The praxis exam for k-5 is plenty hard enough and there's no reason for it to be harder. In fact, it'd be better if we had a k-3 credential test that was even easier, creating more black teachers.
Middle school teachers are now required to be credentialed at the higher single subject high school level, which is also crazy for all but a few middle schools and probably contributes to the teacher shortage.
There is literally no evidence that smarter teachers have better student outcomes. There's a lot of evidence that black teachers in particular, have better outcomes for black kids. Making the test bar higher creates fewer black teachers, so no, it's a really bad idea to make the Praxis harder.
The praxis exam is not insultingly easy for a prospective third grade teacher. We don't need rocket scientists, or even college level ability, for elementary school teachers. Moreover, the harder you make the test, the more likely it is that the black teachers who can pass the test have other options. You need to get the social workers and child care workers to think about being third grade teachers.
My wife and I run a childcare- well, she runs it, and I help as much as I can between shifts.
All children old enough to walk about are wee robots designed to self-destruct as creatively as possible. Your job is to toss monkey wrenches into their gears and sand in their gas tanks all day so they can get home alive. Astounding, really, how ambitious the little dudes are.
It would be grand to design system where you don’t have to have a second parent work full time to afford childcare so they can afford to work full time, but in its absence “keep the toddlers from suiciding” really should be the guiding principle rather than setting them up for algebra classes or whatever.
And also that there is nothing wrong with a bunch of 3 year olds spending the afternoon watching Aquanaut’s. First of all, because trying to use that time to teach reading or math has no long term benefits and may indeed be harmful. Second, not every moment in life needs to be productive.
Same here. I think cartoon nursery rhymes (“learning songs”) are very useful for the little guys learning to speak and identify and sort things - as are books. The means of engagement is different, but they’re always absorbing and taking something in. They are little sponges. I think the biggest benefit of reading a book, other than the content, is the engagement and interaction with mom and dad. My son gets very excited when we sit down to read together (which we *try* to do every day...)
I pray this is true because my kid has watched A LOT of Paw Patrol and Octonauts during the pandemic. He is literally watching Octonauts right now. (I send him to preschool, but he is home sick this week -- second time this month).
Cuddling with my son on the couch (turns two next week, daycare closed due to covid outbreak so I’m not working this week, wife makes a tremendous living and we are super fortunate) and he is watching Little Baby Bum. It’s obvious that he has learned a lot watching these silly (and monotonous and grating) nursery rhyme cartoons. I don’t feel (very) guilty about it.
I don't know what current childrens television is like, but I can tell you that Bob Ross truly imparted a love of art for me at a very young age, and that when I was a little older, 1 2 3 Contact got me super interested in math.
The licensure & expansion for pre-K especially aggravates me because there are so many more essential uses for that money in public ed. Teacher salaries, building infrastructure, internet to rural areas, goddamned bus driver shortages--these are all huge issues that we need to fix. But politicians always prefer putting their name on new initiatives over quietly fixing existing issues.
*raises hand* I have a bachelor's in English, which has really come in handy in the past ten years of raising my kids and babysitting the kids of friends and family as an at-home parent. Nothing aids in changing a diaper or getting a juice box like a modernist quote. :)
But really, I've been in the workforce, and I've also been the daily care provider for eight babies/toddlers--besides my own three!---and I have to say, yeah it's a totally differnet skill set, but boy is it important. And worth a living wage.
Word. There is no straight-up logical reason to have a child/children, although people can delude themselves into thinking that. I will say it's super fulfilling, my feelings have become much more expansive, life feels 3D rather than 2D, but I don't think it's a rite of passage, I don't think everyone should be a parent, I don't think you should compromise on having or not having kids, and I would NEVER have another.
I'm fairly privileged, I guess, so the messiness of school / childcare is something I have been able to opt out of almost entirely. If I had to drop off my newborn to a stranger so that I could go back to my minimum wage job full-time I simply never would have had a kid.
Thank you for highlighting the role of schools in keeping kids safe, fed, and warm. I grew up in Minnesota, and my mom taught special education in a low-income, majority-minority high school for most of her career. The school provided breakfast as well as lunch and after school snacks to any child who wanted them. It also provided something I had never thought about before: heat during Minnesota’s brutal, long winter.
