Bill Gates’ Message To Our Children
I’m printing this out and giving it to my son. Your little ones aren’t ready for it, but keep it in mind for later.
Rule 1: Life is not fair – get used to it!
Rule 2: The world doesn’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.
Rule 3: You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won’t be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.
Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.
Rule 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping: they called it opportunity.
Rule 6: If you mess up, it’s not your parents’ fault, so don’t whine about your mistakes, learn from them.
Rule 7: Before you were born, your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent’s generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.
Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they’ll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.
Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time.
Rule 10: Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.
Add a Comment »
How to Raise a Confident Child
I love this column by Tyra Damm. It appeared in the Dallas Morning News Today. To read it at their website, click here. Otherwise, enjoy and remember the lesson that the author shares.
A healthy self-image for my girl – and a clean kitchen? By TYRA DAMM
My worries about my children are numerous, but one topic that’s rarely on the list is self-confidence. Somehow both Cooper and Katie have self-esteem to spare.
In fact, Katie’s self-confidence positively overflows.
Last winter an education consultant evaluated her kindergarten readiness, a service offered at her preschool. After testing and an interview, the longtime educator expressed one reservation – she doesn’t always have the skills to back up her confidence.
She’s full of bravado, leaving little room for self-doubt.
She proclaims to never be tired or sleepy, as if admitting fatigue would indicate a weakness.
If I say, “Katie, I love you” or “Katie, you’re awesome,” she’s most likely to answer, “I know.”
This summer, as I was asking her basic, single-digit addition questions, she stopped me.
“Mommy, I’m sure I’ll be the best in math in my kindergarten class.”
A few days later she informed me that she really should just start first grade instead.
I couldn’t suppress my laughter as I told her that she had plenty to learn – academically and socially – and that kindergarten was the perfect place for her.
When I brush and pull back her hair in the mornings, she often stares in the mirror and declares herself beautiful.
On paper all of these proclamations may read “conceited.” In real life, she’s really just content and secure.
Katie attended a science day camp just before school began. One morning she walked in and another girl, about a year older, positioned herself right in front of Katie and dramatically pointed her right foot forward.
“I have new shoes,” the older girl said. “They are Twinkle Toes.”
The tone in her voice embarrassed the father, who hastily jumped into the conversation. “Look, honey, this little girl has nice pink shoes,” pointing to Katie’s practical, non-sequined sneakers.
On the drive home I wondered if Katie’s spirit might have been crushed by a girl dropping brand names and showing off her bejeweled feet.
I casually asked her about the exchange that afternoon.
“Katie, how did it make you feel when the girl showed you her new shoes?”
“Oh, I was happy, because we both have pretty shoes.”
I should have known.
One of my parenting goals is to help my daughter maintain her healthy self-image. I want her to hold on to that strong sense of self-worth. I don’t want her to seek unhealthy approval from others.
There are all kinds of studies and statistics that warn of potential difficulty, especially in the pre-teen and early teen years. So I’ve started gathering tips and suggestions.
A common theme among experts is the link between responsibility and self-worth.
William and Martha Sears write on their website: “One of the main ways children develop self-confidence and internalize values is through helping maintain the family living area, inside and out. Giving children household duties helps them feel more valuable .”
The American Academy of Pediatrics advises: “Give your child a chance to show what she is capable of doing. Allow her to take on tasks without being checked on all the time.”
And in one of my favorite development books, Touchpoints 3 to 6 , T. Berry Brazelton and Joshua Sparrow write about children in a Western Kenya village. They observed kids the same age as Katie who had taken on adult roles – cooking, caring for younger children, working in fields.
“Yet we saw little evidence of adult recognition,” they write. “The children were expected to perform these tasks and fulfilling them carried its own inner reward.”
I thought of those children one night this week after I thanked Katie for putting away clean flatware and cups, one of her daily chores.
“Of course, Mommy. I’m happy to help. I’m always happy to help.”
Think I can get that in writing?
Add a Comment »
The impact of new core standards on kindergarten education, by JOAN ALMON and EDWARD MILLER
I thought this was a very interesting article about the use of core standards in kindergarten. If you’d like to view it where it originally appeared, click here.
The new K–12 Common Core State Standards were released by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers in June. Now it is up to individual states to decide whether to adopt them. The U.S. Department of Education has linked Race to the Top funds to adoption of the standards, creating a powerful financial incentive. But we have serious concerns about these standards, especially for kindergartners.
Most kindergartens are already highly focused on raising and testing children’s literacy and math skills. The Alliance for Childhood’s 2009 research report, Crisis in the Kindergarten: Why Children Need to Play in School, found that kindergarten teachers spend two to three hours per day teaching literacy and math and testing or preparing children for tests. The Core Standards’ narrow focus on these two subjects will almost certainly lead to even greater emphasis on them at the expense of other crucial areas of young children’s learning and development.
The push to raise children’s cognitive skills in kindergarten has meant decreasing amounts of time devoted to exploratory learning and child-initiated play. Yet extensive research shows the importance of hands-on learning and creative play in kindergarten. In contrast there is no evidence of long-term gains (in fourth grade and beyond) for the highly didactic and even scripted approaches that many schools have adopted.
The problem for today’s kindergartners is that they, like past generations, learn best when cognitive skills are well integrated with physical, social, and emotional learning. Educate the head as if it is separate from the rest of the child (as frequently happens now) and the learning is shallow and easily forgotten.
While no evidence exists for an academic standards–driven approach to kindergarten producing long-term success, many child development experts believe that high-pressure kindergartens are actually doing harm by increasing children’s stress and contributing to early burn-out. It is time for the pendulum to swing back toward play-based, experiential education. But the new Core Standards will instead freeze the pendulum where it is or drive it even further in a didactic and scripted direction.
