The month of June marked transitions for many of our students, but few more so than the very youngest. This month, thousands of 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds completed their first years of formal education in San Francisco Unified. Research suggests they will be significantly better prepared to succeed in school because of their high-quality preschool experience.
What these children don’t know – and it should be invisible to them – is that they are on the leading edge of our district’s strategy to align pre-K–3rd grade instruction. Our goal with this approach is to shrink a stubborn achievement gap by aligning primary school teaching to a formerly separate pre-K system. If we are going to bridge the gap, we have to start earlier, and that early work must be connected and coherent with the work in the grades that follow.
Initial signs suggest the impacts of our shift to pre-K–3 will be felt by these children next year and beyond in a number of important ways – from their sense of comfort and self-confidence in the classroom, to their familiarity with books and other printed matter, to their early understanding of the concepts of quantity and relative size, to their negotiating skills on the playground. This year, the percentage of district pre-K graduates who were ready for kindergarten was 43 percent, up from 18 percent in the 2012–13 school year.
[For more of this story, written by Richard Carranza, go to http://edsource.org/2015/how-t...to-third-grade/82234]
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