I found this article very frustrating. Everything the author is complaining about comes down to one issue: the ratio of Teachers to Students. And yet, she does

I found this article very frustrating. Everything the author is complaining about comes down to one issue: the ratio of Teachers to Students. And yet, she does not mention this once. > A major evaluation of Tennessee’s publicly funded preschool system, published in September, found that although children who had attended preschool initially exhibited more “school readiness” skills when they entered kindergarten than did their non-preschool-attending peers, by the time they were in first grade their attitudes toward school were deteriorating... overreliance on direct instruction and repetitive, poorly structured pedagogy were likely culprits; children who’d been subjected to the same insipid tasks year after year after year were understandably losing their enthusiasm for learning. The problem here isn't that preschoolers were more "school ready," the problem is that the school system isn't prepared to handle "school ready" students. School ready kindergartners have just come from a preschool like that of my sons, where state regulations require a 1:10 teacher to student ratio [1], and they are now in a 1:20 or worse ratio public school [2]. When a teacher is going over material some students have already mastered, those students zone out. > Unfortunately, much of the conversation in today’s preschool classrooms is one-directional and simplistic, as teachers steer students through a highly structured schedule, herding them from one activity to another and signaling approval with a quick “good job!” The author claims that providing a conversational class room is "relatively cheap to provide." But this isn't something a teacher can just change their teaching strategy and accomplish. This kind of interaction requires focusing attention on a student at the expense of the other students--so it takes more teachers. It is laughably naive to claim a teacher can have personalized dialogue with 20 kindergartners at once. > Pedagogy and curricula have changed too, most recently in response to the Common Core State Standards Initiative’s kindergarten guidelines... One study, titled “Is Kindergarten the New First Grade?,” compared kindergarten teachers’ attitudes nationwide in 1998 and 2010 and found that the percentage of teachers expecting children to know how to read by the end of the year had risen from 30 to 80 percent. And yet, the Common Core only requires children know a number of sight-words, basic phonetics, and the concepts of reading (words are separated by spaces, we read left-to-right, etc.) [3]. The standards, which everyone loves to criticize but no one seems to know what they actually say, are quite easy to meet. One of my preschoolers has easily mastered the Kindergartner recommendations with nothing but teaching him that the alphabet, words, reading, and books are fun--but it takes personalized time to encourage that attitude. [1] http://dphhs.mt.gov/Portals/85/hcsd/documents/ChildCare/STARS/Kits/3to4centerteachertochildratiochart.pdf http://dphhs.mt.gov/Portals/85/hcsd/documents/ChildCare/STAR... [2] http://ecs.force.com/mbdata/mbquestRT?rep=Kq1411 http://ecs.force.com/mbdata/mbquestRT?rep=Kq1411 [3] http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/RF/K/ http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/RF/K/