Good article in Salon covering one parent’s story of having a child expelled from preschool.  Also contains some interesting statistics on child expulsions.  The prevalence of this practice is scary, as are the implications for individual and societal school performance.

The Salon article by Neal Pollack definitely appeals to the emotional side of parenting.  Thankfully it highlights the financial realities surrounding daytime childcare that many of us know too well.

What I don’t want people to take away from the Yale Child Center Study’s recommendations is the simplistic solution that states should prohibit pre-K expulsion.  I believe that forcing schools to retain kids they can’t manage will ultimately force closure of some schools and result in price gouging by others, taking childcare out of reach for far more people than the ones that are having kids expelled. 

While the Yale Study does argue against expelling preschoolers it simultaneously recommends that we establish additional resources and funding to provide daytime childcare and constructive environments to help these children work through their stresses that are most likely causing problematic behaviors in many preschool settings.

Yep, I just made an assumption there - that most of the preschooler behavioral problems are not the result of medical disorder but instead are a reaction by a child to an unrealistic lifestyle demand being placed on their family by society.  Although the Yale study doesn’t go deeply into why the kids are acting out, I believe that today’s lifestyle - one that places massive stress on parents - has got to be affecting kids as well.  Neal’s article paints a very personal example of how kids can act out. 

I bring up the acting out part because of a quote in the statement by Karen Hill-Scott, a consultant and child development expert from Los Angeles California that was posted along with the study on Yale’s website.  Regardless of how this issue get politically spun one quote from her statement rings loudly in my head:
Children don’t just suddenly become compliant at age 5.5 when they begin
kindergarten.

Boom.  That to me is the magic point of this whole discussion, and relates to another I’m going to be posting about the prevalence of “pre-K”, “preppy” or the variety of cute names that pre-kindergarten programs now go by in the coming week or so.  While many parents look at pre-school and K-12 as totally separate environments, and many aren’t even aware of the existence of the pre-K programs, the preschool issues we’re now seeing could in fact be the first in a string of institutional run-ins these kids will have ahead of them.

While I don’t have a degree in psychology to know whether kids having trouble in pre-school will end up juvenile delinquents, I do remember hearing about school systems in other countries where there were “selection” processes early in school-age years that led a child to become almost predestined for certain “tracks” based on how they did in those selections.  What I remember is thinking how great it was to live in America and to have your destiny be something that you could control.  When I look at our situations like that described in Neal’s article, and at programs like pre-K, I think we’re giving up that control a little bit at a time through the economic choices we make as parents and as a society.