The new standards for kindergarten, on the whole, are not research-based. We know of no definitive research showing that certain discrete skills or bits of knowledge (such as counting to 100 or being able to read a certain number of words) if mastered in kindergarten will lead to later success in school. The standards tend to represent educated guesswork, not educational, cognitive, or developmental science.
For this reason the standards writers had a hard time agreeing on which specific facts and skills kindergartners need to know. Their final decisions seem arbitrary in many cases. Experience shows such narrowly conceived standards lead to teaching methods that thwart young children’s natural curiosity, interests, and energy. And the sheer number of standards in the final version—more than 90 for kindergartners — will require long hours of instruction if children are to achieve them.
Another effect of the standards movement is the proliferation of kindergarten testing despite expert views that testing before age eight is highly unreliable and leads to unjustified and harmful labeling of children as failures. A kindergarten teacher in Milwaukee described over 150 tests that she was required to give in a single year to her class. Most were related to the curriculum, but many were standardized tests. Recent studies show that kindergartens now devote 20 to 30 minutes per day to testing or preparing children for tests.
The new national emphasis on common standards and measurable outcomes will almost certainly intensify testing of young children. It is already common to use kindergarten tests to determine if a child should be promoted, should go into gifted programs, or into special education classes. These are major decisions in a young child’s life. Yet the reliability rate of most kindergarten tests is only 50 percent. One might as well flip a coin and spare the child the test. That would be considered highly unethical, but making high-stakes decisions for a young child’s future based on test scores amounts to the same thing.
There is one bright note in the Core Standards document. In the introduction to the language arts standards, in a section called “What is not covered by the Standards,” they write, “[T]he use of play with young children is not specified by the Standards, but it is welcome as a valuable activity in its own right and as a way to help students meet the expectations in this document.”
The Alliance for Childhood recommends that teachers and school administrators put this statement about play front and center as they develop ways to implement the new standards if they are adopted, as well as existing state standards. When play and play-based learning are at the heart of education, young children master content much more deeply than when schools rely primarily on didactic instruction. Play has also been shown to reduce stress levels in young children, and many will need that respite as national attention focuses on how many letters, numbers, and words they have mastered by age six. (See “How Schools Can Make Room for Play,” SEEN Magazine 11.3, Winter 2009.)
The erosion of play-based learning in early education is contributing not only to serious problems for children, their families, and teachers, but contributing to societal problems as well. One reason for developing the K–12 Core Standards is high school graduates’ lack of preparedness for college and work. That is a real concern. But the cognitive shortcomings that the standards address are only one part of the picture. Many business executives complain that young people also lack social and problem-solving skills and can’t think creatively. All of these abilities are enhanced by playful, active learning.
While the new Core Standards may help graduates in some ways, they will handicap them in others. It is vital that we restore play-based education to kindergarten and preserve it in preschools, while setting realistic goals for learning for young children. We need a public outcry in favor of play and play-based learning in kindergartens. It is vital that teachers and school administrators who understand the importance of play speak out. Recent surveys show that parents are concerned about the loss of play from children’s lives. With encouragement, parents can become effective allies for educators in the movement to restore play-based learning for their children.
Joan Almon is Executive Director and Edward Miller is Senior Researcher of the Alliance for Childhood. For further information about the Alliance’s work to restore play and play-based learning to children’s lives, see www.allianceforchildhood.org.
Add a Comment »
Kindergarten Admissions – The Filmography
Kindergarten Shuffle
The Lottery
Waiting For Superman
Nursery University
Private School Demand Dips as New Yorkers Evade Cost, By Janet Frankston Lorin (Bloomberg)
To read this article at the Bloomberg website, click here.
Feb 26, 2010
Darren Foster and Carol Cate with daughter Cait
Anxiety over the recession is trumping the angst of New York City parents to get their children into elite private schools.
Fewer children took entrance exams for private elementary schools, continuing a decline that began last year, as the economy hurt parents’ ability to pay annual tuition of more than $30,000. The number of tests completed by kids applying to prekindergarten to fifth grade declined 4.4 percent, to 4,259, said Antoinette DeLuca, an executive director of the Educational Records Bureau, which administers the exams.
The public schools in the city, the most populous in the U.S., last year had their first increase in enrollment since 2002, mostly in kindergarten, said Jack Zarin-Rosenfeld, a spokesman for the New York City Department of Education. Families that considered sending their children to private schools are turning to the public system partly because the cost of alternatives such as Ethical Culture Fieldston School climbed, said Carol Cate, 45, whose daughter is to begin kindergarten in September.
“I’d always fantasized about her going to Ethical Culture,” said Cate, who produces events for the Food Network, a television channel owned principally by Cincinnati-based Scripps Networks Interactive Inc. “I was hearing that public schools were getting better and private schools were getting so ridiculously expensive. Once we got serious, private schools were off the list.”
$36,000 Kindergarten
Ethical Culture’s kindergarten costs more than $34,000 this year, and the price will be $35,915 for children entering in September, said Ginger Curwen, a school spokeswoman. She declined to comment on applications.
Demand differs from school to school and across grades, and may be up for high school even in places it is down for kindergarten. Applications for the 10 to 15 seats at Trevor Day School in Manhattan increased by 100, to about 250, said Pam Clarke, head of the school.
Frank C. Leana, a private consultant in New York for admissions to high school, college and graduate school, said he has seen a “slight” increase in demand for private high school from the families he advises.
“The economy has put inordinate emphasis on the necessity of an education’s leading to job prospects after college, and rightly or wrongly, people equate a private school education with a stronger likelihood of that,” Leana said in an e-mail.