My mom told me something once that broke my heart: you know how, as kids, we all couldn’t wait for weekends, holidays, and summer vacation? How we would get so excited and happy? Well, my mom’s students dreaded school breaks. They would linger after school on Friday afternoons and on the last day before break until they had to be kicked out. My mom said she could see them getting progressively sadder as the breaks approached. Think about how different their world is from that of most policymakers.
These kids were not heading to college; it was counted a success if they were able to pass the state reading test and graduate. The school did not give them the kind of intense academic education most policymakers say we should strive for. The school gave them something much more important: a place to let down their guards and be cared for.
My wife is a Kindergarten teacher and her other main task is to properly socialize the 10-30% of kids who's parents didn't do it. If kids don't learn how to play with others by 4 or 5 then they have a very tough life ahead of them.
I don’t think the benefits of early socialization (diversity of playmates and experiences) can be overstated. There are many different things and ways to learn early in life, and very few involve a classroom and an instructor. As Freddie says, keep the kids warm, fed , safe, secure, and alive. There’ll be time enough for sorting when the time comes.
You might not be doing this, in which case sorry, but it sounds like you're envisioning pre-k or kindergarten as a classroom with little ones at desks while the teacher lectures to them. This is not how those levels works. At least in my local public, there are a bunch of tables and stations with various things the kids can do. The teachers do teach them stuff, but it looks an awfully lot like a childcare room.
We chose a play based childcare center -- it was licensed, but the caregivers were not teaching, they were setting up different play activities for the kids to select. But when my son arrived at kindergarten not yet reading it took a few weeks before he made the connection between the words he understood orally and those on the page and when his teacher explained that the silent e makes the other vowel in the word "say its name" he was off and reading Harry Potter to himself by the end of the year. I guess I am saying that when kids are ready to learn to read they will if they have decent support.
Perennial reminder that in Finland, with probably the best education metrics in the world, that it's perfectly common for 5 year olds to not even be attempting to read. The idea that you need to start academic tasks early to have success is probably an overextrapolation from language acquisition.
We do have our kindergartener a subject-specific academic enrichment program, but the reason is more for social-emotional development using material that holds both his and his parents' interest than for the academics. If our kid takes after us — and there's a good chance he will — he's likely to have some mathematical aptitude. But he'll also need help managing discouragement, frustration, disorganization, and interpreting others' expectations — all social-emotional skills that, if you don't develop, and early if you can, you can screw yourself over, no matter how otherwise gifted you are.
Because of who *we* are, it's easier for us to pass down life-lessons like, "When people expect a response from you, they have many implicit expectations about how you format the response, and being technically correct tends not to do you much good if you can't meet their expectations," with math problem sets that our kid seems to mostly enjoy, anyhow. He could learn similar lessons from yardwork, and sometimes has. Adults who learned such life-lessons through academics themselves are primed to pass them down through academics, which could be another source of overextrapolation.
The best way I can describe it is by encountering discouragement and frustration repeatedly, from an early age, in manageable "kid-sized" chunks, where there's reasonable hope that persevering through it will actually reward the kid.
Both children who always get their way and have things "too easy" and kids saddled with overwhelming burdens even adults struggle to bear with fortitude, aren't getting "kid-sized chunks" to practice managing.
For my kid with his particular parents, on the other hand, math homework is a nutritious source of "kid-sized chunks". It can be very frustrating for a kid to know the right answer but not yet be writing it legibly. That's a kid-sized frustration, though: some patient practice with a parent writing a shape or numeral legibly will probably overcome it, and if the activity overall sustains the kid's interest, it's rewarding to overcome. (When I grew up, I was simply scolded for illegible writing, with extra practice to correct it treated as "punishment" for being "bad". That worked... less well.)
This is reassuring! I've been struggling to chill about the lack of reading instruction at my kid's Montessori preschool. They have him arranging blocks, polishing silver, and using tongs to transfer objects from one jar to another.
It's hard to let go of the idea that reading early is better. I don't believe it will impact his long-term outcomes -- I know he'll read eventually -- but I guess all else equal I prefer him to be ahead, rather than behind, when he gets to elementary school. I imagine he'll feel more comfortable and confident in class if he already has that foundation.
