Word: kindergarteners
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Gates says his daughter likes to listen to hip-hop music as he drives her to kindergarten. As a professor of Afro-American studies, he says it is important to know about black musical expression. But without his daughter, he wouldn't listen to hip-hop because...
...bossy, wouldn't take naps and already knew how to tie my shoes. So, after two weeks of kindergarten, I was kicked out and enrolled in first grade. I didn't lose my last baby tooth until my sophomore year of high school and couldn't drive until senior spring. My friends had to buy my tickets to rated 'R' movies. This is the first year that I can legally buy cigarettes and I will most likely celebrate my anticlimactic twenty-first birthday in law school, pretending that...
That is starting to change. Today 39 states pay for at least one kind of pre-kindergarten program, says a September report by the Families and Work Institute. Though admission usually hinges on financial need, a few states are moving toward universal pre-K, so called because it provides a place for every child whose parents want one. Georgia has funded universal pre-K since 1995. And beginning this fall, New York is funding some 19,000 slots for pre-kindergartners, chosen mainly by lottery; it has pledged universal access...
Public preschool has been cropping up in stump speeches across the nation. Appearing at a 36-state powwow on pre-K in September, Education Secretary Richard Riley promised increased federal collaboration. Educators, who have long fretted over children showing up for kindergarten ill prepared, are coming around in support. Unlike some private nursery schools, where teachers may have only a high school diploma, most public pre-kindergarten teachers undergo the same rigorous certification as elementary school teachers. "Today we're asking kids to meet higher standards in K through 12," says American Federation of Teachers president Sandra Feldman...
Just what form this preparation should take is still being developed. "You have to let these kids be as creative and as free as they want," says New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman, whose state funds public pre-kindergarten in 136 districts. Standards vary from state to state. Georgia's pre-kindergarten curriculum includes language, literacy and math concepts. At Brooklyn's P.S. 200, a go-at-your- own-pace approach seems to apply. After a brief lesson, pint-size pupils roam among a playhouse, a game corner, an art center and a library. Says principal Neal Opromalla: "These children...