Changing Districts
A public-school education is free to city residents and funded by taxpayer dollars. Because the Education Department is still taking applications, Zarin-Rosenfeld said he couldn’t give any enrollment projection for the next academic year.
Cate’s daughter didn’t take the exam for private school. Cate and her husband, a cable-TV news producer, moved from an Upper West Side Manhattan apartment where they had resided for more than a decade to a smaller rental about 25 blocks south “to be in a better school district.”
By not paying tuition at a private school, Cate and her husband can afford activities for their daughter that would have put a strain on their budget.
“After school, she can go take swim classes at the Y and Spanish and ballet at this place or karate or cooking, and we’ll have the money to do that,” Cate said.
Public Kindergarten
Another parent, Marcy Drogin, plans to send her son to public kindergarten near her Upper West Side apartment in September. While he could have stayed through eighth grade at the private Rodeph Sholom School, his mother said she can’t afford so many years of nonpublic education. The Rodeph Sholom kindergarten costs $32,230 next year, according to the school’s Web Site.
“The economic crisis has affected so many families, making it difficult, if not impossible, to send their children to private school,” said Drogin, 44, a film producer who has worked with the actor and producer Michael Douglas.
Revenue at her company, Maximum Films & Management, has declined 30 percent in a year because clients have less money to spend, Drogin said. Her savings dropped 50 percent in two years, she said.
PS 87, a school on Manhattan’s West 78th Street, where Drogin wants to enroll her son, is expecting applicants to outnumber the available seats, Zarin-Rosenfeld said. The Education Department is proposing to open a new school — at a location and time still to be determined — that would accommodate Upper West Side students, Zarin-Rosenfeld said.
50 Schools
New York’s public schools fall under the administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, also founder and majority owner of Bloomberg News parent Bloomberg LP.
The 50 private schools that go beyond kindergarten in Manhattan each still attract hundreds of applicants vying for a few dozen spots for kindergarten, said George Davison, head of the private Grace Church School, a Lower Manhattan institution founded in 1894.
Private schools began notifying parents of kindergarten decisions on Feb. 19. Families must decide on acceptances by March 2. Of the families that consider independent schools, about 50 percent to 75 percent apply to kindergarten because it is the main entry point at most schools, said Cynthia Bing, head of a committee at the Parents League, a 97-year-old nonprofit organization in Manhattan, that advises parents whose children are applying to prekindergarten programs through high school.
Dropping Plans
In the last two years, more parents have dropped plans to send children to private schools for the first time or to keep the kids there, said Robin Aronow, the owner of School Search NYC, a consultant to New York families applying to schools.
“The biggest difference I’m seeing is that I’m having more people talk about public schools, people who were hoping to go to private school,” Aronow said in an interview. “They can’t afford the tuition anymore.”
Kindergarten applications, usually made when children are 4 years old, fell for the first time in 15 years at the Dalton School on the Upper East Side, Elisabeth Krents, director of admission for K through 12, said in an interview.
Tuition at Dalton — which counts Anderson Cooper, the Cable News Network anchor, among its alumni — is rising 3.5 percent to $35,300 for the 2010-11 school year, Krents said. While the school declined to provide the number of applications, she called the change “an insignificant decrease.”
“This was expected at some point,” Krents said. “You can’t keep increasing at the rate we were increasing. There can’t be that many 4-year-olds.”
Cutting Jobs
While the under-5 population in the borough of Manhattan ballooned 27 percent from 2000 to 2005, it increased only 1.8 percent during the following three years, according to the latest U.S. Census Bureau estimates. Manhattan includes the city’s commercial and financial center, where Wall Street companies, such as Citigroup Inc. cut jobs in the financial crisis and recession.
A total of 67,500 private-sector jobs were lost in New York City last year, including 20,400 in the finance and insurance industries, according to the New York State Labor Department.
“The decline in kindergarten applications reflects both a decline in the demographics and the current economy, which has families of younger children not starting the independent-school route while the economy is down,” Clarke said.
More Aid
More of those who do apply for Trevor want financial aid. This year, 43 percent of applicants to Trevor requested assistance, up from 35 percent to 38 percent in previous years, Clarke said. The school increased its aid budget by $200,000, to $3.2 million, Clarke said.
Applications for Trevor’s kindergarten, which costs $33,000 next year, declined 11 percent to 571 from the record 644 last year and returned to the level of 2005, Clarke said. Trevor interviewed about 400 applicants for about 30 to 35 open seats, as it has done for the last decade, Clarke said.
The ranks of applicants to independent schools — a category that excludes public and parochial institutions –have declined throughout the U.S., by about 1 percent to 9 percent, depending on the region and size of school, said Peter Aitken, president of Benchmark Research, a Boston consultant to more than 100 independent schools.
The private schools still have more applicants than they can accept. Grace Church School received three fewer applications for kindergarten and pre-kindergarten after “consistent increases” over five years, Davison said.
‘Over the Top’
“We’ve seen the flood levels drop slightly, but it’s still over the top,” Davison said in an interview. “It is not growing exponentially anymore, at least for now.”
At St. Hilda’s & St. Hugh’s, a six-decade-old Episcopal school near Columbia University, total applications for admission to pre-kindergarten through grade 8 declined about 5 percent to 10 percent, the first decrease in a decade, said Megan Delaney, a spokeswoman.
The number of students who took the New York City private school admissions test climbed for six years in a row, rising 36 percent during that period, before declining 1.8 percent last year, according to data from the nonprofit Educational Records Bureau, based in Manhattan.
