“[Bettering education] requires everything from more challenging curriculums … to better support for teachers and new ways to measure how well our kids think, not how well they can fill in a bubble on a test. …
“The problem is we’re still not reaching enough kids, and we’re not reaching them in time. That has to change.Â
“Research shows that one of the best investments we can make in a child’s life is high-quality early education … I [ask] this Congress to help states make high-quality pre-K available to every four year-old.”
There are three more major education misses here for the President.
First, his highly-promoted Common Core education standards have been widely criticized for lowering curriculum standards in critical fields of elementary and secondary study. Furthermore, Common Core testing and other education solutions like it utilize “fill[ing] in a bubble” as the exclusive means of testing.
Second, the assertion that getting 4 year-olds out of the house and into government education programs as soon as possible will somehow improve the education program in the United States is as foolhardy as it is ridiculous. The President would be hard-pressed to show exactly how he expects a 4 year-old’s Pre-K experience to improve the same child’s elementary and secondary education experience within a failing inner-city school he or she is stuck in due to “accident of birth” or other circumstances.
Lastly, a major study of the progress of children in the Head Start system revealed that children in this program have the same educational attainment as children from the same socio-economic group who didn’t participate by the age of three – read the article here.
