A colleague gave me this article to read from Newsweek. I have been processing it over the weekend and still feel nervous about it. You can see why after reading the article at Newsweek. Here are some things I read that I had to reread to make sure I was reading them correctly.
Like many of his friends, Robert Cloud, a president of an engineering company in suburban Chicago, had the Ivy League in mind when he enrolled his sons, ages 5 and 8, in a weekly after-school tutoring program. "To get into a good school, you need to have good grades," he says.
(I can speak to this, I can tell you for sure that when I was 5 there was no way I was thinking about what college I was going to go to- I went to an ivy league school.All I can say, is shame on this parent for putting such enormous pressure on their first grader- If you are parent and you are thinking along these lines, please rethink. Remember, it really doesn't matter where you go- but what you do when you get there.)
"In wealthier communities, where parents can afford an extra year of day care or preschool, they are holding their kids out of kindergarten a year—a practice known in sports circles as red-shirting—so their kids can get a jump on the competition."
What?
So many more things I can sya about this article. I do agree that first graders are really being pushed alot harder and faster than first graders in the past.