Of course, he could also end up bored in school because his mom already forced him to learn phonics at home. Hard to say.
Reading instruction in preschool sounds dreadfully dull to me. I didn't start learning to read until age 6 (first grade, public school, 60 years ago), and now I have academic credentials up the wazoo.
My theory of education is that if they can read by age 18, it's all good.
My parents had, I think, unduly academic expectations of the local public schools — anything that wasn't inculcating academic skills or "manners" seemed suspicious to them. That academic-oriented activities benefit a kid most by teaching all the "soft" skills, with academics as the icing on top, was a lesson I finally figured out — painfully — in college.
A game where kids should freeze every time they hear a word beginning with "B" is mostly not about the "B". It's about halting perseveration and learning to "fake it till you make it" (follow the cues of your classmates until you catch on). I don't think it's bad if it's *also* about the "B", though. These activities don't seem any obviously duller than other, non-academically-oriented activities. Plus, kids let you know if it's dull for them by losing interest.
That reminds me of a Tina Fay quote, "The woman who runs my local toy store that sells the kind of beautiful wooden educational toys that kids love (if there are absolutely no other toys around and they have never seen television)"
What other options do they have? If there something they might enjoy more (Octonauts)?
Oh, I know what you mean! Our kids get plenty of the "nonproductive" stuff — if only because an electronic nanny is the nanny we can afford!
But the early-childhood curriculum in this district does seem to be at least moderately entertaining for children, and though the material is academic in the way I described, social-emotional learning and just making sure the kids are looked after seems to be their main goal. This district is quite socioeconomically mixed — a good mix, I think. Some of the kids just need a safe space to be. Many children are from academically-focused immigrant families. Some children are from wealthy families who have "made it". And everyone has to figure out how to get along.
I had one child that learned to read with minimal instruction at age 4 and could read well entering kindergarten and one that knew only the alphabet basics in kindergarten and didn’t read with any great fluency until second grade and then shocked everyone by flying up the Lexile levels. At this point both kids are reading above their respective grade levels and there really isn’t any way to tell which was the early and which the late reader.
The only thing I really believe in as far as encouraging kids to read is reading to them, which is 70% for me anyway because I love reading to them more than anything. Mine are 12 and 9 now and i still read to them almost every evening except now we read books at a more complex level. It’s a great way to stuff them with the classics I love that they won’t read on their own but still enjoy reading with me.
An older couple that is very dear to my family (they're early 70s now) once told me that when they were younger and poorer and their furniture was pillows on the floor, they would read books together by reading them aloud to one another, alternating chapters. THey read War and Peace that way.
Neither one of my school-aged kids knew the whole alphabet (like, could identify the letters) when they started K. My eldest could only read about four words when he started first grade (either he wasn't ready, or I'm a total failure as a homeschool mom; probably both). He's now taking high-school sophomore-level classes in 8th grade--in a Title 1 public school--and just made all-county band for flute. It's allllll good. The parenting you and your wife provide is probably the most important indicator.
So would you be on board with Matt Yglesias' view that the Democrats' current child care proposal is a mess, and should be thrown out in favor of a permanent cash benefit?
I think there's a legitimate case to be made that free government child care discriminates against women who want to be stay-at-home moms. The counterargument would be that for some children (the ones from disadvantaged backgrounds, possibly) pre-K is more enriching than staying home with mom and ought to be encouraged, even if it means providing social benefits in a way that restricts parental choice. But if you're right that pre-K doesn't do very much for poor kids, then the case for a cash child benefit is pretty strong.
Do the Matt Bruenig childcare proposal, wherein you get the choice of sending your kid to a free childcare center or receiving a cash benefit equivalent to the cost of sending your kid to a childcare center.
The license and credential requirements are great for pumping federal money into state and local college systems. My city offered a "last dollar" scholarship for child development programs, but these workers are so poor that they all qualify for federal financial aid unless they are undocumented
The problem is that it's hard to earn a living wage while you're also going to college just to keep your childcare job -- so it was still a financial burden for these workers as the requirements kept increasing. (And you can make more money working at the gas station, so I wonder how they're even finding new workers these days.)
