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March 11, 2005
All-day kindergarten: Working parents' dream?
"It's a working parent's dream—kindergartens competing to take your children off your hands all day, and the promise that they'll learn something, too," reports the Christian Science Monitor, in a revealing piece about how one state is confronting the issue.
"In Arizona, a state with a booming senior population and dwindling pockets of families with small children, a marketing tug of war has erupted over who will get to educate Arizona's future. Competition for students has always existed between public and private schools. But open enrollment, home schooling, and a growing number of charter schools have widened parents' choices, and now public schools are facing one of their biggest competitors yet—themselves.
"For Arizona's traditional public schools, the offer of full-day kindergarten represents a preemptive-strike opportunity: Hook parents before they opt for a charter school. That's not the overt motive, of course. All-day kindergarten has been on the rise nationwide, driven by a growing focus on the academic benefits of early education. But a plethora of marketing tools send a clear promotional signal: slick videos, websites, movie-trailer ads, a cable-access television show, and even a two-week 'kindergarten academy.' "
But how to pay for it?
"Cash-strapped districts must sacrifice to keep their all-day kindergarten programs alive," the Monitor reports. "For example, Tucson Unified has retained all-day kindergarten, but will now cut the number of teachers and make class sizes larger."
Posted March 11, 2005 12:00 AM
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