when it comes to supporting the claim that these pies are delicious. Matter when it comes to supporting the claim that these pies are delicious Now. Similarly, these landmark studies show the amazing benefits of high quality preschool programs for children, but the ingredients matter.
08:00
There are a lot of programs out there claiming all the benefits of preschool, but when you look at the details, they’re just serving up the educational equivalent of mud pie. They just don’t have the right ingredients. For example, the Perry Preschool Project spent the equivalent in today’s dollars of more than $20,000 per child. Meanwhile, most current programs spend half of that or much less. Perry Preschool had a teacher-child ratio of 1 to 6. You’d be hard-pressed to find that in a public program today. Perry’s curriculum also focused on active learning, decision-making and problem-solving within an emergent child-centered curriculum and an emergent child-centered curriculum.
08:41
Many public programs today emphasize kindergarten readiness in the form of academic skills and perhaps most notably missing from current programs. Many of these model studies included strong parent education elements that included home visits and coaching. Now, obviously, $20,000 per child is a high price tag and I’m not saying we necessarily have to spend that much money. But it is logical to assume that if you don’t invest in the ingredients that that price tag purchased, you won’t be getting the same program or the same benefits. And communities begin planning early childhood programs on a larger scale. How do we provide a program that is affordable and sustainable and still get the benefits we’re claiming?
09:30
In the literature We’ve seen some great outcomes from long-term studies of programs in Boston and Tulsa and states like Georgia, north Carolina and New Jersey. You can look up all of those and find the evidence is there for high quality programs having positive impact. But the results from Tennessee were not so great, and that’s where the NPR article comes in. Before the article this February, however, there was an NPR article in 2015. Back then the study of Tennessee’s program was relatively new, but already the news wasn’t good. The pre-K participants were rated as being better prepared for kindergarten by all measures used in the study. It’s great news, right, but by the end of kindergarten those advantages had disappeared. Now alone that might not have been too striking.
10:21
The fade-out effect has been found in other studies and there are plenty of questions to ask. Were pre-K students later disadvantaged in some way, or were the non-pre-K students supported in a specific way that caught them up, so to speak? Does the K-5 school not operate in a way that maintains the advantages of a pre-K program? Those are all valid questions to look at. Anytime there’s a fade-out effect, but in Tennessee by the end of second and third grade the two groups were no longer equal.
10:52
It wasn’t just a fade-out. The study group, the children who had attended the state’s pre-K program were actually scoring below the children who did not attend the program, and that negative score was found in one of the three academic areas covered in the state achievement tests. That started the panic. After analyzing the program, it was clear that Tennessee had not implemented a quality program, and they have made some adjustments and improvements since then to their newer programs. But in the meantime, researchers continue to follow this same group to see what would happen over the long run, and that’s how we arrive here at last month’s article, after the release of the most recent analysis of the data from this original study group.
11:38
Data collected after this group completed the sixth grade showed that children who attended the pre-K program were not only underperforming in comparison to the non-pre-K group on one area of the state testing, as they had done in previous years, but they were underperforming on all three math, science and reading. They were also more likely to be in remedial programs like special education, and more likely to have discipline issues, including suspensions. Now it’s important to note that these differences were huge, but at the same time, those differences between the groups were consistently negative and more likely due to a specific cause rather than just a fluke chance. The logical conclusion is that the key difference was the pre-K program. So that’s why Farron says people don’t want these results to be true. When people are trying to get funding for early childhood programs, they don’t want someone bringing up a study where participants were worse off than the non-participants. In fact, as one could expect in our current political climate, some people have been quick to jump on this news and say see, this is why we don’t need pre-K programs.
12:59
This study was a failure, but this study does not negate all the other positive evidence that’s found in other studies, and this study itself is not a failure at all. The only failure would be not learning from it, and there is clearly a lot to be learned here. That’s what Farran gets into in the NPR article, as well as in a few other publications that I’ll be linking in the show notes. As NPR’s title suggests, dale Farran challenges several assumptions about preschool. But while the title almost makes it sound like she woke up the day before the interview and suddenly had an epiphany or a crisis of convictions, I believe that Farron, a developmental psychologist and researcher who has studied early childhood education for decades, is actually challenging all of us to reconsider our assumptions, and she’s starting that out by asking out loud the same questions she’s actually been researching for a long time. So here are a few of those key points that Dr Dale Farron brings up. These are the lessons that come out of the Tennessee Pre-K study, lessons that we should be applying to early childhood education as a whole.
