Arkansas Blog

From the article: . . .and engage parents in their children's education.
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The last part of this news release was the only uplifting and promising part of this grant. How sad that we are spending a few million dollars so parents can farm out their 3 and 4 year old children to some outside-of-the-home reading program.

Our kids learned to read at home before they ever went to any school program. Now our children's children are doing the same.

Allowing someone else to experience the joy of watching your child's face light up as he/she learns this skill and achieve this milestone is an indescribable loss. I hope this is not your decision of convenience but one of absolute necessity.

If this is the only way that child will learn to read at a pace with the other kids, then good for the child.

And, Parent, you'll never know what you missed.

Look at me agreeing with Don for once. It's just sad that now 3 year old kids will be marched off to school so Mommy can go cut hair for 12 bucks an hour. What next? Some sort of vaginal probe that teaches the fetus the ABCs before birth? It can also be programed to teach them to not smoke or drink and drive or drive off without paying for their gas and to be sure and have their tax returns in early on April 15th. Might as well throw in some Jesus too ya know.

I had the opportunity to be a kid and it was a hell of a lot of fun. I've treasured my pre-school life ever since becoming an adult. I can still shut my eyes and float back to 1959 and see the black and white floor and my mother's feet walking around in the kitchen. The sweet smell of a chicken pot pie in the oven combined with fresh laundry. How, no matter where I went out the door her eyes seemed to follow me. God.....it still produces a feeling of warmth, happiness, safety and love I've never experienced since.

No 3 year old is going to experience that in reading class. Seems like the 1st day of school brought the first day of responsibility and nothing has ever shut off that valve since. Life knocks the hell out of everyone, even the rich, so we've tried extra hard to protect our kids for as long as we can because we know the day is nearly here when they fly off and are on their own. And life will knock the hell out of them sure as your born.

It's nice when American can compete with the rest of the world, but nothing is worth the destruction of childhood......nothing! So be real good to your little kids and the big kids too. The way things are going China will be sitting on their heads about the time we're kaput. So let the little kids have a childhood. Something they can remember in 40 years when they're chained to a machine in a sweat shop.

I may have read the article wrong, but the program sounds like an enrichment program rather than some sort of early first grade. A lot of these kids may already be in daycare, parked in front of the tv watching something other than Sesame Street.

Hopefully, this experience will be a alternative to being babay-say and watching TV all day. It is a good time to instill values and learn that which parents can't, won't and/or don't teach. They may miss the "kitchen" experience, but the kids may get some good and lasting memories.

Sad, but true.

A friend and I drove to a funeral the other day and we naturally asked how each other's kids were doing. The conversation became one about "affluenza", a condition *suffered* by some kids these days whereby they have absolutely zero concept of how money and value are related. You know how it is ... gotta have this or that (more likely: this AND that), so-and-so has the deluxe model so why can't I? Younger ones melt down if they have to walk out of the ballpark without a souvenir, older ones bitch about their own personal bathroom in the family home being too small.

According to the announcement 96% of the children in these centers are eligible for free lunch, which tells me that they might have missed the ballgame altogether; they may use more than one bathroom "at home" but those bathrooms aren't necessarily in the same home. And it's certainly not their own personal one. These children don't all have the luxury of a stay-at-home mom (or dad) who bakes bread and presses the whatever thread count sheets while singing Itsy-Bitsy Spider and giving puppet shows.

I am lucky to have a handful of fairly vivid memories of preschool days with my own mother. Oatmeal just the way I liked it, letting me bang the pots and pans' lids together, Captain Kangaroo, etc., all while Dad worked a stable job and older siblings were in school all day. Not everyone gets what a lot of us take for granted.

My son has been even luckier. His mother, a professional (and acclaimed) teacher, stayed with him in his preschool days and provided him with almost unimaginable love, boundless nurturing, and creative educational interaction with different kids and in different settings.
I daresay most of the children who stand to benefit from this grant likely don't get anything near that kind of parental attention, or stability of homelife/rearing. They don't get the dear upbringing DBI described; the erosion of which Don correctly bemoans.

I wonder if the "reading" aspect is only part of the equation. I hope it's a big part, but I'm fine if some of the impetus for the program is just to provide an alternative to a kid being plopped down in front of the TV.

I am delighted we got this grant and I hope it is employed prudently, and that there is good oversight and media updates on how well it is operated.

Hugh:
I agree that not all children have the opportunity to be raised by two parent homes where the early years are nurtured by an involved parent, not some paid caretaker. Like the commercial says, those memories (and benefits) are priceless. So for those children that do not have this chance, hopefully, this program will provide some type of educational and nurturing environment for at least a few hours a day.

For the casual parents that will use this as a free babysitting service, I hope there is some focused effort to convince them to instead change course and teach their child at home so they, and their child, gain from the experience . . .and leave this program to the parent(s) and child that circumstantially, for whatever reason, HAVE to have outside help.

The obvious problem though is that government programs are self-justifying. If the child, despite his lack of parental involvement, shows signs of an early achiever, the program will have a poster-child and an impressive statistic to display.

I can't imagine a program like this encouraging parents that, for the best interests of the child, they really should withdraw and teach their child at home.

Let's face it. Some people have no understanding of what it means to be poor. A single mother holding down two or three jobs probably doesn't have the time or energy to teach her young children to read. In fact, she may not be able to read very well herself. Or she may be too poor to afford the glasses that would allow her to read.

hugh mann is correct. This is wonderful news for the children who would otherwise get to the first grade with no reading skills, doomed to lag behind their classmates forever. The $13 million for AP training would be better used to spread the early reading program to as many young children as possible. Without the early reading head start, thousands of kids will ultimately never have the opportunity to take AP courses.