Three articles worth a read here on this topic, starting with this NYTimes article about the new documentary, Nursery University. This is mostly for fun, especially for any parent in a Type A city who tried to find a preschool for their child. Hey, it’s weird out there.

Next comes this Associated Press article (photo courtesy of AP) about the importance of teaching socialization skills rather than academic skills. It goes unmentioned in the article, but that’s particularly important for boys, many of whom aren’t wired for early literacy skills. Nor are they wired for that whole sitting-still thing, which may explain why more than four times as many boys as girls get expelled from preschool.

Now, here’s Peg Tyre’s interview with Pre-K Now about boys and preschool:

I recently had the opportunity to read Peg Tyre’s new book, “The Trouble With Boys”. It inspired me so much I asked the author if she would participate in our Inside Pre-K 5 Qs interview series. She happily agreed and offers some very interesting and thoughtful answers to five questions that relate her work to pre-k education.

In a conversation with another parent, what would you say are the benefits and risks of preschool for boys?

I think the value of preschool for all children is pretty well documented — it can lay down the building blocks for school success and enhancing lifelong learning. The problem really comes in when preschools run programs that are developmentally inappropriate for little children, especially little boys. In particular, programs that are highly academic, that consist of hours of uninterrupted teacher-directed activity, that prize quiet time over physical movement. Often, when boys are enrolled in these kinds of pre-schools, they flounder. They attract an intense amount of negative attention from teachers and that is very sad. Unfortunately, it can be the first blot that turns in into a pattern of academic failure.

How do you see the role of pre-k in our society?

Interesting question. And a big one. There is a discourse among early educators that suggests a very democratic notion — that preschool is a great leveler — and often we talk about preschool as if it functions in the same way for all kids. But practically, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Poor kids need pre-k a great deal — to get them away from the TV, to expose them to a language rich environment, to help them develop pre-literacy skills, familiarize themselves with the mechanics of reading (left to right, which way to hold a book) to learn numbers and colors and days of the week, and social/emotional skills like self-regulation. Middle class and affluent kids are usually getting the enrichment then need at home — it’s good to have it reinforced in preschool but there needs are different - or maybe, they aren’t as great.

What did you learn about pre-k during your research for this book?

That it can be tough to be a little boy enrolled in preschool right now. And it can be tough to be his mom.

What has changed about society’s perceptions of boys over the past 10 years?

It think we have become very intolerant of what boys are like, how they think, how they play and how they express themselves.

What is the most critical issue facing boys and their parents today?

There is a pipeline that carries all children from preschool to college and I think the data shows that there are several places along that pipeline where boys are fall out. My book is really about those places were boys– for a variety of reason — disengage from education — often with disastrous results. I think it is critical for parents to address this problem in their schools and in their communities. Right now we have 2.5 million more girls than boys in college — a staggering gap. But when you ask college presidents why there are so many more college ready girls than boys, they will tell you that the problem begins in preschool. We need to address it early so all our children can get the best education possible.

 Knowing of my interest in this topic, Holly Higgins from Pre-K Now sent along this article from ScienceNews:

According to a new study, preschool boys perform better on tests that measure learning and other important skills when they are in classes that have more girls than boys. The pattern doesn’t seem to hold for girls, though. For preschool girls, the presence or absence of boys did not affect learning.

The study raises questions about having all-boy or all-girl classes for preschool , says psychologist Arlen Moller, of Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, who led the study. Other studies have shown that high-school girls may perform better in all-girl schools. In middle school, however, the effects of same-sex schooling are unclear, and even less is known for very young kids.

Interesting, and it raises this fundamental question: Do boys show up for kindergarten less prepared for school work than girls? For the answer, I went to one of the nation’s top experts, Steven Barnett, executive director of the National Institute for Early Education at Rutgers University. His response (and be sure to read the last line, which gets at the heart of the issue): 

You have a complicated question, how many boys relative to girls show up not ready for school. Readiness for school is multi-faceted–knowledge about language, literacy, math, etc. plus executive function and social-emotional skills and even health. Also, your question asks who is at the bottom rather than for group averages. Readiness also depends on what schools require, that is what they do to make themselves ready for children. So here is my best take. There are only small differences in cognitive skills or achievement at the start of kindergarten between boys and girls. In reading, girls are a bit ahead, and in math boys have a small advantage at the top of the distribution while girls have a small advantage at the bottom of the distribution (the average is about the same but there are more boys at the extremes. It may be more important that boys are less well-behaved than girls. For example, as they move through school, boys are placed in lower reading groups more often than they should be based on their actual achievement, in part because of teacher perceptions of their behavior. Another way to approach your question is to look at the percentage of children who are below the modal grade for their age, at ages 6-8. From 2000-2006 this averaged 21.5% for boys and 17.3% for girls, indicating that in the earliest years of school boys are being held back at a 25% higher rate than girls (by either their parents or the schools). 

It would seem that boys may come to school somewhat less ready for school, but that schools also are less ready for boys.

If you’re a believer in universal preschool, as am I, and if you believe this research released last week on the benefits of preschool is valid, as do I, and if you believe the Perry Preschool research is solid, as do I, the answer would seem simple: Of course boys benefited academically.

Actually, the primary benefit the boys drew from Perry was getting arrested less often than the control group. As an academic savior, Perry was less than a success for boys. All those academic gains you’ve seen listed for the Perry treatment group over the years (on-time high school graduation was the measure) looked good only because they mixed girls and boys in the research. Inconvenient truth: Only the girls experienced that boost in on-time graduation.

That fact first became known to me a couple of years ago when I moderated a preschool panel at the National Education Writers Association annual gathering, this time in Los Angeles. One of the panelists was Perry lifetime chronicler Larry Schweinhart. Over the course of several email exchanges, he laid out the problem for me.

“Teachers cemented this improvement in place for girls, but not boys, by having more of the girls continue on grade in regular classes rather than retaining them in grade or assigning them to special education classes for mental impairment.”

This doesn’t mean the boys weren’t helped by the Perry Preschool. But that boost didn’t stick for the boys in the same way it stuck for the girls.

Another cautionary note about boys and preschool comes from this Yale study concluding that boys are 4.5 times more likely to get expelled from preschool. For most of us, this was the first time we even realized kids got expelled from preschool. That happens because preschool operators have greater freedom to expell students than public elementary schools.

The final cautionary note is anecdotal, coming from elementary school principals I’ve interviewed who placed their sons into preschool and later regretted it. Those preschools were pushing hard on literacy skills at a developmental time when their sons weren’t ready, they said. As a result, their sons developed an aversion to reading that persisted through the elementary years. I think it’s fair to say that researchers have confirmed what any parent already knows, which is that their daughters develop literacy skills earlier than their sons.

Preschool researchers I trust assure me that boys are in fact helped by preschool, as long as parents choose preschools that know the difference between nuturing school readiness skills and drilling children on those skills. To me, all this adds up to a cautionary note: When writing about preschool research showing the benefits passed along to children, always ask for gender breakdowns.