By Suki Wessling, Special Correspondent to the Pre-Born
Washington, D.C.: To win a grant in the U.S. Department of Education’s new Race to the Top competition for pre-childhood education aid, states will have to develop rating systems for their fetal test prep programs, craft appropriate standards and tests for pre-born children, and set clear expectations for what teachers should know.
That’s according to the proposed rules released today by the Obama administration that will govern the $500 million competition, which was made possible by the fiscal 2011 budget deal Congress passed in April.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was given $700 million in new Race to the Top money, and chose to put most of it into pre-natal education, while keeping a $200 million slice to award to runners-up from last year’s competition. (Details of that separate contest have yet to be announced.)
The Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge awards will range from $50 million to $100 million, depending on a state’s population, and the contest is open to all states, not just the winners in last year’s competition. This could be especially attractive for small states, which were eligible for maximum grants of $75 million in the first edition of Race to the Top. For big states, $100 million won’t go as far; the biggest states in the original Race to the Top won $700 million each. For this pre-natal competition, four states—California, Florida, New York, and Texas—are eligible for $100 million.
In crafting this new iteration of Race to the Top, the Obama administration is building upon the stress of last year’s $4 billion competition, which pushed states to embrace destroying their public schools, payola for teachers who agree to produce better test-takers rather than better students, and better ways to spend millions of dollars on data systems that won’t improve education but will make tax-payers feel like someone is in control. This competition is designed to improve programs aimed at stressing out pre-natal gestators (parents) even before their babies are born, and to eliminate some of the “vast inequities” in care, which result in some fetuses being allowed to loll about all day, sipping fetal junk food and playing with their toes, said Special Assistant to the President for Education in the White House Domestic Policy Council Roberto Rodriguez, speaking in a call with reporters Thursday afternoon.
“We believe this Race to the Top can have the same kind of impact,” Rodriguez said. “How do we really do more to boost the reach of our parental stress-inducing programs?”
Under the competition guidelines developed by the Education Department—working with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services—a winning state must:
• Come up with and use pre-natal and development standards for fetuses, along with assessments;
• Develop and administer birth-readiness tests, and develop rating systems for pre-natal gestator stress-inducing programs;
• Demonstrate cooperation across the multiple agencies that touch pre-natal issues (from departments of health to education), and establish statewide standards for how licensed pre-natal educators can intrude on a parent’s right to gestate their baby in peace;
• Have a good track record on pre-partum stress programs, and an ambitious plan to improve those programs;
• Make sure pre-natal test data is incorporated into its longitudinal data system and is tied to the child from birth by creating IEPs for all at-risk fetuses.
(Confusingly, states do not have to develop pay-for-performance plans for pre-natal teachers—which was a successful stress-inducing component in the first Race to the Top competition. This may stem from the fact that all pre-born children are homeschooled by unpaid, unlicensed pre-natal gestators, a situation Duncan vows to remedy as soon as the technology is available.)
In a nod to rural districts and advocates, who often feel overlooked by the department, the Obama administration says it may go out of its way to reward states with large rural populations, potentially bypassing higher-scoring urban states, which show a higher use of pre-natal Baby Einstein, in favor of lower-scoring rural states, whose pre-natal education programs are usually nature-based.
Just as in the original Race to the Top, this competition will rely on outside judges to pick the winners. But the ultimate decision rests with Duncan, who plans to personally investigate fetal learning. Duncan, who usually works from his office in Washington, D.C., has promised to man a state-of-the-art fetal inspection van, which will randomly pick up pregnant women in competing states. Non-compliant prenatal gestators will be sent back to Race-to-the-Top winning high schools for retraining in testing compliance and modern educational theory.
[View the original, wholly serious version of this article on EdWeek.]
China has boarding preschools and kindergarten. They push enrollment in them with the notion that state trained experts are much better at raising your children than you are as the parents. The long push here for earlier school here isn’t that much different, except for the boarding component. Originally government Headstart/Pre-K was all about reaching “at risk” kids– i.e. kids that the state thought were in sub-standard home environments and would do better with some intervention before they got to Kindergarten.
Now it seems to be all about “how soon can we get all kids into our system?” which I really don’t think is the ideal solution for every kid. Especially when coupled with the deranged notion that if you start younger, you can cram more learning in.
Yes, there is this common belief that if something is good at one age, it’s even better at an earlier age! So it was great that we used to teach kids to read at 7… even better if we do it at 6. But wait, if they lose 6 years before they can read, then they’ll be “behind.” How about pushing reading into kindergarten? Pre-k? It’s just so obvious to anyone who’s looking that kids learn through play and enjoyment, and trying to make them study like adults earlier isn’t going to make them learn more. And on top of it, all this push to test fools parents into believing that something is being done, when in fact it’s a way to make sure that nothing is being achieved…
Here’s another view: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/race-to-the-top-standardized-testing-for-preschoolers/2011/07/05/gIQAU4Wi0H_blog.html