14:13
First off, quality matters. It’s not enough to simply do preschool. There’s nothing magical about cobbling together a program and sending children there. Benefits come from high quality programs. In the early iteration of the Tennessee program, quality was clearly an issue. The design satisfied nine out of ten of the requirements for quality from the National Institute of Early Education Research, but those are bare minimum standards for quality, so they were providing just less than the bare minimum from the get-go and in separate evaluations of the individual classrooms in the program, 85% of them scored below the rating of good. That literally means that the vast majority of these classrooms were not good. We need more research on what makes a high quality program, but we do have consistent evidence that tells us. One major element is the type of interactions that go on in that classroom. Interactions that are responsive and warm, that encourage language and support thinking out loud are tied to a variety of high quality programs. Lectures and worksheets are not Standing quietly in a line or sitting still at a table all day, are not. If interactions are a key factor for quality and they are then that means in order to have high quality programs, we need to invest in people and their development as early childhood professionals and we’ll circle back to this issue of professional development in the next point, and that is the concept of retrofitting.
16:04
The NPR article points out Dr Farran’s observation that when pre-K programs are housed in existing elementary schools, as is common practice, the environment is a poor fit. Large percentages of time are lost to simply moving around the building to take the whole class to the bathroom or travel to the cafeteria, where the tables are too big, or to the playground, where the equipment is oversized. A more ideal setting would include bathrooms and snack times in the classrooms with the appropriately sized furniture, and there would be appropriate outdoor space just steps from the classroom door. The environmental retrofitting doesn’t work and it makes programs less effective. But I have to wonder if the building isn’t the only retrofitting that’s going on.
16:53
A major challenge to pre-K programs is the proclivity to retrofit the whole paradigm. Pre-k simply becomes an extension of elementary school, as though we can just stretch to fit it all in. And in the same way that kindergarten has become the new first grade, pre-k then becomes the new new first grade. In a piece written for Defending the Early Years, which is a must-read and I will definitely link it in the show notes, dr Farron emphasizes that the problems that are threatening the quality of early childhood programs are quote accelerated by the process of subsuming preschool into the K-12 system. So the whole program just sometimes looks like a watered-down version of the grades above. It’s literally threatening the quality of our early childhood programs.
17:49
Even credentialing comes into question in this paradigm. The NPR article includes Dr Farran’s comment that teacher licensure doesn’t seem to factor into quality programs, as has been shown in a series of studies. But it’s important to note that for pre-k programs within a school district, often the concept of license very simply means a broad K-5 certification, once again retrofitting the elementary school concept of quality credentialing to fill in for the actual need for quality specific to preschool. K-5 licensed teachers may or may not have had any real training or experience specializing in early childhood or pre-K pedagogy and practice. So if a teacher is simply bringing their K-5 license, along with their fourth grade teaching experience and expectations, to their new assignment in pre-K without any further training, then it makes perfect sense that licensing alone does not correlate with pre-K quality.
18:54
Quality pre-K programs require a design that fits the way these young children grow and learn. That means particular and unique attention to the design of their physical environment, the design of their curriculum and their teacher preparation, pedagogy and support. All of that must be prepared with preschoolers in mind, not a pre-existing system in mind. These decisions simply cannot be effectively made as a one-size-fits-all option that spans all the way down from our 11-year-old fifth graders to our four-year-olds in pre-K. Now that’s certainly a hot-button topic for me, but just wait until we get settled into this next one.
19:40
Dr Farran’s most pointed question in the NPR article is essentially why do we assume poor kids need a different preschool experience than their more affluent peers? What Farran and others have noted is that while wealthy families widely send their children to child-centered, play-based classrooms full of hands-on activities and rich language experiences, the programs that are ostensibly designed to quote-unquote, close the gap for disadvantaged learners are often very different and not in good ways. They spend more time lecturing and less time engaging children in conversations, spend more time lecturing and less time engaging children in conversations. They typically spend more time controlling behavior through adult-directed precision and drill and less time encouraging child-directed problem solving and self-efficacy, while affluent children are finger painting and building with blocks and engaging in dress-up and all the rich learning that comes through those guided play experiences. There are some who say but these kids, quote, unquote, these kids, these less fortunate kids, they don’t have time for that, they’re behind. They need academic drilling, they need worksheets and strict structure. They need to catch up.
21:02
But the frustrating irony is that when you look at study after study showing the benefits of child-centered, play-based early education, many of those studies are done with samples of children who are disadvantaged and or in poverty. So we’re taking the research that says children, but particularly disadvantaged children, really benefit from this developmentally appropriate pedagogy. But then the children who are more likely to benefit from it and access it, the ones who are actually more likely to be in a high quality, developmentally appropriate program program, are the more wealthy children, and this isn’t new. We can go back over a hundred years to Maria Montessori and her groundbreaking child-centered techniques. She showed tremendous growth with poor children who had been essentially counted out by society, but who is most likely to find themselves in a Montessori classroom? Even Vygotsky did some of his work teaching children who were deemed unteachable and labeled as disabled, and he did so with striking benefits to be in a classroom that espouses a Vygotskyan approach that encourages scaffolded social interactions and supports the development of mental tools for problem solving and planning.
22:29
According to Farran, the programs designed for these at-risk children too often do not include these high quality elements. Disadvantaged children are being further disadvantaged when we give them programs that ignore what we know about how young children grow and learn. Instead, too many programs are trading off short-term performances that look like learning in exchange for real growth and development. And I’ve talked about the danger of performances before. You can find more about that in the show notes. And I’ve talked about the danger of performances before. You can find more about that in the show notes.
