Common Core Poses Challenges for Preschools

Kindergarten pupils Piper Stephan, left, and Delaney Lane read to each other at Triadelphia Ridge Elementary School in Glenelg, Md. Maryland is one of 46 states to adopt new common standards in math and English/language arts for K-12.

—Matt Roth for Education Week

Educators walk a tightrope between academics and young children's developmental needs

By Jaclyn Zubrzycki

Although the common-core standards are calibrated to ensure that students leave K-12 schools ready for work and college, they are also posing challenges for the educators who work with children just starting out their school careers.

As 46 states and the District of Columbia work this year to put the new curricular guidelines in place, preschool and early-childhood educators are determining how to balance the common standards' emphasis on increasing and measuring academic rigor with research findings on young children's developmental needs, which place a high value on play, the arts, social skills, and integrated instruction.

"We have to be careful that those standards, particularly as they extend downward, appropriately recognize these important social, communication, and self-regulation skills that are really as critical for kids' learning in those early and later years as whether they know the alphabet," said Robert C. Pianta, the dean of the Curry School of Education at the University...