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Unfortunately, today's typical pre-pandemic preschool/kindergarten curriculum often consisted of memorizing meaningless bits of information and then regurgitating that information on a test. The dilemma for educators is that the current teach-to-the-test curriculum is based on reaching short-term goals in order to improve test scores rather than on developing long-term intellectual goals. The report discusses how the Covid-19 pandemic is providing an unexpected pause in education. This pause affords educators the perfect opportunity to create a new meaningful curriculum, a new paradigm, for preschoolers and kindergarteners. This new curriculum should be based on what is known about child development and what is known about how children construct knowledge.

Defending the Early Years released a survey to better understand the impact COVID-19 has had on young children, their families, and their teachers. Schools, centers, and childcare providers were forced to close their doors as the world implemented social distancing measures to slow the spread of the new deadly virus. This survey was written to capture the experiences of parents and teachers of young children, a population often overlooked when discussing education. The survey contained 39 questions in three sections: demographics, parents, and teachers. Utilizing a mix of open-ended, multiple-choice, and Likert scale questions, respondents were asked about their experience with online learning/remote schooling, including participation, expectations, ease of adjustment, benefits, challenges, and concerns. This report documents the findings based on an analysis of the responses collected. The authors begin by sharing the demographic data. Then they provide an overview of the online learning/remote schooling participation, expectations, and reports of adjustment. Next, they share the benefits, challenges, and concerns of both parents and teachers. Finally, the authors offer some suggestions for parents and teachers based on their understanding of the data. The hope is that by amplifying the voice of parents and teachers of young children, we can continue to protect and invest in childhood.

In this report, Defending the Early Years (DEY) offers offers some thoughts and suggestions for supporting young children through COVID-19. Topics discussed include: (1) falling behind; (2) communicating with grandparents, family, and friends; (3) routines; (4) play; (5) time to teach skills; (6) screen time; (7) talking with children; and (8) tips for parents from a veteran preschool teacher. These are stressful times but perhaps most challenging for parents of young children who are trying to do the impossible -- to care for young children and work from home, while worrying about finances, everyone's health and safety, and many other concerns. It is hoped that these ideas and resources will help the reader to navigate these uncertain days, reduce stress, and to help keep families safe and well.

This report documents the disappearance of child-directed activities and teachers' autonomy from Massachussetts' kindergartens. While child-directed activities have been reduced across the board, the study found that high socioeconomic status schools (SES) schedule 30 minutes more daily, two and a half more hours weekly, than low SES schools. Furthermore, low SES kindergartens were more likely to have transformed child-directed activities into adult-directed activities.

Soon after the implementation of federal and state early education mandates that require the teaching and testing of more formal "academic" skills, many highly experienced early childhood teachers began voicing concerns about the negative impact the mandates were having on the young children in their classrooms. Many of these concerns focused on children from low-income homes--the very children the mandates were most supposed to help. This report documents what highly experienced and well-trained teachers in several states said in interviews about how school reform mandates are harming low-income young children, their families, their programs and themselves. The responses reveal that the mandates--and the top-down manner in which they have been implemented--disregard teachers' knowledge of child development, culturally appropriate practice, and how to meet the diverse educational needs of poor children. Recommendations for action conclude the report.

It is difficult to get a good grasp of the topic of kindergarten entry assessment because there are such great differences in the purpose for the instruments, how they are constructed, and how the data is used. Even so, in many states and communities, there is cause for concern. Until the paradigm of education moves from a preoccupation with accountability to a focus on meaningful learning, based on what is known about child development, readiness is likely to continue to be assessed to inform policy and guide program funding. To provide more information on this discussion, the following questions are addressed in this report: (1) What is kindergarten readiness assessment? (2) Why is Defending the Early Years (DEY) concerned about the current state of readiness assessment? and (3) What can parents, teachers, and policymakers do about inappropriate kindergarten assessment?

The extent to which academic instruction should be a major goal of the curriculum for preschool and kindergarten children is a constant topic of debate among the many parties concerned with early childhood education. The main argument presented in this report is that the traditional debates in the field about whether to emphasize so-called free play or formal beginning academic instruction are not the only two options for the early childhood curriculum. Certainly some proportions of time can be given to both of those kinds of curriculum components. But in the early years, another major component of education -- (indeed for all age groups) must be to provide a wide range of experiences, opportunities, resources and contexts that will provoke, stimulate, and support children's innate intellectual dispositions.

Today, in conjunction with the Alliance for Childhood, we are thrilled to release our new report "Reading Instruction in Kindergarten: Little to Gain and Much to Lose." In the report we concluded that Common Core reading requirements for kindergarten are inappropriate and not well-grounded in research. Under Common Core, students are expected to be able to read before entering first grade. The report maintains that the pressure of implementing the reading standard is leading many kindergarten teachers to resort to inappropriate drilling on specific skills and excessive testing. Teacher-led instruction in kindergartens has almost entirely replaced the active, play-based experiential learning that children need based on decades of research in cognitive and developmental psychology and neuroscience. In an effort to shift back to a developmentally appropriate, child-centered curriculum, Defending the Early Years and Alliance for Childhood call for the withdrawal of the kindergarten standards from the Common Core so they can be rethought along developmental lines.

The Common Core State Standards, standards in literacy and math for K-12 that have been adopted in more than forty states, are intensifying the academic pressures on young learners. In general, these standards do not reflect how young children learn and are not developmentally appropriate. The author of this essay shows that selected Common Core math standards for Kindergarten-Grade 3 are not grounded in the large body of research on how children learn mathematics. Young children cannot ordinarily grasp mathematical concepts as early as the standards require. To meet the Common Core State Standards, teachers will be forced to teach ideas that sail over children's heads. Children will learn "verbalisms," memorizing statements they do not understand. They will learn to accept answers on the basis of what teachers and books say and will lose confidence in their own ability to think for themselves. Defending the Early Years is calling for removing kindergarten from the Common Core and for the convening of a task force of early childhood educators to recommend developmentally appropriate, culturally responsive guidelines for supporting young children's optimal learning birth to age 3.