The biggest annual surge in the six-year period was 12 percent two years ago. The latest exams took place from last April through Feb. 25; the period a year earlier contained one extra day.
Competition Surged
In New York, competition for spots in private kindergarten soared as families chose not to move to the suburbs and often elected to have three or four children instead of fewer, said Amanda Uhry, a private consultant who said she charges each client $18,500 for help getting a child into school.
As applications rose, the number of spots to “the most sought-after schools” stayed the same, she said. Schools became as exclusive as top colleges, and parents came to believe that the path to an Ivy League school can begin at age 2, she said. The Ivy League, a group of eight universities in the northeastern U.S., includes Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.
“New York defines the concept of where you start is where you finish, from preschool on,” Uhry said.
To contact the reporter on this story: Janet Frankston Lorin in New York jlorin@bloomberg.net.
©2010 BLOOMBERG L.P. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Add a Comment »
The Littlest Redshirts Sit Out Kindergarten, By Pamela Paul (New York Times)
This article is from the New York Times. Click here if you’d like to read it on their site.
August 22, 2010
Suzanne Collier opted for a “transitional” year for John, 5, rather than kindergarten.
Rachel Tayse Baillieul “agonized” about keeping Lillian, 4, in preschool.
AFTER ALL THOSE ATTENTIVE EARLY CHILDHOOD RITUALS — the flashcards, the Kumon, the Dora the Explorer, the mornings spent in cutting-edge playgrounds — who wouldn’t want to give their children a head start when it’s finally time to set off for school?
Suzanne Collier, for one. Rather than send her 5-year-old son, John, to kindergarten this year, the 36-year-old mother from Brea, Calif., enrolled him in a “transitional” kindergarten “without all the rigor.” He’s an active child, Ms. Collier said, “and not quite ready to focus on a full day of classroom work.” Citing a study from “The Tipping Point” about Canadian hockey players, which found that the strongest players were the oldest, she said, “If he’s older, he’ll have the strongest chance to do the best.”
Hers is a popular school of thought, and it is not new. “Redshirting” of kindergartners — the term comes from the practice of postponing the participation of college athletes in competitive games — became increasingly widespread in the 1990s, and shows no signs of waning.
In 2008, the most recent year for which census data is available, 17 percent of children were 6 or older when they entered the kindergarten classroom. Sand tables have been replaced by worksheets to a degree that’s surprising even by the standards of a decade ago. Blame it on No Child Left Behind and the race to get children test-ready by third grade: Kindergarten has steadily become, as many educators put it, “the new first grade.”
What once seemed like an aberration — something that sparked fierce dinner party debates — has come to seem like the norm. But that doesn’t make it any easier for parents.
“We agonized over it all year,” said Rachel Tayse Baillieul, a food educator in Columbus, Ohio, where the cutoff date is Oct. 1. Children whose birthdates fall later must wait until the next year to start school. But her daughter, Lillian, 4, was born five days before, on Sept. 25, which would make her one of the youngest in the class.
With the wide age spans in kindergarten classrooms, each new generation of preschool parents must grapple with where exactly to slot their children. Wiggly, easily distracted and less mature, boys are more likely to be held back than girls, but delayed enrollment is now common for both sexes.
“Technically, Lillian could go to kindergarten,” Ms. Tayse Baillieul said. Moving her up from part-time preschool would allow Ms. Tayse Baillieul to return to work and earn income. But Lillian’s preschool teachers counseled her to hold Lillian back. “They said staying in preschool a year longer will probably never hurt and will probably always help, especially with social and emotional development.”
Regardless, a classroom with an 18-month age spread will create social disparities. “Someone has to be the youngest in class,” pointed out Susan Messina, a 46-year-old mother in Washington. “No matter how you slice it.” When Clare, her daughter, who is now 9, entered kindergarten at 4, Ms. Messina was aware of widespread redshirting.
“I thought, I’m not breaking the rules, I’m not pushing her ahead, we’re doing exactly what we’re supposed to do,” she said. “Then it dawned on me that in this day and age, there’s a move to keep your brilliant angel in preschool longer so they could be smarter and taller for the basketball team. But my daughter doesn’t need a leg up. She’s fine.”
Still, it bothers her that children in the same class are as much as a year and a half older than Clare. “She has friends who are 11 who are going to get their periods this year, and she’s still playing with American Girl dolls.” Another mother complained that her 4-year-old became hooked on Hannah Montana by her aspiring-tween classmates. A 6-year-old wielding a light saber can be awfully intimidating to a boy who still sleeps with his teddy.
At the other tip of the age span, parents who promote children to kindergarten before 5 are often seen as pushy, “even ogre-ish,” Ms. Messina said. But suppose your child is already reading at 4? Do you hold her back where she may be bored to tears in preschool or send her into a classroom of hulking 6-year-old boys? In 1970, 14.4 percent of kindergartners started at age 4. That figure has dropped to less than 10 percent.
The self-esteem movement has inspired parents to care as much about emotional well-being as academic achievement, and with fragile self-images still in the making, the worst fear for parents is setting up their children for failure. One Connecticut mother in Fairfield County sent her October-born son to kindergarten at 4, despite “the informal rule of thumb that everyone holds back their September to December boys.” Kindergarten seemed to go well, but when her son entered first grade, she said, “I got hit over the head. They told me he was way behind.”
She watched in horror as her son’s self-confidence tanked. “He was spinning his wheels just to keep up,” she recalled. “He even got pulled out of class for poor handwriting.” At the end of a miserable second-grade year, she withdrew him to repeat the grade at a private school. “It’s been a long and difficult journey,” she said. “I totally regret starting him on kindergarten at 4.”
