Developmentally and Culturally Inappropriate Practice in U.s. Early Childhood Programs, Early Childhood Programs, Kindergarten Programs: Prevalence, Severity, and Its Relationship with Teacher and Administrator Qualifications.

The late 1960s witnessed the beginning of tremendous expansion of early childhood programs in the U.S. Over the past few decades, enrolling young children, ranging from infants of several months old to young children of 4 or 5 years old, in some kind of out-of-home program has become a social phenomenon. Along with the proliferation of early childhood programs, there emerged a trend of introducing academics to young children. Popular belief held that children were extremely malleable and that their intelligence could be increased if provided with rigorous academic training in their early years. These beliefs, as theorist David Elkind (1987) noted, were evident in and perhaps further propagated by popular books at the time that taught parents how to instruct their infants and toddlers in reading or math, such as Teach Your Baby to Read (Doman, 1963), Give Your Child a Superior Mind (Engelmann & Engelmann, 1983), and so on. However, with both men and women joining the workforce as the societal norm, a large percentage of parents could not afford to invest a substantial amount of time on their young. Genuinely believing that early exposure to formal instruction was going to make their offspring brighter, many parents felt compelled to put their infants and toddlers in high-powered academic programs. Many early childhood programs seemed to have lived up to the popular beliefs and, in particular, to the demands and expectations of those parents who desired to have "superkids," to use Elkind's words. Claiming to help young children get ahead in their academic preparations, these programs often took a "regimented curriculum approach" (Olenick, 1986b) by putting children in large groups, with time spent predominantly on formal, teacher-directed drill and practice of isolated academic skills. Children were expected to learn despite the fact that the pedagogy was "rigid, didactic, and geared to the attention levels of older children" (Olenick, 1986b). For example, Olenick's study (1986a) of 100 randomly selected child care programs in Los Angeles, California, reported that a good 25% of the programs fell into the category that he later termed as "Sit down, shut up, and count to 100" (p. 7). As he reported, "children as young as 2 years old were spending entire mornings seated at tables or desks reciting the alphabet, counting to 100, and drawing letters with pencils" (Olenick, 1986a, p. 7); meanwhile, they were expected to follow the rules and respond as a group. Likewise, in a study (Bryant, Clifford, & Peisner, 1991) where 103 kindergarten classrooms randomly selected from the state of North Carolina were observed, it was found that only 20% of the classes measured up to the criterion of developmental appropriateness. Early exposure to formal instruction, however, was not based on established knowledge about what is good pedagogy for infants and young children. In fact, the professional educators and experts in early childhood education opposed it as the rigid structure of instruction takes little consideration of the needs and learning styles of the children at their particular developmental stage. To protect young children from the harm of inappropriate expectations and schooling, in 1986 the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) issued a position statement to provide guidelines for practices that are developmentally appropriate for children aged 0-8 years. As the nation's largest professional organization of early childhood educators, NAEYC's official position on developmentally appropriate practice (DAP) not only embodies the vast amount of empirical experiences of many professional educators in the field, but it is also widely supported by a large body of existing research. Research showed that developmentally appropriate programs help facilitate children's creative development/divergent thinking (Hyson, Hirsh-Pasek, & Rescorla, 1990) and their verbal skills (Dunn, Beach, & Kontos, 1994; Marcon, 1992); in addition, young children attending child-centered programs seemed more confident in their own mental abilities (Stipek, Feiler, Daniels, & Milbum, 1995). …