Dr. Dale Clark Farran, a prominent early childhood researcher at Peabody College Vandebilt University, finished a decade long study on the effects of sending low income children to a preschool tailored to school readiness. The results taught her an essential lesson in education and equity. Where she once believed academic readiness was the gold standard for preschools, she now believes, thanks to her own research, that all children need a play based approach.
Her study revealed that while children in the school readiness preschool had an advantage in year one of school, that advantage had disappeared by third grade and had grown to a disadvantage by grade six.
In an article — A top researcher says it’s time to rethink our entire approach to preschool — Farran told NPR: “She hadn’t expected it. She didn’t like it. But her study design was unusually strong, so she couldn’t easily explain it away. This is still the only randomized controlled trial of a statewide pre-K, and I know that people get upset about this and don’t want it to be true.”
“One of the biases that I hadn’t examined in myself is the idea that poor children need a different sort of preparation from children of higher-income families,” says Farran. She noted that lower income students in school readiness programs spent much of their time drilling in basic skills while students from wealthier families went to play-based preschool programs “with art, movement, music and nature. Children are asked open-ended questions, and they are listened to.”
Ultimately, her own work challenged her assumptions and changed her mind. “We might actually get better results, she says, from simply letting little children play.”
Read the article at NPR.org
Read the study at the American Psychological Association
Photo Credit: Detroit Waldorf School
