Newsweek | The New First Grade: Too Much Too Soon?

Kids as young as 6 are tested, and tested again, to ensure they're making sufficient progress. Then there's homework, more workbooks and tutoring.

Newsweek September 11, 2006 issue

NYTimes.com | Preparing Hispanic Parents and Children for School

By Valerie Cotsalas

GARDEN CITY, N.Y. — Chunky yellow Play-Doh hamburgers, jars of primary-color paint and cardboard letter tiles filled up part of a room at the Long Island Children’s Museum here. Nearby on a carpet, a group of children stared up at a teacher who turned a book around to show them the pictures.
It wasn’t exactly a scene in a kindergarten classroom, but it was close.
The museum room is designed to resemble a kindergarten, complete with a teacher and structured activities, as a way to introduce children from immigrant Hispanic families to an American classroom before they walk into one today for their first day of school. [...]

NYTimes.com September 7, 2006

WNDU News | Kindergarten may demand too much, too soon

Kids in kindergarten now get more schoolwork than years past.

Rigorous homework and challenging math tests may sound like a typical day for a high school senior. But, think again. Kids in kindergarten now get more schoolwork than years past. It may be too much, too soon.< style="font-family: georgia;">

Laura Pilchik is worried about her daughter Josie entering kindergarten. At age five, she will be one of the youngest in her class. Parents are holding their kids back so they have a competitive advantage. They are a year older, a year smarter, and a year bigger. This means they are more prepared to face the new challenges of kindergarten. Which, according to some suburban moms, is brutal. “Kindergarten was very hard. She cried almost every day doing her homework,” Pilchik
said. [...]
WNDU News, South Bend, Indiana Posted: 09/05/2006 05:00 pm

NYTimes | Health | When Toddlers Turn on the TV and Actually Learn

by Lisa Guernsey

'But what happens with children younger than 3? Should babies and toddlers be exposed to television at all? Is there any chance that they could actually learn from the screen? While debates rage among parents, pediatricians and critics of baby videos (think “Baby Einstein”), developmental psychologists are trying to apply some science to the question.'

NYTimes.com 5 September 2006

NYTimes | To Give Children an Edge, Au Pairs from China

By Ginia Bellafante

[...] [P]arents assume that China’s expanding influence will make Mandarin the sophisticates’ language decades hence.
“Our clientele is middle and upper middle class,” said William L. Gertz, chairman of the American Institute for Foreign Study, which oversees Au Pair in America. “They see something really happening, and they don’t want to be left behind.”
The last two years have seen an astonishing increase in the number of American parents wishing to employ Mandarin-speaking nannies, difficult to find here and even harder to obtain from China. [...]

NYTimes.com 5 September 2006