23:11
As Dr Farron notes, quote, the kinds of pre-K that our poor children are going into are not good for them long term. Now that quote should be enough to stop us in our tracks and cause some serious reevaluations. Are we giving poor children what they need or are we trading that for what we want to see A hollow performance that makes us feel good in the short term, or real learning and growth that will benefit them and, honestly, all of us for the long run? Farron has spent years observing classrooms and that she worries that pre-K typically involves too much whole group instruction, rigid behavioral controls, not enough time spent outside and too much time in which teachers are speaking instead of listening to the children. She says we have let ourselves get into the idea that what these children need is a lot more academic instruction, and I would say no, it’s just the opposite. The concept that quote-unquote these kids are different or that these kids need something different matters if we really want to do something that actually helps disadvantaged children and families, but here’s why it also matters for all children, in the same way that less developmentally appropriate programs have been used in a counterproductive effort to close the academic gap between more and less at-risk populations. In this post-pandemic era, which we’re hopefully headed towards, we are hearing a lot of talk about the academic gaps that are being unearthed as the residual effect of coping with a worldwide crisis. As we look to the next few years, we run the risk of making the exact same mistake on a much broader scale. There are some who may say these kids meaning all of these kids don’t have time for play and conversation and problem solving. They all need to catch up, they need intensive academics, and we will again be running in the opposite direction of what our children need most and what our research tells us will benefit them most.
25:24
In Dr Farran’s piece for Defending the Early Years, she shares what I think is a fantastic model for early education. She calls it the iceberg model of early developmental competencies. We’ve all seen the diagram of an iceberg with a small visible tip poking out of the water and a much larger base concealed down below. Farron argues that those tip of the iceberg skills are the performance tasks like letters, sounds and numbers. They’re the academic skills often referred to as kindergarten readiness. They’re easily defined and they’re easy to measure. But Ferran says these skills are used to measure kindergarten readiness because they are assumed to represent those underlying skills that are on the submerged part of the iceberg, skills like curiosity and a drive to learn, vocabulary, persistence, attentiveness and self-control. We measure the academic skills with the assumption that the underlying skills were put into place first, allowing those later skills the tip of the iceberg to develop. So assessing those tip of the iceberg skills is also a type of a proxy assessment for all the skills that should have come before them, skills that should have come before them.
26:41
But Farron argues that in many pre-K programs the pedagogy and practices simply focus on building the tip of the iceberg skills detached from the underlying base. Instead of building from the base up, starting with those underlying skills, programs are trying to start building from that surface level. Skills programs are trying to start building from that surface level and that’s why we end up with surface level skills In Tennessee’s case. That’s why we get children who enter kindergarten looking like they’re ahead but then they’re struggling both academically and behaviorally, because we just didn’t build the underlying skills to allow them to be self-directed, to drive real learning and to be authentic problem solvers. That’s why we get children who can perform in the short term. They’ve been trained, but those gains quickly slip away because there’s no base to continue to build on.
27:38
I feel strongly about this because our children deserve more and, in particular, children who are already at risk deserve real support and not just hollow promises for adults to campaign on or pat themselves on the back. For they deserve and, quite honestly, we all deserve it, because it impacts our entire society. We deserve high quality programs that truly serve children more than they serve adult egos. We have to get clear on what our goals actually are when it comes to early education and, specifically, pre-k programs, and those goals need to be higher than simply giving families a place to send their children. Those goals need to be higher than simply giving families a place to send their children. They have to be higher than simply training them to give a temporary bump in test scores. One year later, tennessee’s program shows us that that is simply not enough. High quality preschool has been shown to make a lasting impact on a child’s trajectory, corralling them and lecturing to them has not. Investing in pre-k and early childhood education requires more than putting up a sign that says high quality preschool. We have to be willing to invest in the ingredients that make that sign true, and Dr Farron’s work in Tennessee continues to show us why.
29:05
Thanks again for listening to Not Just Cute the podcast. You can find show notes at notjustcutecom forward slash podcast. Forward slash, episode 50. There you’ll find links to the original NPR article as well as the many different articles I mentioned in the episode, along with a few extras that I know you’ll find interesting. You can also hit up the show notes for a link to the why we Play letters. Head to notjustcutecom forward slash podcast. Forward slash, episode 50, or go straight to notjustcutecom forward slash why we Play to get signed up and download your free sample letter. The why we Play letters will help you start conversations and advocate for developmentally appropriate, play-based early education. I’m Amanda Morgan. You can read more on my blog and sign up for the Not Just Cute newsletter at notjustcutecom and follow me on Facebook. That’s facebookcom. Forward slash notjustcute. I’m also sharing some new things on Instagram, so follow me there at Amanda underscore not just cute. Thanks for listening today and, as always, thank you for standing up for children and for childhood.