Like Freddie said, we just need higher wages for all childcare workers, and it has to come from the government. Parents don't make enough to pay someone else's entire salary (or even 1/5 plus overhead at a center) -- it's a burden for parents and not enough for workers.
There is actually some evidence that mandatory or induced pre-K can be a little harmful for kids in terms of social adjustment (e.g. https://www.nber.org/papers/w11832 - that is just one study, there have been others). The problem is that putting very young children in a collective setting away from their parents can lead to stress and aggression. I didn't quite get this until I observed it with my own children. In my experience "official" pre-K can actually be worse than less formal child care because there are procedures and discipline that work for older kids but are inappropriate for say 3 year olds -- 3 year olds and 5 or 6 year olds are very different.
"And it devalues the true purpose of childcare, which is also an underrated aspect of public schools: keeping children alive when their parents can’t watch them."
Single biggest job of principals during the pandemic: getting the free lunches distributed.
I agree with all this. In fact, I'd be in favor of removing the college degree requirement from k-3 in favor of a knowledge test. All we're doing is constantly lowering the college degree standard to push out more people for jobs that don't need college knowledge.
"It's not working, so we must preserve it"?
The praxis exam for k-5 is plenty hard enough and there's no reason for it to be harder. In fact, it'd be better if we had a k-3 credential test that was even easier, creating more black teachers.
Middle school teachers are now required to be credentialed at the higher single subject high school level, which is also crazy for all but a few middle schools and probably contributes to the teacher shortage.
There is literally no evidence that smarter teachers have better student outcomes. There's a lot of evidence that black teachers in particular, have better outcomes for black kids. Making the test bar higher creates fewer black teachers, so no, it's a really bad idea to make the Praxis harder.
The praxis exam is not insultingly easy for a prospective third grade teacher. We don't need rocket scientists, or even college level ability, for elementary school teachers. Moreover, the harder you make the test, the more likely it is that the black teachers who can pass the test have other options. You need to get the social workers and child care workers to think about being third grade teachers.
I would describe myself as having an economically stable life situation, but subsidized childcare would literally be life changing.
My wife and I run a childcare- well, she runs it, and I help as much as I can between shifts.
All children old enough to walk about are wee robots designed to self-destruct as creatively as possible. Your job is to toss monkey wrenches into their gears and sand in their gas tanks all day so they can get home alive. Astounding, really, how ambitious the little dudes are.
It would be grand to design system where you don’t have to have a second parent work full time to afford childcare so they can afford to work full time, but in its absence “keep the toddlers from suiciding” really should be the guiding principle rather than setting them up for algebra classes or whatever.
Bless your wife (and you), haha. I'm pretty sure my toddler almost died like 5 times yesterday. Yer doin' hard work over there.
And also that there is nothing wrong with a bunch of 3 year olds spending the afternoon watching Aquanaut’s. First of all, because trying to use that time to teach reading or math has no long term benefits and may indeed be harmful. Second, not every moment in life needs to be productive.
Same here. I think cartoon nursery rhymes (“learning songs”) are very useful for the little guys learning to speak and identify and sort things - as are books. The means of engagement is different, but they’re always absorbing and taking something in. They are little sponges. I think the biggest benefit of reading a book, other than the content, is the engagement and interaction with mom and dad. My son gets very excited when we sit down to read together (which we *try* to do every day...)
"Not every moment in life needs to be productive" - BINGO! But try telling that to parents drunk on meritocracy.......
I pray this is true because my kid has watched A LOT of Paw Patrol and Octonauts during the pandemic. He is literally watching Octonauts right now. (I send him to preschool, but he is home sick this week -- second time this month).
Cuddling with my son on the couch (turns two next week, daycare closed due to covid outbreak so I’m not working this week, wife makes a tremendous living and we are super fortunate) and he is watching Little Baby Bum. It’s obvious that he has learned a lot watching these silly (and monotonous and grating) nursery rhyme cartoons. I don’t feel (very) guilty about it.
Freddie’s book makes a great case for it being true.
