It has always seemed to me that economists, especially those of a neo-con ilk, have always undervalued those contibutions to nations that cannot be immediately measured in monetarist terms.

The social benefits of early learning and early intervention tend to be discounted because it is hard to place a money value on them, but there can be no doubt that money invested in early learning and family support is more than adequately repaid in the long term if we can avoid the need for more-and-more expensive remedial interventions in educational, health and social welfare in later life, after the horse has bolted.

My entire career was spent in public education, and we knew that for those who entered school at age five from a home with a conscientious mother (in particular) had a wonderful head start. A conscientious father and interested and involved other friends and relations was an added bonus.

What a shame that we have never been able to adequately financially compensate those parents who actually do most to prepare their offspring for school and for life. Instead, we give a baby bonus with no guarantee of it being "earned" in the long term.

This is little more than an "advertorial" for the author's business. If you want to read the REAL story about the utter failure that is "No Child Left Behind", you only need to google Jonathan Kozol, a writer and researcher "on the ground" in some of the most poverty-ridden districts of the US.

The dramatic increase of private tutoring businesses is a blight and a shame. It has arisen from, ironically, government intervention (the author states this herself) - terribly misguided, ideologically driven government intervention - and has only served to widen the socioeconomic gap. Far from the private sector coming to the rescue (which seems to be implied in the article - and the author's link to other articles by Kevin Donnelly on her website seem to confirm this), the US government has worked, once again, to benefit the rich and leave the poor behind.

The only beneficiaries of such actions are those who stand most to gain from the increasing privatisation of all sectors of education - the tutoring businesses (run by people like Glynne Sutcliffe); the self-styled "education consultants" (like Kevin Donnelly); and the companies that make and sell tests and marking programs - whose numbers have proliferated since the introduction of "No (white, middle-class, from the proper neighbourhood) Child Left Behind".

Glynne Sutcliffe, please declare your interests much more overtly before attempting another advertorial.

Response to Petal

When one stands up to be counted, one can predict an attack – it’s the great Australian way. Still, it would help the emergence of better social policies if the attack was well-informed.

One of the more grievous intellectual errors of the residual left in Australia is the unfounded assumption that those on government funded payrolls are pure of heart and dedicated solely to the delivery of professional excellence. Yet in the arena of reading instruction (surely one of the most important tasks for schools initially set up to make sure all children could read, write and count) teachers have been near-criminally incompetent. The reign of ‘whole language’ could NEVER have occurred were teachers minimally thoughtful about the logic of the curriculum content they were charged with imparting. That the ‘whole language’ juggernaut rolled on for thirty years after the 1960‘s publication of “Why Johnny Can’t Read” - to the point where the entire educational enterprise was in jeopardy - is almost unbelievable, except that’s what the record shows.

Regarding Petal’s contempt for ‘business’, it is in the business arena that you find innovation, energy, and some attempt to supply what service users actually want. Government monopolies rarely do this. Both the shift to private schooling and the growth in home-schooling document parental appreciation of options.

The No-Child-Left-Behind Act has been patchily successful not because Bush is engaged in some kind of conspiratorial endeavour to advantage text book publishers, or test providers. The critique of Halliburton seems to have migrated quite inappropriately. Nor does NCLB favor the children of the wealthy!

NCLB has run into difficulties primarily because teachers, unions and education faculties have resented and resisted the idea that teachers should be made accountable for children actually learning an identifiable quantum of curriculum content. Something to do with comfort zones, I think.

To find out how ‘business’ can contribute to policy debates Petal should go to http://www.earlyreadingplayschool.com.au - Theoretical Issues page and read “The More Things Change - A case study in the conduct of intellectual debate and discussion in Australia”.

- GS

I have read a number of articles on your site, Glynne, and I would like for you to read a number of articles on the man I mentioned, Jonathan Kozol. I think it would benefit you to have a broader understanding of the real implications of the NCLB policies you support so assiduously.

Petal - I am puzzled by your assumption that I have not read Kozol. Death At An Early Age was one of those must read texts in my Dip Ed year. I have also lived in Chicago for a number of years, and sent my children to a public school on the Hyde Park/ghetto border. At the University of Melbourne as a History student I read extensively on the race problems of Jim Crow America and wrote a substantive research essay comparing Du Bois favourably with Booker T.Washington. Kozol is a nice man, and an excellent author. I do not believe he has come to terms with the obligation of teachers to actually teach. His approach depends entirely on the availablity of top quality, highly trained teachers with a total and missionary commitment to their students. In the real world of jobs, salaries, careers, etc. this is pie on the sky, and doesn't address the real issue, which is that that 'whole language'is a misbegotten and essentially stupid and ignorant method of teaching children to read, with predictably poor results. The only students to survive 'whole language' have, I believe, been those with parents who provoked a love of learning in their pre-school children. I could say more. But I'll wait to see what you have to say next.

Veritas, you've got your head up your own dark place - Jeez - Petal wasn't talking to YOU. Cant't you read? She was addressing the author of the article, Glynne.