Many parents feel compelled to redshirt by what they see as unreasonable academic demands for 4- and 5-year-olds. But keeping children in preschool, according to both academic research and parental experience, doesn’t necessarily offer every advantage. Jennifer Harrison, a mother of two from Folsom, Calif., held her October-born son, Elliott, back so he “wouldn’t get labeled as out of control.” Over all, she said, it was the right decision. “But his math skills are far above those of his classmates.”
How to attend to a child’s myriad needs, and which should be the priority? “There don’t seem to be any rules,” said Rebecca Meekma, a mother of two from Laguna Beach, Calif. “People are saying, ‘I want him to be big in high school for sports!’ What is that? You can’t know who they’ll be in high school.”
And what about children who aren’t Leo the Late Bloomer? “I have met mom after mom who is intentionally holding her child back a year,” said Jennifer Finke, a mother of two in Englewood, Colo. “They say they don’t want their kids to be the youngest or shortest. Is that right? Is it fair?”
Ms. Finke’s son, Benjamin, is soon to start kindergarten at 5. “There will be boys in his class who are a year or more older than him. They’ll be bored in class and then the bar will be set higher, and the kids who are the right age will find that they can’t keep up.” What will happen in gym when the larger boys are picked first for brute force, leaving the pipsqueaks languishing? “I’m afraid my children will feel inferior.”
Not all parents can choose when their children begin kindergarten. “Though redshirting is common in the suburbs, in Manhattan, it’s the schools — not parents — who decide,” said Emily Glickman, whose company, Abacus Guide Educational Consulting, advises parents on kindergarten admissions. At New York City private schools, the cutoff date is Sept. 1; in practice, summer babies, particularly boys, generally enter kindergarten at age 6. “It’s a ramped-up world,” Ms. Glickman said. “And the easiest way for schools to assure that their kids do better is for them to be older and more mature.”
Meanwhile, New York City public schools have a firm age cutoff date of Dec. 31. Kindergarten isn’t required by the state, so parents could keep their children out, but then they would have to start the following year at first grade. And not everyone can afford two to three years of nursery school or day care.
“Among parents here, there’s a tremendous demand for kindergarten earlier,” said Eva Moskowitz, founder of the Harlem Success Academy Charter School, which pushed its cutoff back to Dec. 1. “If these parents could start their kids at 2, they would.” Not everyone, alas, defines academic privilege the same way.
Add a Comment »
How to Practice for the Private-School Playdate, by Shelly Banjo (Wall Street Journal)
This article is from the Wall Street Journal. Click here if you’d like to read it on their site.
August 18, 2010
In addition to stowing away white shoes and bathing suits, Labor Day weekend marks the beginning of the kindergarten application season for New York private schools.
See related article: Prepping for the Playdate Test
A child draws shapes during a practice playdate.
NOW THAT PREPARING CHILDREN for kindergarten admissions tests is the norm, parents are trying to gain an edge another way: prepping kids for the playdate or group interview.
While some schools test quirky skills, such as standing on one foot or reciting the alphabet backwards, most admissions directors focus on children’s motor skills, how they interact with other children and adults, language and communication. Academic skills, such as drawing connections between letters of the alphabet and certain words (think: A is for Apple, B is for Banana), are also tested.
For tips on how parents can help their children ace their playdate, Metropolis spoke with Murr LeBey, a private admissions adviser at Blue Tomato in New York. Here’s what she had to say:
Gung-Ho on Grownups: Typically taught not to talk to strangers, children can have a hard time opening up to new adults in such an unnatural environment. But a successful playdate depends on how comfortable a child is talking to the play group’s leader, LeBey says.
Admissions directors and teachers will ask children a host of questions: How many siblings or pets do you have? When is your birthday? Have you ever been on an airplane? The more children can open up and elaborate, the better.
To help children turn from wallflowers to social butterflies, LeBey suggests bringing them to new and different social situations, such as a restaurant, office or family gathering where they can interact with “approved strangers.” Ask children to introduce themselves by making eye contact, shaking hands and answering questions. Encourage children to order their meals at a restaurant or answer the phone.
Motor Skills: Education consultants say a lack of basic motor skills can be an indication of larger learning or emotional challenges. To test for this, admissions teams mark down how a child grips her pencil, copies a series of shapes or builds with blocks. They may also ask kids to walk a certain number of steps (as in, “Simon says take three steps”) or skip across the room.
To help develop this dexterity, parents can ask kids to participate in household activities, such as pouring their own juice, cleaning up toys or putting away dishes.
Puzzles, which test everything from motor and cognitive skills to problem solving, are the holy grail of admissions tests: “Virtually every school uses some sort of puzzle,” LeBey says.
Drawing is also a largely-tested skill. Many schools will ask children to draw basic and not-so-basic shapes, such as squares, rectangles, hearts and even hexagons, as well as personal portraits. “A child who draws herself with eyelashes, fingers and earrings shows a much higher level of development than a child who only draws herself with eyes and a mouth,” says LeBey.
Reading Critically: While most kids are accustomed to listening as parents simply read them a book, group interviews typically involve what education consultants call reading comprehension. During the story, admissions consultants may ask children why characters feel a certain way or what they think will happen next.
“Parents can easily practice these skills during bedtime stories,” LeBey says.
Make It Fun: Rather than drilling kids to death, education experts suggest incorporating skills into daily routines and normal play. Not only is it better for a child’s learning, but it can assuage schools on the lookout for too much test prep.
“Testers will often ask a child why he is so good at something, and if he blurts out ‘I do this game every Tuesday afternoon with a tutor,’ admissions directors get the sense the child’s abilities aren’t skills but rehearsed actions,” LeBey says. “A much more comforting answer is, ‘Mommy and daddy and I do puzzles all the time.”