My three year old knows how to identify both a mosasaurus and a plesiosaurus, and I've never said a word to him about either. It's fine.
I don't know what current childrens television is like, but I can tell you that Bob Ross truly imparted a love of art for me at a very young age, and that when I was a little older, 1 2 3 Contact got me super interested in math.
Some programming is good!
My love of This Old House was a precursor to being a competent adult DIYer with a lot of home-related stuff. I still love going to the hardware store.
I don't think my kids watch the Backyardigans, but maybe they should — the music is supposed to be unusually good for a kid's show!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVAGjfFmFkw&t=819s
Mine did and it is.
This topic is a good one for your new short-form kick!
The licensure & expansion for pre-K especially aggravates me because there are so many more essential uses for that money in public ed. Teacher salaries, building infrastructure, internet to rural areas, goddamned bus driver shortages--these are all huge issues that we need to fix. But politicians always prefer putting their name on new initiatives over quietly fixing existing issues.
Licensure of grandparents or extended family who watch so many children not required.
*raises hand* I have a bachelor's in English, which has really come in handy in the past ten years of raising my kids and babysitting the kids of friends and family as an at-home parent. Nothing aids in changing a diaper or getting a juice box like a modernist quote. :)
But really, I've been in the workforce, and I've also been the daily care provider for eight babies/toddlers--besides my own three!---and I have to say, yeah it's a totally differnet skill set, but boy is it important. And worth a living wage.
Really wish this one was longer ....
There's a whole book!
Yes, I've ordered it.
Very little to do with the piece, but literally nothing I read about children makes me want to have any.
Word. There is no straight-up logical reason to have a child/children, although people can delude themselves into thinking that. I will say it's super fulfilling, my feelings have become much more expansive, life feels 3D rather than 2D, but I don't think it's a rite of passage, I don't think everyone should be a parent, I don't think you should compromise on having or not having kids, and I would NEVER have another.
I'm fairly privileged, I guess, so the messiness of school / childcare is something I have been able to opt out of almost entirely. If I had to drop off my newborn to a stranger so that I could go back to my minimum wage job full-time I simply never would have had a kid.
lol. I love my kids with my whole heart. And being a parent is an entirely different life than not being one. I understand your perspective.
Thank you for highlighting the role of schools in keeping kids safe, fed, and warm. I grew up in Minnesota, and my mom taught special education in a low-income, majority-minority high school for most of her career. The school provided breakfast as well as lunch and after school snacks to any child who wanted them. It also provided something I had never thought about before: heat during Minnesota’s brutal, long winter.
My mom told me something once that broke my heart: you know how, as kids, we all couldn’t wait for weekends, holidays, and summer vacation? How we would get so excited and happy? Well, my mom’s students dreaded school breaks. They would linger after school on Friday afternoons and on the last day before break until they had to be kicked out. My mom said she could see them getting progressively sadder as the breaks approached. Think about how different their world is from that of most policymakers.
These kids were not heading to college; it was counted a success if they were able to pass the state reading test and graduate. The school did not give them the kind of intense academic education most policymakers say we should strive for. The school gave them something much more important: a place to let down their guards and be cared for.
My wife is a Kindergarten teacher and her other main task is to properly socialize the 10-30% of kids who's parents didn't do it. If kids don't learn how to play with others by 4 or 5 then they have a very tough life ahead of them.
I don’t think the benefits of early socialization (diversity of playmates and experiences) can be overstated. There are many different things and ways to learn early in life, and very few involve a classroom and an instructor. As Freddie says, keep the kids warm, fed , safe, secure, and alive. There’ll be time enough for sorting when the time comes.
Preschool has been great for our 4yo only child who spent the entire pandemic at home with adults. He finally has friends who aren’t imaginary.
>very few involve a classroom and an instructor
You might not be doing this, in which case sorry, but it sounds like you're envisioning pre-k or kindergarten as a classroom with little ones at desks while the teacher lectures to them. This is not how those levels works. At least in my local public, there are a bunch of tables and stations with various things the kids can do. The teachers do teach them stuff, but it looks an awfully lot like a childcare room.
