Maybe The Kids in the Sandbox Shouldn't Always Get Along
Preschool students at Henderson's Thelma B. Johnson Early Learning Center march around the school Wednesday as they participate in the March of Dimes March for Babies event, March 25, 2015. (AP Photo/The Gleaner, Mike Lawrence)
RCEd Commentary
Preschool teachers are experts in conflict resolution, but preschool policy commentary is better known for conflict avoidance.
A recent report by Defending the Early Years and the Alliance for Children criticized the impact of the Common Core on kindergarten -- and then the National Institute for Early Education Research responded with a blog post rebutting the report’s conclusions. In K-12, disagreements of this kind permeate the blogosphere and social media; without inflammatory language and personal insults, a schism this small would barely register. But it struck me that in early learning this was a relatively rare event: early childhood advocacy organizations rarely disagree so directly and publicly.
Early education is become an increasingly important and visible part of education policy. The president hosted a White House Summit on early learning, governors have emphasized it in their State of the State speeches, and cities are increasingly expanding services as well. And as the K-12 debate has become increasingly vociferous, discussion among early learning advocates happens almost entirely in private. Is that a good thing?
In some ways, yes, it’s a good and necessary thing. Early learning advocates at both the federal and state levels always have to start with the existential question: is early learning going to be funded at all? In K-12 there’s a robust debate over the best strategies for providing a great education, but there’s no serious debate that states should just stop offering a publicly-funded education to some significant percentage of the population.
While the dollar amounts may be heavily debated, we all can be assured that K-12 education in America will receive government funding, one way or another. But in early learning, whether any kids get the resources they need to learn in the first place is always a key part of the discussion. And in that context, advocates feel great pressure to present a united and positive front about how dollars should be spent.
It’s also the case that uncivil debate can have a negative effect. Many commentators from advocacy organizations and think tanks have decried the nasty tone that education disagreements have taken on in recent years. Some of this adverse discourse is a natural outgrowth of the passion people have for the subject matter, but some of it is a wearying strategy to grind people down by being mean to them. Early learning definitely wouldn’t be better off having more of that.
But perhaps we would be better off with a more public debate than we currently have. In K-12, the publication of a thoughtful policy paper with fresh perspective can instigate a series of articles, blog posts and tweets debating an initiative’s merits and unpacking or rebutting its arguments. And K-12 organizations publish point-counterpoint K-12 essays. Early learning doesn’t have that kind of conversation going.
Bellwether and New America are two organizations that in recent years have presented some provocative ideas about early learning in new publications, and while those have been debated in gatherings of the faithful, nobody from the early learning community has published a rigorous rebuttal to any of it. At best, people talk past each other, and at worst, they just carry on as if nothing happened. That’s a loss for the field.
Early learning is a complex policy area with a host of major questions that aren’t being debated publicly by leaders in the field. Public debate can bring issues to light, clarify misconceptions, and help inform better policymaking. Think about how many K-12 topics spark a heated debate: Common Core, assessments, charter schools, teacher preparation and Teach for America, and many more. All of these are debates about ideas on how best to serve kids. Early learning has at least as many issues that would benefit from public debate—teacher effectiveness, standards and assessment, accountability, and the right role for the federal government, to name a few—but very few, if any, that are actually having that debate.
To the extent there are public debates in early learning, they tend to be about the “whether,” not the “how.” This includes questions about whether programs should be universal or targeted, and disagreements about the research methodologies used to evaluate federal and state programs. Those are important, but don’t typically get to the level of analyzing different strategies for improving education—the kind of debates that dominate K-12. Behind the scenes, I’ve been part of many animated and thoughtful disagreements, but it’s very rare that these disagreements are carried on beyond the boundaries of a room, call, or email thread.
Recently for a panel presentation, I was asked to talk about the hottest arguments in early learning policy. I was a little stumped, though, as to what those hot button issues actually are—there are plenty of issues that could be hot button, on many of the same topics that have sparked so much energy in K-12. I believe strongly in the idea of “productive disagreement,” and I hope we get to a point in early learning where we can do more of it. Because I know better than to think that silence equals agreement; silence just equals silence. And silence isn’t advancing our best thinking on early learning.
