Will New York City Lead the Way on Pre-K?
December 26, 2013
Preschool children watch El Museo del Barrio’s thirty-fourth annual Three Kings Day parade, Thursday, January 6, 2011, in New York. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)
At the Future of America Learning Center in the West Bronx, the pre-K curriculum is built around adult jobs—visiting real workplaces and then learning about the vocabulary and skills that grown-ups use every day.
At a career-month event, 4-year-olds meet doctors and nurses from the Montefiore Medical Center. Back in their classroom, they set up a replica triage desk and play doctor with a real stethoscope and blood-pressure cuff. In another unit, students visit a Citibank vault and then deposit real coins in a classroom bank.
If they are upset, children can choose to visit the “oasis,” a corner furnished with soft carpets, pillows and a mini-armchair. The idea is for kids to learn resilience, the self-soothing skills that help people of all ages overcome conflict, disappointment and discomfort. There are three adults in each twenty-student classroom at Future of America, one with a master’s degree. And the center is open for eleven hours per day, which means people—a good number of them single parents—can drop their children off on the way to work and pick them up when their shift is over, without worrying about arranging after-school baby-sitting or nutritious meals. All of that is provided at one location.
This is a gold-standard pre-K education—the kind that, according to research by Nobel Prize–