Word: preschooling
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Like many young parents, John and Janine Morreale were willing to stretch their finances to get their child, three-year-old Johnny, into preschool. Both worked full time--John in maintenance, Janine as a teacher--but their joint income was not enough to foot the $6,000 bill, equal to the yearly rent of their apartment. "We were living paycheck to paycheck, and we even had to start borrowing from my mother-in-law," recalls Janine. "It just didn't make any sense...
...makes a lot of sense now. In September, Johnny, now four, started pre-kindergarten at Brooklyn's P.S. 200, the local public elementary school--free. He is one of the first beneficiaries of a $62 million New York State program aimed at making preschool, like elementary and high school, part of every child's publicly funded education...
Parental demand for early learning has grown steadily in recent years--as has the cost. Well-off families can usually afford the pricey tuition of private preschool, and the poor are eligible for aid in the form of Head Start, the federally funded preschool program. But middle-class families like the Morreales have traditionally been left...
...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...
What Cheryl Aytch did for her daughter--what the best preschool teachers all do--was to incorporate learning into everyday life and make it lively. "This means that instead of telling a five-year-old about apples or reading about them in a book, you go pick apples, you peel apples and make apple sauce and apple pies," says Wendy Derrow, a family therapist in Orlando, Fla. "It's that pure, healthy, aren't-we-lucky-to-be-together environment that grows great learners...