Add a Comment »
Prepping For the Playdate Test, By Shelly Banjo (Wall Street Journal)
This article is from the Wall Street Journal. Click here if you’d like to read it on their site.
August 18, 2010
Good eye contact, a firm handshake and self confidence can pave the way to a good interview. Turns out, that’s the case even if the applicant is 4 or 5 years old.
In the frenzy to get kindergarteners into the top private schools, parents are now hiring consultants to coach their children on the art of the interview.
For years, such preparations have been the norm for the standardized tests children must take to get into private schools, the so-called ERBs, which measure IQ and are administered by the Educational Records Bureau. But after a cottage industry devoted to test-prep materials and classes developed, parents say scoring in the top percentile or two became the norm rather than the exception; schools such as Horace Mann, Dalton and Collegiate began placing more emphasis on the interview and getting more granular in their assessments.
Since New York parents have a tendency to exaggerate their sons’ and daughters’ piano or French skills, admissions directors say they like to see any special talents with their own eyes.
“Scores on the ERBs went up because kids were preparing and parents began thinking, ‘My kid got a 99 but so did my neighbor’s kids, what else can we do to better our chances in this market?’ ” says Suzanne Rheault, a 40-year-old mother of two who left Wall Street last year to start New York test-prep company, Aristotle Circle.
Enter the mock playdate.
On a recent morning in Manhattan, former Horace Mann admissions director Dana Haddad asked a group of 4- and 5-year-olds: “Do you have your marching shoes on?” The children began marching, left their parents behind and followed after Ms. Haddad, as she led them into a Midtown office turned preschool playroom, the new headquarters of Aristotle Circle.
August 19, 2010
As the children followed tasks such as identifying their name tags, putting together a puzzle or drawing a series of shapes, Ms. Haddad and two educational consultants took copious notes.
One 4-year-old “appeared slightly shy at the beginning of the playgroup,” requiring the moderator “to occasionally need to repeat a question,” read a six-page assessment provided to her parents within a few days of the playgroup.
The assessment concluded that the child “appeared to enjoy the game of ‘Simon Says,’ engaging in gross motor tasks such as jumping, clapping, hopping” but other skills were “more challenging, such as balancing on one foot (she was not fully able to balance for more than 1 second or so).”
Accompanying the assessment is suggested activities for improvement such as encouraging the 4-year-old to speak directly with a waiter to place her own restaurant order or handing the money to the cashier at the grocery store to emphasize more natural interaction with adults.
“You’re trying to be that peacock, to be noticed and it’s a lot of work and a lot of pressure,” says the girl’s mother, who only identified herself as Ellen. She declined to provide her last name for fear of retribution from the schools where her daughter is applying.
“While you can’t just prep all the time, the report and suggestions help me focus and I’m OK with that,” she says.
Like most things in New York, the sessions don’t come cheap. Aristotle Circle charges $400 for a 45-minute observation and assessment. Bright Kids NYC, a similar company started last year by Bige Doruk, a mother of three, charges between $175 to $275 for sessions lasting between 45 and 75 minutes.
“They call it a playdate,” Ms. Doruk says. “We call it just another test to prepare for.”
In New York City, getting into some private schools is akin to getting into Harvard. Come September, Horace Mann has only 35 spots and will likely receive hundreds of applications (Harvard’s acceptance rate was 6.9% for the class of 2014). The admissions procedure generally requires parents to submit an application and school records, attend a tour and interview with admissions officials. Children generally are required to take an ERB-administered test, visit the school and participate in an interview or playgroup.
Add a Comment »
As Private Tutoring Booms, Parents Look at the Returns, By Paul Sullivan (New York Times)
This article is from the New York Times. Click here if you’d like to read it on their site.
August 22, 2010
Sandy Bass, editor and publisher of Private School Insider, a Web newsletter, says parents are searching for less expensive tutors for their children.
WITH ONLY A FEW WEEKS left until school starts, the tutoring business is gearing up. And it is one industry in America that seems immune to recession. More parents are paying for tutors for their children.
Spending on tutors is growing at more than 5 percent a year, said Steve Pines, executive director of the Education Industry Association. This is down from yearly growth of 8 to 10 percent in 2007, when the education research firm EduVentures estimated the size of the tutoring industry at $5 billion to $7 billion a year. But it is still strong, given the state of most people’s personal finances. And Sandi Ayaz, executive director of the National Tutoring Association, said the number of tutors her organization had certified had grown 18 percent in each of the last five years.
While tutors once focused on helping children who were falling behind in particular subjects or had a learning disability, they are now being used far more to guide students through particularly tough courses, insure their grades are equal to or above their peers’ and, in the end, polish a child’s college application. This costs parents a lot of money, and the question is, What returns should they expect for their investment? And how does that desire mesh with what is right?
Before I go further, I want to address the question of fairness, which is ever-present in the world of high-priced tutors. The simple answer is that it is surely not fair that wealthy children can have private tutors when poor children cannot.
But many things in life are not fair, and I want to look at tutoring from an investment point of view. Is there any way to measure what parents and children are getting for all this money? What can a tutor reasonably be expected to do? Is this money well spent?
SHOPPING AROUND Even with the increase in the use of tutors, parents are not necessarily spending money the way they once did. Some are, of course, since money is still no object when it comes to their children. Yet even in Manhattan, where tutors are particularly popular, plenty of parents are shopping around for less expensive options.
“People have been pulling back for tutors charging $250 to $400 an hour,” said Sandy Bass, editor and publisher of Private School Insider, an online newsletter. “They’re still using tutors, but they’re searching around for more reasonably priced help. In Manhattan, $85 to $150 is the acceptable range for reasonably priced.”
