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Experts express concern
Early childhood experts agree that online preschools are a bad idea. More than one hundred early childhood leaders and organizations signed a position statement in which they express their deep concern about the high-tech industry’s push to target young children.
They point out that current knowledge about human development demonstrates that children learn best through exploratory, creative play and relationships with caring adults. And they quote the American Academy of Pediatrics: “Higher-order thinking skills and executive functions essential for school success, such as task persistence, impulse control, emotion regulation, and creative, flexible thinking, are best taught through unstructured and social (not digital) play.”
Online preschool is not a quality education
Preschool is not about learning letters and numbers on a computer screen. Preschool is about hands-on learning and exploring. “Children who are given this pseudo-preschool experience will not have the skills or knowledge of their peers who attend quality pre-K programs; the opportunity gap will widen at an even earlier age. States have a responsibility to provide high-quality early childhood education to every child,” warns Nancy Carlsson-Paige, professor emerita at Lesley University and co-founder of the nonprofit Defending the Early Years.
Online pre-K will only widen achievement gaps even more and increase inequality, says Carlsson-Paige. Children who get their preschool education through online preschools will be at a disadvantage compared to children who can attend preschools that offer activities that stimulate their cognitive, social, emotional, and physical development. Bottom line: you can’t compare what a child can learn through a screen to what a child can learn through human interaction.
https://www.thetechedvocate.org/why-online-preschool-is-a-terrible-idea/
Overhaul this guidance document. Instead put this tech money toward interactive, in-person prek. The cyber education industry sadly includes school district administrators, very profitable non-profit organizations like the AASA Superintendents Association in Virginia, and venture capitalist firms who are hungry for the prek big dollar profits.
All children should be free to enjoy childhood, to learn naturally and joyfully and not be subjected to measurement, assessment, diagnosis, intervention, judgment, control, rigid compliance or conformity. Nor should they be used as fodder for predatory publishing and technology companies.
The current state of education reform, particularly for poor children of color, is not only ineffective, it is abusive. When I think about this in terms of my privileged granddaughter, it makes me furious that other peoples’ children and grandchildren are being treated this way. It’s not a political debate. It’s a national shame.
https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_12030426?section=us_education
Is decrease in laughter of the prek kids plugged into computers going to be measured? Does lack of enjoyment even matter if digital screens are on and prek kids respond into the microphone? Will SEL embedded curriculum and surveys be used upon 3 and 4 years olds to justify cheap remote?
This guidance document cannot rescue this plan to further destabilize and undermine public education. Follow the profits made by the predatory publishing and technology companies.