Every year more than 5000 children are expelled from preschool, reports the Yale Child Study Center. Preschool students are three times more likely than their primary school counterparts to get kicked out. The study did not offer explanations for why this is, but the New York Times did ask some experts to speculate on that question. Their thoughts are intriguing--while all acknowledge that the usual factors (poverty, poor parenting, various clinical disorders) are probably at play--they also finger the increasing hyper-academicism of a preschool curriculum in which socializing young children has become less important than teaching them to perform well on standardized tests. In more and more preschools, repetitive drills, rote memorization, and desk work are replacing more active, playful modes of learning. The result of all this introverted activity, according to the article, is that children aren't learning the interactive things they really need at that age to know: how to share, how to play nicely with others, how to accept contingency without throwing tantrums.

The article is an interesting one, part sociological critique of a trend in preschool education, part jab at NCLB, which gets the blame for pushing schools to stress skill acquisition at the expense of the far more basic behavioral lessons that young children urgently need to learn. Prematurely emphasizing academic achievement while neglecting age-appropriate instruction in social skills is a recipe for disaster, the quoted experts point out: Children who are bored, or restless, or frustrated, or lost, are far more likely to act out in unacceptable ways.

I'm neither the parent of a small child nor an expert on preschool education, so I can't comment authoritatively on this critique. But it does strike me that it ought to be possible to teach both basic academic skills and social skills (even to teach the one by way of the other, through group activities and so on), and that the either/or quality of the argument the article makes is thus not only a bit too easy, but also a bit too telegraphic in its political bent. I'd welcome readers' thoughts on both the article and on what they see happening in contemporary preschools.

Ask academic experts. Get answer that reflects negatively on GWB's agenda. Hmmmm. Yep, situation normal.

Despite the obvious lack of empirical connection to preschool expulsion rates and academic focus in curriculum, the "experts" are willing to use any convenient data point to condemn the current administration.

Having been a child care director and a graduate student in ECE, I would guess that almost all expulsions have multiple reasons. Parents were not cooperating with teacher, child was not cooperating with teacher, teacher was not cooperating with director, curriculum was lower on priority list than conduct, children lived in disorganized homes, and on and on. Academic focus causing expulsions is to say that programs would expel a paying customer for the program's failure to instruct the child is counterintuitive and obtuse.

The expulsion rate appears to be 0.6%. Is this a crisis? I'm with Sid - there are probably lots of reasons for those expulsions. As for blaming two-career families, that's asinine. Why are most of those kids in preschool in the first place, duh.

I liked Rosemond's quote. My mother-in-law used to say that there's a reason toddlers are so small: it's to give their mother a chance to get her bluff in (I can make you do as I say).

If in fact preschools are trying to push academics to get kids ready for kindergarten, they're on the wrong track IMO. Toddlerhood and preschool are about brain development. Brain development occurs when a child has lots of manipulable objects and has his imagination fired, is talked to about stuff, and gets to do a lot of running around. The excellent daycare/preschool my daughter attended didn't push academics at all, although they did make sure the 4-year-olds knew their alphabet before they went off to kindergarten, and helped them write their letters. But every day at naptime the teacher read a poem, the same one for a month at a time, so that my daughter at 4 could recite parts of "Little Orphant Annie" at Halloween with great glee. I hate to think about little folks being pressured to perform. They have the rest of their lives for that.

I don't think the problem of high-pressure kindergarten started with NCLB. See this, from May 2003:

http://photoncourier.blogspot.com/archives/2003_05_01_photoncourier_archive.html#94691438

The real problem is an absolutely crazed level of status anxiety on the part of certain parents.

1) Preschool isn't "real school". I can imagine that the threshold for expulsion is a lot lower in what is generally viewed as glorified daycare than it is for grade school.

2) Also, the traditional starting ages for school weren't arbitrarily chosen -- they were the result of a thousand years (or thousands of years, depending on your society) of experience in teaching. It's not surprising that the distribution of three-year-olds contains a lot more unteachable outliers than does a kindergarten.

I agree with Laura - the percentage of children at this age being expelled is so low it could be argued not to exist at all. But of course each expulsion costs a school some of its precious money, which probably explains why in some quarters it's considered a crisis (and as sid mentioned it's another chance to attack the Bush administration).

But if someone out there is expelling students from kindergarten or preschool because of poor academic performance in an overly academic environment and if such an environment exists in kindergartens and preschools, then maybe it's time for us to stop and consider the fact that American children 40 years ago were overall more knowledgeable about history, math and language - and more literate) in high school and college than they are today, with less emphasis on early-childhood development. Maybe the real problem with upper-level student performance has more to do with shoddy curricula and overactive political agendas pushed by teachers’ unions.

The answer is discipline. Mild forms of discipline = lawsuit, so the preschool's only recourse is to expel the student.

I don't understand a system that talks up developmental stages in teacher college but then forgets that there isn't much learning at three years old that isn't motor-related.

If you expect kids to learn in any way other than through self-motivated play at three years of age, you're setting a lot of kids up for failure, and even the 'successful' kids will be successful only to the degree they stultify themselves. You're also ignoring the deepest truth about development: it doesn't happen in a neat upward-trending line. Boys who won't sit still at age three, who can't read at age seven, are not necessarily in need of special help, of intervention, of therapy, of all that crap. In many cases, only patience is required, because when they do move, they will catch up to their earlier-developing peers very quickly indeed.

Schools should be starting when kids are eight or nine, not three and four....

John makes a strong and valid point. I was just one such kid. I was one of the very young the ecucrats wished to remediate and set aside as human debris simply because I did not follow the linear model. However when taken out of the cookie-cutter public school environment I began to thrive and eventually went on to be counted among the top 5% of students ever to have attended my university. Heaven help me had the educrats begun tossing me aside in preschool.

The war on men begins with young boys. Kick them out, then drug them up, or vice versa.

Then in the higher grades have them read stories on relationships, not caring that young men like action and adventure.

The girls rule.

Well, until puberty and some of the boys kick butt in math, leaving the girls shaken and disappointed: they no longer unconditionally trounce the stronger sex.

Speaking of stronger, girls still look forward to nearly nine years' longer life expectancy, notwithstanding the deluge of news stories about medical issues revolving around women.

Whadya think?