Mr. Pines of the Education Industry Association said he had seen the same reassessment in the rest of the country, where the average rate was $45 to $65 an hour. Parents who once would have had in-home tutors are going to tutoring centers, while some using the centers have cut back on hours or moved to online-only platforms. He said a rising player in this field is TutorVista, an online education company based in Bangalore, India, that charges $99.99 a month for help on an Internet platform.
Where access to tutors appears to be drying up is for people with limited means. In the past, the issue was not whether they could afford it, but rather whether they could finance it. And Jeffrey Cohen, the president and chief executive of Sylvan Learning Centers, which operates one of the largest chains of tutoring franchises in the country, said the lack of financing had been a big blow to less wealthy families.
“Programs do exist, but they’re hard to come by,” Mr. Cohen said. “Prerecession families with a decent credit score could get approved to finance these programs. They could put themselves on a multiyear monthly payment schedule.”
HELP OR HINDRANCE? Money can’t buy you love, the song says, but what should it buy? The cardinal sin of tutoring is writing a student’s college essay. This is the murkiest part of the industry. After all, the first line in the National Tutoring Association’s ethics code is: “I understand that my role as a tutor is to never do the student’s work for him or her.”
Not surprisingly, people in the industry cringe when the issue is brought up, particularly with online tutoring. “That’s where the parent has to play a role of oversight,” Mr. Pines said. “It has to be monitored at home, and I can’t let Mom and Dad off the hook for that.”
But the bigger question that springs from this is, How do you make sure the money you’re spending is benefiting your child?
Helping children improve in areas where they are struggling is clearly important. But Ms. Bass said any tutoring should bolster standardized test scores. “You’re not going to go from a 550 to an 800 on the SAT, but you can count on a 100-point rise,” she said. “A lot of that is just getting a kid used to taking the test.”
This has reached its absurd extreme. Ms. Bass said most private schools in New York had started to discount the Early Childhood Admissions Assessment, more commonly called the E.R.B. after the Educational Records Bureau, the company that administers it, because parents hired tutors to coach their 4-year-olds on acing it.
While this is one way to spend your money, it may not be the best way to teach children the long-term skills they will need after they get into that top kindergarten. It may also hinder them more than help them.
“I always say be careful in doing this,” said Lloyd Thacker, a former college admissions officer and the executive director of the Education Conservancy. “Not only does it jeopardize your child’s ‘studenthood’ — those qualities that make learning happen — but someone finding your way for you and packaging you in the process jeopardizes your ability to be yourself.”
In other words, hiring a tutor to help a child who is struggling in math is a good use of money. Hiring one so the child does not have to push himself is a bad one.
“In an ideal world, students should realize they can do it themselves,” said Mr. Thacker, an admitted opponent of the hyper-tutoring culture. And many of them could, but would parents risk letting them try?
HARVARD OR BUST A financier I know who was educated at a trifecta of top institutions — St. Paul’s School, Yale and Columbia Law — observed that wealthy parents today were paying for tutoring and private school as a forward contract on the Ivy League, with anything less being a disappointment.
This was a cynical take, for sure, but it stuck with me: what constitutes success after paying for thousands of hours of tutoring at $100-plus an hour? The argument for this extra attention as a means to create well-rounded students is not convincing, since private tutoring in college tends to be for remedial help.
School competition is clearly part of parents’ thinking, but it’s not just for college. “Parents are concerned about how their children rank against their friends, their neighbors, kids in the next town over, the next state over, even the next country over,” Mr. Cohen said.
On the positive side, for children, tutors can often comfort them and let them talk to someone beyond their parents. “They can say what they want and that person will translate it to Mom and Dad,” Ms. Bass said. “That’s what the kid needs because they’re afraid of letting Mom and Dad down.”
This therapeutic value is one good use of the money, but so, too, is how it can make a child feel about school.
“The more qualitative measures of success are things like attitude, self-confidence and the willingness to finish homework,” Mr. Pines said. “Parents appreciate when kids can get their homework done without Mom hovering over them.”
It’s not Harvard, but it could lead to happiness.
Add a Comment »
Taking The Stress Out of San Francisco Kindergarten Admissions
From SFGate – 7/30/10 – The San Francisco Chronicle
Taking the stress out of San Francisco kindergarten admissions
Julian Guthrie, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, July 30, 2010
San Francisco residents Rich Peterson and wife Tanya Peterson visited a dozen elementary schools – a mix of public and private – in search of just the right place for their daughter, Avery. None of the schools seemed right.
The Petersons wanted a mainstream school, but also one that would be attentive to Avery, who had a history of seizures. That’s when they turned to Betsy Little and Paula Molligan to help them navigate the Bay Area’s daunting kindergarten admissions process.
“We met with them, they listened to us talk about our daughter, and as we were talking, they looked at each other and said at the exact same time, ‘Marin Primary,’ ” recalled Rich Peterson. “It was a school we hadn’t even considered. It is a mainstream school, but one that turned out to be just perfect for her.”
These days, coaches like Little and Molligan are gaining in popularity, part of a cottage industry that has sprung up around getting kids ready for kindergarten placement. It’s an industry that includes tutoring, boot camps, assessment programs, checklists and guides.
Based in San Rafael, Little and Molligan specialize in providing admission counseling for families trying to find the right preschool, primary or secondary school. Both women have master’s degrees in education, and both have worked in private schools – Little as an admissions director and Molligan as teacher and head of a school. And they are the authors of “Private K-8 Schools of San Francisco & Marin,” a book that is often heavily earmarked and riddled with sticky notes by parents. (A new edition of the book is due out early this month.)
