Preschool is getting a lot of attention these days.
Several states are pushing to increase access to publicly funded preschool, or already have. One city even plans to expand free, public preschool to 2-year-olds soon. Advocates tout its ability to help kids succeed academically long term, but research has yielded mixed results.
Some studies show positive gains. Others see initial benefits fade by 3rd grade. In one landmark study, kids who attended a statewide pre-K program fared worse on academic and behavior measures by 6th grade than their peers who did not attend.
Dale C. Farran co-authored that decades-long study, which examined outcomes of 2,990 low-income children in Tennessee who were randomly assigned or denied access to free, public pre-K.
Farran, an emerita professor at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College, has studied early education for a half-century. She has observed hundreds of early education, mostly pre-K, classrooms. In doing so, she’s noted significant changes to preschool over the years. Based on decades of observation and data collection, Farran suggests that, in many ways, early education is headed in the wrong direction.
She recently shared her insights with EdWeek. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
‘Pre-K expansion’ is making headlines. What’s behind the push to expand it?
There are a few different reasons. You have empty classrooms—not in all schools but in some. Some districts want to redistribute students because there just really aren’t enough kids to populate them. Then you have childcare, which is very expensive, and working parents need a place for their children to go during the day. The third reason is the idea that nine months at preschool for 4-year-olds is going to somehow reduce inequities in the U.S.
I don’t even think there’s consensus about why we’re doing this, and I think that lack of clarity really impedes discussion about what we want to do, or how we want to do it. All these forces have such different roots in terms of what’s causing people to champion pre-K. But people aren’t taking time to look at what children actually need in order to be successful—not just at kindergarten entry, but long term in school.
Your research suggests that language and executive functioning skills at age 4, not early reading and math skills, predict the rate of learning in grade school. What do executive function skills look like in a 4-year-old?
We know that between about ages 4 to 7, the frontal lobe is really beginning to develop very important capabilities: memory, the ability to focus, the ability to be persistent—things that are important for long-term success in school. Part of what’s happening is this ability to organize your behaviors to allow you to be able to approach a task.
Kids who come to school at age 4 with a higher developed executive function skill can better handle classrooms that are highly structured better than kids whose executive function skills are less developed. They’re more compliant. They will sit in whole groups longer. They will organize themselves when they’re given a little free time.
When children’s executive function skills are less developed at 4 or 5, what challenges do they face at school?
You’re more likely to be unoccupied [during free time]. It’s much harder for you to get involved in things. Your engagement level in the classroom is lower, and you make less gains overall. And you’re likely to receive a lot of negative reinforcement from the teacher.
What can early education teachers do to support preschoolers’ executive function skills?
In our research on this, we saw that teachers who got children to engage in social interaction helped students make gains in executive function skills. For example, teachers who asked more open-ended questions like: “How do you know that?” [or] “Tell us more about why you think that.” Those kinds of questions [are] where kids are having to think, and then the teacher actually listens to what they’re saying.
These kids didn’t catch up to peers who entered school with stronger executive function skills, but they did make more gains than in classrooms where teachers didn’t promote social interaction during whole-class instruction.
Talk about the importance of students exercising language skills in preschool.
Children need a lot of language interaction so they develop some capability of both listening to but also being able to be listened to, so they can put their thoughts into words, which requires somebody listening to and building on it.
Children need a lot of opportunities that are relatively unstructured—guided but unstructured—not spending 20 or 40 minutes ‘criss-cross applesauce’ sitting in a group of 20 listening to a teacher for all that time.
You’ve downplayed the importance of preschoolers acquiring ‘concrete skills’ like letters, sounds, and numbers as a way to ensure long-term academic success. Why?
What we know from research is that for kids who enter kindergarten with higher literacy skills, that advantage is gone by the end of kindergarten. Almost everybody catches up in kindergarten.
Kids may be more ready to master those skills once they get to be 5 than they were when they were 4. Michael Puma, who wrote the Head Start Impact Study, said it took the control children [those who didn’t attend Head Start preschool] one year to learn what it took the Head Start children two years to learn. There are only 26 letters in the alphabet.
Language, on the other hand, is so much more complicated because it reflects, to some extent, what you know about the world. You need to have lots of experiences—with all the sorts of things that are interesting to children, like dinosaurs and trucks and the ocean—to link to language. You can’t just teach language.
How much time do children in the early grades spend practicing language?
I have data from so many different classrooms that show that teachers rarely listen to children. Our data show that children spend a lot of time listening to teachers. Children spend more time talking to peers [than teachers], but peers almost never listen to other children. So it’s a situation where you really don’t get to exercise your language very much in classrooms.
What else have you noticed about the way teachers talk to 4- and 5-year-olds?
We have a scale [measuring] teacher affect, and the affect in teaching often comes across as very serious business. We rarely see expressions of joy. Many teachers are just flat; they don’t get excited.
We need to free up teachers to get that joy again. The reason they went into teaching was not to reprimand children forever.
What about social skills?
Up until about age 3, the most important people in a child’s life are adults. But at around 2 ½ or 3, children begin to learn that they have to take turns, that they can’t dominate. That you don’t always get their way. All those are very, very important skills that you need to master somewhere between ages 3 and 5 or 6.
Twenty or 25 years ago, when I would observe kindergarten classrooms, the teacher would have a five- or 10-minute prep conversation with students about what was new in the centers. If it was Valentine’s Day, we’ve got a writing center so you can write Valentine’s Day cards, a post office center to mail them, another center where you can look up your classmate’s name. And then kids would be released to the centers, and they would get highly engaged in these activities.
We never see that anymore. In the centers, the materials never change. So we see fewer “associative interactions” going on, even in pre-K—opportunities to learn to engage and interact with peers. It’s missing in the classroom, but it’s also increasingly missing at home.
Why do you say it’s missing at home?
Kids are spending a lot of time individually on their iPads or phones. It’s creating less of an awareness of how to have friends and how to interact. And then they’re not always getting those opportunities in pre-K and kindergarten classrooms either.
It makes me despair what’s going to happen long term.
You’re seeing fewer dynamic centers in preschool. What are you seeing more of?
There’s a push to have a scripted curriculum where the teacher says the things that are on it. It does not include telling [the teacher] that you need to spend effort creating productive and interesting things for children.
But interesting things for children to do are what keep them occupied. It keeps them curious and helps them develop language, persistence, and helps them to know how to approach a problem—all those things that you really want long term for children to be able to be successful.
