Photo: Jean-Claude Lejeune
Education in America is undergoing a sweeping reform. Its guiding mantra is "Standards, Accountability, Testing, and Technology," and its effects reverberate from ivory towers to Head Start programs.
At the preschool and kindergarten level, it translates into early academics, "scripted teaching," desk work, computer-based learning, and a paucity of play. As a result, a rich multidisciplinary literature demonstrating the critical role of play for cognitive, social, emotional, and ethical development—a literature that was decades in the making—is being ignored.
Remarkably, current educational reforms are not driven by the findings and recommendations of educators and child-development experts, but by politicians and policymakers at the federal, state, and local levels, with the express intention of ensuring America's competitive edge in the new information-based economy. This agenda was first articulated in the 1983 report A Nation at Risk, issued by President Reagan's National Commission on Excellence:
If only to keep and improve on the slim competitive edge we still retain in world markets, we must dedicate ourselves to the reform of our educational system. . . . Learning is the indispensable investment required for success in the 'information age' we are entering.
The "high-stakes" testing movement and race to "wire the classroom" were launched by Reagan in 1983, given renewed vigor by presidents Bush and Clinton, and have now gained further momentum with George W. Bush's 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, which received overwhelming bipartisan support. On January 16, 2003, the current administration announced that it was implementing a standardized assessment of all 4-year-olds in Head Start programs nationwide to assess reading readiness, thus officially delivering "high-stakes" testing to preschoolers. In addition, the Early Care and Education Act, now before Congress, will give bonuses to states that demonstrate that their preschool programs are successfully teaching early literacy skills, necessitating even more academic pressure and wide-scale testing of preschoolers.