Their services range from hourly consultations (at $400 an hour) to a year’s contract, offering unlimited time to families during “admissions season,” which runs from March through March. (Letters of acceptance are sent out the second or third Thursday in March.)
With too many applicants vying for too few spots, the process of getting into a private kindergarten is generally considered torturous. There are school tours and parent interviews, coffees and cocktails. There is the dreaded drop-off of children to be assessed by admission directors for things such as writing of one’s first and last name (correct capitalization required), shaking hands and making eye contact, and drawing a three-dimensional self-portrait.
“We actually try to dispel the anxiety around assessment,” said Little. “We also try to get people to think outside the box, and to apply to between five and seven schools.”
They also urge parents to think carefully about the costs of going private, noting that there are high-quality public and parochial schools. Tuition at private primary schools runs as much as $24,750 a year, and it can cost more than $33,000 at private secondary schools, bringing the total of a kindergarten through 12th-grade private school education to around $400,000.
“This is after-tax, nondeductible money,” said Molligan. “If it’s going to be a huge sacrifice to send the child to private school, we say, ‘Don’t feel compelled. There are lots of options.’ ”
Little added, “Would you rather take the money and do something like make your kids global citizens by spending several weeks out of the year taking family trips to foreign countries? We can’t make the decision for families, but we can calm the angst.”
Little and Molligan are the first to say that not everyone needs their services.
“We don’t guarantee – or we’d be charging a lot more money,” laughed Little. “But our yield is very high in terms of families getting in.”
She added, “Kindergarten isn’t kindergarten anymore. When I went to kindergarten, I got stars on my report card for things like being respectful. Now it’s about things like phonemic awareness. It’s just a different world.”
Anxiety only escalates on the days when parents have to drop off children for assessment.
But in contrast to many urban areas across the country, San Francisco independent schools do not use IQ tests for entry. While each school in the city – and across the Bay Area – has a different way to assess readiness, all look at a combination of behavior and developmental readiness: Can the child write his name, identify letters in the alphabet, use scissors correctly and show a comprehension of rhymes? Does the child look an adult in the eye and listen through storytelling?
Po Bronson, author of the best-selling “NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children,” says San Francisco’s private school assessment process is “relatively nonthreatening and might be more sane” because it doesn’t rely on one intelligence test. In cities including New York, where admission to coveted private schools has been characterized as a “blood sport,” a single test is used, with questions focusing on things including discerning patterns (understanding that a circle is to an oval what a square is to a rectangle) and doing things such as arranging colored blocks based on a picture shown in a certain amount of time.
Having studied IQ tests given for kindergarten admission at major school systems across the country, Bronson has concluded: “Regardless of what is being tested or which test is used, they all have one thing in common. They’re all astonishingly ineffective predictors of a young child’s academic success.”
He says a study of the research shows: “If you picked 100 kindergartners as ‘gifted,’ i.e. the smartest, by third grade only 27 of them would still deserve that categorization. You would have wrongly locked out 73 other deserving students.”
Bay Area private schools base a great deal on a child’s behavior during the one- or two-hour assessment. This emphasis on behavior also has its weaknesses, Bronson cautioned.
“One of the leading assumptions is that kids who are better behaved are going to be able to learn more in kindergarten, and because they’re well behaved they’ll do better in first grade, and so on and so on,” said Bronson, who lives in San Francisco and has been through the admissions process with his two children. “But that’s not true. Sitting on one’s hands and minding the teacher is very different from being self-motivated and focused.
“You have plenty of kids who don’t bother the teacher and will follow orders, but won’t really focus. They will sing in the choir, but they won’t sing with all of their heart. They will play soccer, but they won’t play to win. They will not cause any problems, but they don’t throw themselves into anything.”
What Bronson sees as an incredibly powerful thing to look for, something that’s often overlooked in the assessment of young children, is for kids who are self-directed in a way that speaks to an abiding interest and strength of will.
“Obedience is way overrated in terms of how we look at 5- and 6-year-olds,” Bronson said. “When a kid is focused and can tune things out and has goal-directed activities, when they find things they care about and throw themselves into, those are the kids who can pass other kids by the thousands. That is what’s very powerful.”
As for coaches like Little and Molligan, Bronson says, “I have talked to lots of coaches across the country. I think families are stressed out by this process, and if they can afford it, can use the help.”
Betsy Little describes their services this way: “Do you write your own will, or do you see a specialist?”
And, in the end, Little and Molligan see their job ultimately as “being the voice of the child,” in helping find the school that fits the youth.
One of their clients, who wanted only his first name used so his daughter wouldn’t be identified, said that he and his wife felt totally unprepared for the kindergarten admissions process in San Francisco.
“My wife and I were both very busy with work, and we didn’t know the differences between various schools and the specific pluses and minuses of public versus private versus parochial,” George said.
He said that working with Little and Molligan helped in myriad ways.
“We were very interested in getting into one school, the Chinese American School, because we are Mandarin speakers,” he said. “Betsy and Paula suggested we keep our minds open and look at other schools, including one we hadn’t thought about. We ended up applying to something like eight private schools and a number of public schools. Betsy and Paula gave us a mock interview and gave us feedback on our parent essays. They watched our daughter at preschool to give them insight into what type of school she would like.”
In the end, they fell in love with a school they hadn’t considered: San Francisco Day.
“I don’t think Paula and Betsy are absolutely necessary,” George concluded. “But they lowered our stress level, and they were helpful. Our daughter loves her school.”
E-mail Julian Guthrie at jguthrie@sfchronicle.com.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/07/30/CMPG1EARO9.DTL#ixzz0vIklt9LR
Add a Comment »