We chose a play based childcare center -- it was licensed, but the caregivers were not teaching, they were setting up different play activities for the kids to select. But when my son arrived at kindergarten not yet reading it took a few weeks before he made the connection between the words he understood orally and those on the page and when his teacher explained that the silent e makes the other vowel in the word "say its name" he was off and reading Harry Potter to himself by the end of the year. I guess I am saying that when kids are ready to learn to read they will if they have decent support.
Perennial reminder that in Finland, with probably the best education metrics in the world, that it's perfectly common for 5 year olds to not even be attempting to read. The idea that you need to start academic tasks early to have success is probably an overextrapolation from language acquisition.
We do have our kindergartener a subject-specific academic enrichment program, but the reason is more for social-emotional development using material that holds both his and his parents' interest than for the academics. If our kid takes after us — and there's a good chance he will — he's likely to have some mathematical aptitude. But he'll also need help managing discouragement, frustration, disorganization, and interpreting others' expectations — all social-emotional skills that, if you don't develop, and early if you can, you can screw yourself over, no matter how otherwise gifted you are.
Because of who *we* are, it's easier for us to pass down life-lessons like, "When people expect a response from you, they have many implicit expectations about how you format the response, and being technically correct tends not to do you much good if you can't meet their expectations," with math problem sets that our kid seems to mostly enjoy, anyhow. He could learn similar lessons from yardwork, and sometimes has. Adults who learned such life-lessons through academics themselves are primed to pass them down through academics, which could be another source of overextrapolation.
How does one learn to deal with discouragement and frustration?
The best way I can describe it is by encountering discouragement and frustration repeatedly, from an early age, in manageable "kid-sized" chunks, where there's reasonable hope that persevering through it will actually reward the kid.
Both children who always get their way and have things "too easy" and kids saddled with overwhelming burdens even adults struggle to bear with fortitude, aren't getting "kid-sized chunks" to practice managing.
For my kid with his particular parents, on the other hand, math homework is a nutritious source of "kid-sized chunks". It can be very frustrating for a kid to know the right answer but not yet be writing it legibly. That's a kid-sized frustration, though: some patient practice with a parent writing a shape or numeral legibly will probably overcome it, and if the activity overall sustains the kid's interest, it's rewarding to overcome. (When I grew up, I was simply scolded for illegible writing, with extra practice to correct it treated as "punishment" for being "bad". That worked... less well.)
This is reassuring! I've been struggling to chill about the lack of reading instruction at my kid's Montessori preschool. They have him arranging blocks, polishing silver, and using tongs to transfer objects from one jar to another.
It's hard to let go of the idea that reading early is better. I don't believe it will impact his long-term outcomes -- I know he'll read eventually -- but I guess all else equal I prefer him to be ahead, rather than behind, when he gets to elementary school. I imagine he'll feel more comfortable and confident in class if he already has that foundation.
Of course, he could also end up bored in school because his mom already forced him to learn phonics at home. Hard to say.
Reading instruction in preschool sounds dreadfully dull to me. I didn't start learning to read until age 6 (first grade, public school, 60 years ago), and now I have academic credentials up the wazoo.
My theory of education is that if they can read by age 18, it's all good.
If it holds a kid's interest, is it dull?
My parents had, I think, unduly academic expectations of the local public schools — anything that wasn't inculcating academic skills or "manners" seemed suspicious to them. That academic-oriented activities benefit a kid most by teaching all the "soft" skills, with academics as the icing on top, was a lesson I finally figured out — painfully — in college.
A game where kids should freeze every time they hear a word beginning with "B" is mostly not about the "B". It's about halting perseveration and learning to "fake it till you make it" (follow the cues of your classmates until you catch on). I don't think it's bad if it's *also* about the "B", though. These activities don't seem any obviously duller than other, non-academically-oriented activities. Plus, kids let you know if it's dull for them by losing interest.
"If it holds a kid's interest, is it dull?"
That reminds me of a Tina Fay quote, "The woman who runs my local toy store that sells the kind of beautiful wooden educational toys that kids love (if there are absolutely no other toys around and they have never seen television)"
What other options do they have? If there something they might enjoy more (Octonauts)?
My kids consistently enjoyed the cardboard delivery box equally to whatever educational toy was in it.