You might have been talking to her, but she wasn't talking to you.

Anyway, Petal, you go for it, I'm with you. The less the bastards of the establishment have to do with our kds the better. How do we keep their filthy hands off of our kids? That's the fight.

Maximus - could I suggest you check out the signature lines on my previous post. If you do you'll possibly find two IDs.

Meantime, Petal, sorry to have gotten distracted from the main point of the original article, which is that there is now a documented boom in pre-K intellectual stuff in both the US and Australia, but more in the US, and that this is being provided for to a great extent by entrepreneurs in the private sector, presumably because the public schools are still slow to respond either to academic research or parents' wishes. No doubt because the Early Reading Play School has from the beginning run parent-led classes, I did propose that parents realise that as well as appreciating the value of an early start, that they also take into account that parents are the best mediators of early learning for their own children. It is important that children learn to read with fluency and comprehension. The best way for parents to ensure that this occurs is to start early, use phonics, and do the teaching themselves to the greatest extent possible (a strategy which is not as time-consuming as it sounds, because parent teaching can be quite informal.) My article was also by way of a warning to beware of massive institutionalisation of early learning for little children, because the research on brain development is now so conclusive that many will regard it as an opportunity to put the pre-K little ones into class settings for too many hours per day and per week. While their brains are growing exponentially, young children still need great slabs of one-on-one time with their primary carer, usually the mother.

Meanwhile, It does seem highly desirable to throw in a plea for re-introducing "clear thinking" as a curriculum component in Year 12, using the discussion here as clear evidence of the need for such a move.

Glynne, I'm not sure exactly what you are doing by linking Kozol to the discredited idea of "Whole Word Learning". In fact, I haven't come across whole word learning in ages (after doing a lot of teaching in different schools), and I can't understand why you, Kevin Donnelly, and others, insist on linking this stupid idea to all of "The Left". Kozol quotes people who say "are you sure that these people can be helped just by THROWING MONEY at them?", and he quotes them because THAT is exactly the issue: money taken away from where it is most needed. His article in the Atlantic Monthly last year said it all - I would recommend that you read it.

And for the issue of private enterprise filling the gap: people will only spend money on their kids (for the most part) if they think it's going to get their child ahead of everyone else's. This is why people buy huge 4WDs and drive them at incredible speeds which endanger everyone except themselves and their children. People who don't have money can't afford the luxury of the pre-K tuition industry that is booming in the US for all the wrong reasons. Such progress is SHAMEFUL because it only fuels inequity, which ultimately comes back at all of us in society.

"...normal employment aspirations of the generality of Anglo and Irish background Aussie kids in a globalised economy already means competing with Indian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Jewish, Italian and Greek graduates in all areas of professional employment. The observed over-representation of Asian-Australian students in the annual Year 12 credit list is a clear sign of things to come..."

What the hell? What is going on that even an article purporting to be about the value of early education needs to bring in a racial aspect which implicitly suggests that "real" Aussie kids are being disadvantaged?! By Kindergarten?! The mind boggles. What a waste of editorial space.

Early education can be a great thing, and can do a great deal to help disadvantaged kids get a leg-up on school. But we should not be making it yet another ethnic battleground.

And we really shouldn't be pressuring kids to learn certain things too early - as my aunt, who used to teach first-year-primary school kids once said "when they get to school, kids should know how to tie their shoe laces, use the school toilets, find their lunchbox, and identify which is their school bag. Don't worry about the rest, the school can teach them to read and write, thats our job!"

Laurie – your aunt isn’t really a very good guide to bringing up children. I think you need a bigger data base, a lot more information across several disciplines, better theoretical perspectives and wiser counsel.

Furthermore, your “We’re alright, mate” certainty that the way things are currently done in the Great South Land is for the best in the best of all possible worlds is so crazily provincial that one can only clasp one’s head in despair.

It is a simple truth that Anglo and Irish background kids are statistically already on the back foot in terms of Year 12 results. Instead of implying I am some kind of racist right-wing populist demagogue, how about going with the spirit of my comments, and realize that there is a degree of humility in my suggestion that we should LEARN FROM other cultures how to achieve superior outcomes in the rearing of functional, literate, educated adults.

When average Anglo and Irish Aussie kids have lost even their current levels of access to professional careers and careers choice, who will you hold responsible, Laurie?

Petal – Maybe if you were to read a few of Diane Ravitch’s essays, articles and books it might be a quid pro quo for my taking up your challenge to read Kozol’s latest (which I have done).

Kozol’s link to whole language is a link that runs via John Dewey and the progressivist, child-centred educational paradigm that has been regarded as gospel in Schools of Education for over half a century. It is this paradigm which has proven so inadequate to the needs of public education systems across the English-speaking world. While not entirely without virtue, it is of minimal use in teaching reading. But Kozol’s main thrust is to castigate white America for not funding black education adequately. Why doesn’t he also castigate the black middle class that the Civil Rights movement created – a demographic that in moving up and out of the ghettoes in fact also deprived the black population of its activist leaders, and helped create an underclass of those left behind