'The story Tracy Jan published in the Boston Globe about a month ago on the frank and disturbing study of preschools and kindergartens in the city got a lot of attention, as it should have. I've been waiting to find a copy of the full report to link to but so far haven't. I'll keep looking.

According to Jan's story, which was followed up by a hardhitting editorial, the study by the Wellesley Centers for Women found "mediocre instruction, unsanitary classrooms, and dangerous schoolyards." The study also found that the quality of about 70% of the classrooms were not good enough to achieve the goal of closing gaps in kindergarten readiness between white and Asian children and Latino and African-American children.

A couple points from the Globe story to emphasize: The teachers in the classrooms studied all had bachelor's degrees but a fifth of them didn't necessarily have degrees in early childhood education. One school of thought in early childhood education insists on college degrees as a measure of quality. An alternative view is that teachers in preschools need to be highly skilled. It sounds like the same point but it's not. If preschool teachers can gain critical skills and knowledge of how young children learn and how best to help them learn in community college or in a special training program, then what's the purpose of insisting on a bachelor's degree? It's heartbreaking but the researchers found that many of these kids were sitting in their seats in kindergarten and preschool, being lectured to and responding to flash cards. No wonder these preschools aren't helping much.

Another point to emphasize comes from Elizabeth Reilinger, a member of the Boston Schools Committee. She commented that Boston Mayor Thomas Menino had pushed to expand preschool too quickly. Is this a problem around the country? Is the pressure so great to expand pre-k spending as quickly as possible causing the creation of poorly funded, poor quality programs that are accomplishing little?

One other observation. Yes, these were the conclusions of researchers. But couldn't journalists have made some of these same observations by visiting a lot of classrooms? A journalist who knew a little bit about how young chldren learn would have noticed that kids were sitting still too long and doing worksheets instead of engaging in purposeful, creative activities that involved a lot of conversation, right? I hope so.

One of the greatest challenges of education policy and, frankly, education journalism, is that accurately measuring education quality is very difficult. So, instead, we pay attention to what's available to us: spending, class size, teacher experience, teacher test scores, graduation rates, college-going, test scores. All of those are proxies for what really matters--the interactions between teachers and students. But how do you measure the quality of those interactions? How do you measure whether they will help children not just learn facts but understand, think, question, grow in their confidence as learners and speakers and do-ers?

I had a chance the other day to listen in to a "webinar" put on by two of the great minds on preschool quality--Robert C. Pianta of the Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning at the University and Barbara Bowman, the Chief Early Education Officer of the Chicago Public Schools and the founder of the Erickson Institute in Chicago. (The event was sponsored by Pre-K Now and a link to the slides for the call as well as the slides for previous calls with experts on a variety of topics can be found here.
Bowman made the point that children have a "natural predisposition to develop" and they do so through exploration of their senses, relationships, language, play and self-regulation. But school learning is different. School learning requires what she called "decontextualized language," meaning, for example, the words for categorization of objects. School learning also involves symbolic skills, small muscle control, social skills, complex grammar, a large vocabulary, clear enunciation and other things. The point is that those who say "kids learn naturally" are right. They do develop and learn some things naturally. They're programmed to, though at different rates. School learning is different. And it requires intentional, thoughtful, planned learning opportunities and interactions. What a useful way to break down that old teaching vs. development argument! It's also useful for journalists, to help them better understand child development and schooling and how they are similar and different.

Bowman's point also leads right into what Pianta had to say. Pianta's research involves lots and lots of observations of classrooms. His observations have led to the development of a scale that measures the quality of teachers' interaction in pre-school and kindergarten classrooms with their children. Pianta says that scale predicts quite accurately how much children learn. Unfortunately, it also demonstrates that the quality of those interactions is often not very good. Pianta wrote a piece in the journal Education Next a while back. In that piece, he asserted that only about a quarter of the pre-k classes and classes studied provided students with the high levels of emotional and instructional support needed to maximize learning.

Fortunately, however, Pianta and his colleagues have developed some training tools that help pre-k teachers get better. He asserts that it is the skill and knowledge of the teachers--not their degrees or certifications--that matters. In fact, his data show no correlation between degree attainment and teacher performance. What does matter is training and professional development tied to knowledge and skill about teaching in actual classrooms. A "webinar" caller asked about that. If there's no connection between B.A. degrees and children's learning, the caller asked, doesn't insisting on college degrees for preschool teachers just raise the cost of those programs?

Advocates for higher quality such as Libby Doggett of Pre-K Now acknowledge that the evidence that children who have teachers with more formal education learn more is ambiguous. But she said in response to the caller that degrees have to be required if the teachers are to be paid a professional salary and be regarded as professionals. In other words, it's about positioning pre-k as part of the formal education system, which requires formal degrees and credentials. That may be the right strategy. But one hopes that somewhere along the line the teachers, whatever formal degrees they have, also get the kind of training Pianta is talking about.

The other article in the volume that should be of interest to journalists is by Harvard Grad School professor and economist Richard Murnane and is called “Improving the Education of Children Living in Poverty.” Despite the ambitious-sounding title, Murnane’s proposal is both more modest and less sanguine about the positive effects that can be expected. He proposes a number of changes to the No Child Left Behind law (some of which already are being discussed) that would make the law’s achievement targets more realistic and meaningful for teachers. He says the feds should provide states with strong incentives to make their high school graduation requirements better reflect the needs of the labor market and also promote interdistrict transfer programs, such as are in place in Boston, Milwaukee, and St. Louis. And, finally—and this is the big one—he says the feds must provide competitive, matching grants to districts and states to improve the quality of teaching through recruitment, compensation, preparation, and professional development. Cost? $2.5 billion a year. The piece does a great job of providing a clear, quick overview of what’s going on in education policy, context often missing from education reporting.

The word “rigor,’’ is one of the new buzz words in education, used to describe everything from stringent new graduation standards many states are adopting to advanced placement courses that give college credit to high school students. Lately, the word has crept into the pre-k lexicon with little explanation.

In Washington D.C., for example, pre-kindergarten is about to get a lot more rigorous, according to a Washington Post article.

And…what exactly does that mean?

Earlier this week, the article points out, the D.C. Council committee unanimously approved legislation that would “increase the rigor of the curriculum for early childhood education throughout the city.’’ A quick google search found the term creeping into the pre-k conversation throughout the U.S.

The Post article did a fine job of describing some of the hurdles to expanding pre-kindergarten in the District of Columbia, where about 12,000 children are enrolled and another 2,000 or so are not being served. However, it did not question, examine or explain what a “more rigorous.’’ program would look like.

Shakespeare instead of sand box play? Early SAT preparation? Pre-pre-calculus? Degree requirements for teachers? The question really should be, does the program reflect high standards? And what does that mean? What is the student teacher ratio, for example? Is there a curriculum? What are kids expected to know and do?

Journalists – and the public – should challenge words that don’t say a lot. The next time a pre-k program promises to be “rigorous,’’ find out what it means.