More Challenges For Public Education

Not everyone can home school. That is reality. Public schools, charter schools, private schools are the predominant options in that case. However, as it relates to the Pre-school component of any education outside of the home, a report from the largest study of American child care says that keeping a preschooler in a day care center for a year or more increased the likelihood that the child would become disruptive in class later and that the effect persisted through the sixth grade. The researchers reported that the effect was slight, and within the normal range. Parental guidance and genetics had stronger influence on how children behaved. Perhaps unexpectedly the finding held up regardless of gender or family income, and regardless of the quality of the day care center. According to the authors, with more than 2 million American preschoolers attending day care, the increased disruptiveness very likely contributes to the load on teachers who must manage large classrooms. On the other hand, time spent in high-quality day care centers was correlated positively with higher vocabulary scores through elementary school. For more information on this longitudinal and complicated dataset (and other related studies) see http://www.child-encyclopedia.com/Pages/PDF/McCartneyANGxp.pdf