20181220.0430

On 16 December 2018, Christopher Brown's "Make Kindergarten More Engaging Again" appeared in the online San Antonio Express-News. In the piece, Brown, an early childhood education professor at the University of Texas, glosses a typical Texas kindergarten experience before putting across the thesis that the typical pattern is not a good one. He then explicates why matters are as they are and why they are problems for students and teachers now and in times to come. Ideas for how to correct the matter are noted, centering on a reconsideration of what parents and teachers want kindergarten to be, before the article concludes on a reminder that the goal of teaching as a profession is to help people become lifelong learners.
I have several reasons to react to the article. I am an educator, certified to teach high school English in addition to my credentials and experience teaching college-level coursework. I am myself the product of a particular kind of schooling that may not have regimented kindergarten but started such things soon enough. And I am a parent of a child who will be heading to kindergarten perhaps sooner than it is comfortable to recognize. So, while I might find myself vexed somewhat by the relative lack of detail in the article, I recognize 1) that the context of presentation is not one that admits of the level of detail I would like to see (a newspaper cannot address academic issues in ways academics do by its nature; it is not addressing an academic primary audience), and 2) Brown is right. If the way kindergarten is taught is as he depicts it, it is not what I want for my daughter, not what hardly any of us ought to want for hardly any of our children. (I know some need more structure than others. And that's fine; give it them. But only them.)
I know why such things will have grown up. The testing culture that pervades K-12 education and infiltrates colleges and universities is to blame, and, as I and many, many others have argued and raged even unto apoplexy about, it is not the teachers who have chosen it. It is not even necessarily administrators, though they now cleave to it as if their own. No, it is an outgrowth of legislators at various levels, many of whom I am certain have received contributions of one kind or another from the companies that develop tests (and I know they pay well; I've done such work before), so that they have had reason to set up compulsory markets that oblige the purchase of those tests--and, once they're bought, they have to be used and passed, because we can't have our children being failures, after all. And that means teachers have to teach to the test, beginning as early as can be done--which is as early as the students are in the classroom.
My dear Ms. 8 will be entering into such an environment soon enough, I know. The school where she is likely to go is the best available to us here, and "best" inevitably means "in terms of test scores," so I know she will soon face the dreadful grind of drill-and-kill exercises familiar to me from having done it before NCLB was a thing. (Indeed, I am convinced I was part of the test run for the test culture.) What my wife and I will do to keep alive her love of learning--which now burns brightly and consumes all with which it comes into contact--is not clear to me. Mine was not ground out of me, though I (even I) have had problems, so I know there is hope even in the absence of Brown's recommendations. But I think she would have a better chance of things were they heeded.