My strongest memory of a toy I had as a kid is the two large cardboard boxes that the new washer and dryer from Sears came in ...
Oh, I know what you mean! Our kids get plenty of the "nonproductive" stuff — if only because an electronic nanny is the nanny we can afford!
But the early-childhood curriculum in this district does seem to be at least moderately entertaining for children, and though the material is academic in the way I described, social-emotional learning and just making sure the kids are looked after seems to be their main goal. This district is quite socioeconomically mixed — a good mix, I think. Some of the kids just need a safe space to be. Many children are from academically-focused immigrant families. Some children are from wealthy families who have "made it". And everyone has to figure out how to get along.
I had one child that learned to read with minimal instruction at age 4 and could read well entering kindergarten and one that knew only the alphabet basics in kindergarten and didn’t read with any great fluency until second grade and then shocked everyone by flying up the Lexile levels. At this point both kids are reading above their respective grade levels and there really isn’t any way to tell which was the early and which the late reader.
The only thing I really believe in as far as encouraging kids to read is reading to them, which is 70% for me anyway because I love reading to them more than anything. Mine are 12 and 9 now and i still read to them almost every evening except now we read books at a more complex level. It’s a great way to stuff them with the classics I love that they won’t read on their own but still enjoy reading with me.
An older couple that is very dear to my family (they're early 70s now) once told me that when they were younger and poorer and their furniture was pillows on the floor, they would read books together by reading them aloud to one another, alternating chapters. THey read War and Peace that way.
Neither one of my school-aged kids knew the whole alphabet (like, could identify the letters) when they started K. My eldest could only read about four words when he started first grade (either he wasn't ready, or I'm a total failure as a homeschool mom; probably both). He's now taking high-school sophomore-level classes in 8th grade--in a Title 1 public school--and just made all-county band for flute. It's allllll good. The parenting you and your wife provide is probably the most important indicator.
So would you be on board with Matt Yglesias' view that the Democrats' current child care proposal is a mess, and should be thrown out in favor of a permanent cash benefit?
I think there's a legitimate case to be made that free government child care discriminates against women who want to be stay-at-home moms. The counterargument would be that for some children (the ones from disadvantaged backgrounds, possibly) pre-K is more enriching than staying home with mom and ought to be encouraged, even if it means providing social benefits in a way that restricts parental choice. But if you're right that pre-K doesn't do very much for poor kids, then the case for a cash child benefit is pretty strong.
Do the Matt Bruenig childcare proposal, wherein you get the choice of sending your kid to a free childcare center or receiving a cash benefit equivalent to the cost of sending your kid to a childcare center.
The license and credential requirements are great for pumping federal money into state and local college systems. My city offered a "last dollar" scholarship for child development programs, but these workers are so poor that they all qualify for federal financial aid unless they are undocumented
The problem is that it's hard to earn a living wage while you're also going to college just to keep your childcare job -- so it was still a financial burden for these workers as the requirements kept increasing. (And you can make more money working at the gas station, so I wonder how they're even finding new workers these days.)
Like Freddie said, we just need higher wages for all childcare workers, and it has to come from the government. Parents don't make enough to pay someone else's entire salary (or even 1/5 plus overhead at a center) -- it's a burden for parents and not enough for workers.
There is actually some evidence that mandatory or induced pre-K can be a little harmful for kids in terms of social adjustment (e.g. https://www.nber.org/papers/w11832 - that is just one study, there have been others). The problem is that putting very young children in a collective setting away from their parents can lead to stress and aggression. I didn't quite get this until I observed it with my own children. In my experience "official" pre-K can actually be worse than less formal child care because there are procedures and discipline that work for older kids but are inappropriate for say 3 year olds -- 3 year olds and 5 or 6 year olds are very different.
"And it devalues the true purpose of childcare, which is also an underrated aspect of public schools: keeping children alive when their parents can’t watch them."
Single biggest job of principals during the pandemic: getting the free lunches distributed.
I agree with all this. In fact, I'd be in favor of removing the college degree requirement from k-3 in favor of a knowledge test. All we're doing is constantly lowering the college degree standard to push out more people for jobs that don't need college knowledge.