prek talking about daily schedule with kids

The perfect daily routine for a 4 year old can vary greatly. It helps to know what to expect and what is going to happen next. This gives them a sense of comfort and security, knowing that they have a predictable routine. Farran's study, where 70% of the kids were white, found interactions between race, gender, and discipline problems, but no extra effect of attending preschool was detected.Creating a daily schedule for children provides them with structure. Other studies have suggested that Black children are disciplined more often in preschool, as they are in later grades. We know from other research that the control of children's bodies at school can have disparate racial impact. In other words, regularly reprimanding kids for doing normal kid stuff at 4 years old, even suspending them, could backfire down the road as children experience school as a place of unreasonable expectations. And if anything, they're learning sort of an almost allergic reaction to the amount of external control that they're having, that they're having to experience in school.' 'I think children are not learning internal control. One of Farran's most intriguing conjectures is that this need for control could explain the extra discipline problems seen later on in her most recent study. You have to walk through the halls, you know: 'Don't touch your neighbor, don't touch the wall, put a bubble in your mouth because you have to be quiet.' ' 'And then, if you have to use the cafeteria, it's the same thing. You've got to take your children out, line them up and then they wait,' Farran says. 'So if you're in an older elementary school, the bathroom is going to be down the hall. Putting these same programs in public schools can make the whole day more inconvenient. Boston's program spent more per student, and it also was mixed-income, whereas Tennessee's program is for low-income kids only. This study found that the preschool kids had better disciplinary records and were much more likely to graduate from high school, take the SATs and go to college, though their test scores didn't show a difference.įarran believes that, with a citywide program, there's more opportunity for quality control than in her statewide study. The study was a similar size to Farran's, used a similar quasi-experimental design based on random assignment, and also followed up with students for years. In May 2021, a working paper (not yet peer reviewed) came out that looked at Boston's pre-K program. The research on pre-K continues to be mixed. To put it crudely, policymakers and experts have touted for decades now that if you give a 4-year-old who is growing up in poverty a good dose of story time and block play, they'll be more likely to grow up to become a high-earning, productive citizen.

Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman, among others, showed substantial long-term returns on investment for specially designed and carefully implemented programs. This enthusiasm has rested in part on research going back to the 1970s.

But her study design was unusually strong, so she couldn't easily explain it away. A statewide public pre-K program, taught by licensed teachers, housed in public schools, had a measurable and statistically significant negative effect on the children in this study.įarran hadn't expected it. 'In third grade, where we had seen effects on one type of suspension, which is minor violations, by sixth grade we're seeing it on both types of suspensions, both major and minor.'

'Whereas in third grade we saw negative effects on one of the three state achievement tests, in sixth grade we saw it on all three - math, science and reading,' says Farran. They had lower test scores, were more likely to be in special education, and were more likely to get into trouble in school, including serious trouble like suspensions. And at the end of sixth grade, they were doing even worse. At the end of their first year, the kids who went to pre-K scored higher on school readiness - as expected.īut after third grade, they were doing worse than the control group. Easter Grassįarran and her co-authors at Vanderbilt University followed both groups of children all the way through sixth grade. NPR Ed The Tennessee Pre-K Debate: Spinach Vs.

Prek talking about daily schedule with kids