In this report, Defending the Early Years (DEY) offers offers some thoughts and suggestions for supporting young children through COVID-19. Topics discussed include: (1) falling behind; (2) communicating with grandparents, family, and friends; (3) routines; (4) play; (5) time to teach skills; (6) screen time; (7) talking with children; and (8)…

Defending the Early Years released a survey to better understand the impact COVID-19 has had on young children, their families, and their teachers. Schools, centers, and childcare providers were forced to close their doors as the world implemented social distancing measures to slow the spread of the new deadly virus. This survey was written to…

Unfortunately, today's typical pre-pandemic preschool/kindergarten curriculum often consisted of memorizing meaningless bits of information and then regurgitating that information on a test. The dilemma for educators is that the current teach-to-the-test curriculum is based on reaching short-term goals in order to improve test scores rather than…

This report documents the disappearance of child-directed activities and teachers' autonomy from Massachussetts' kindergartens. While child-directed activities have been reduced across the board, the study found that high socioeconomic status schools (SES) schedule 30 minutes more daily, two and a half more hours weekly, than low SES schools.…

Many parents find it hard to make decisions about screen time for their kids because advice comes from different directions and often conflicts. In the field of child development, there are decades of theory and research that can be very helpful as a guide for screen and digital device use with young kids. These ideas can be a resource for parents…

It is difficult to get a good grasp of the topic of kindergarten entry assessment because there are such great differences in the purpose for the instruments, how they are constructed, and how the data is used. Even so, in many states and communities, there is cause for concern. Until the paradigm of education moves from a preoccupation with…

Soon after the implementation of federal and state early education mandates that require the teaching and testing of more formal "academic" skills, many highly experienced early childhood teachers began voicing concerns about the negative impact the mandates were having on the young children in their classrooms. Many of these concerns…

The Common Core State Standards, standards in literacy and math for K-12 that have been adopted in more than forty states, are intensifying the academic pressures on young learners. In general, these standards do not reflect how young children learn and are not developmentally appropriate. The author of this essay shows that selected Common Core…

Today, in conjunction with the Alliance for Childhood, we are thrilled to release our new report "Reading Instruction in Kindergarten: Little to Gain and Much to Lose." In the report we concluded that Common Core reading requirements for kindergarten are inappropriate and not well-grounded in research. Under Common Core, students are…

The extent to which academic instruction should be a major goal of the curriculum for preschool and kindergarten children is a constant topic of debate among the many parties concerned with early childhood education. The main argument presented in this report is that the traditional debates in the field about whether to emphasize so-called free…