Ron Haskins, a preschool expert who co-directs the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institute, says the movement is symptomatic of the country’s failure to reduce poverty and stymie growing inequality. Pre-k is seen as a solution to those problems. Preschool, on the other hand, connotes nursery school. And when people imagine nursery school, they think of daycare. A babysitting arrangement.
Framing the final year of preschool as pre-k, some say, implies that it’s an essential building block in a child’s educational experience. The benefits of early education aside, critics question the accuracy of that message, particularly because pre-k isn’t considered compulsory. After all, few states even mandate kindergarten.
"It was a political decision to call it prekindergarten," said Cuban, who’s also a prominent critic of universal pre-k. "It implies that schools can solve all these problems of achievement gaps, these differences in adult performance between whites and minorities. It makes it a school decision.
"It’s a denigration, an implied criticism about preschool as childcare," he continued. "The flaw that I see is that we need quality childcare as much as we need quality prekindergarten."
[For more of this story, written by Alia Wong, go to http://www.theatlantic.com/edu...s-of-pre-k/382878/2/]
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