D.C. charters tackle preschool

At LEAP Academy, a public charter school in Southeast Washington, a roomful of 4-year-olds hunched over tables, quietly practicing their writing skills. Most can’t actually write entire words yet, so they scrawled the first letter and supplemented their stories with pictures.

When one boy instead covered his page with fierce black scribbles, Principal Laura Bowen leaned over his shoulder and told him to stop. “I don’t want any more scribbles,” she said. “I want a story.”

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Such encounters are part of the new frontier as D.C.’s thriving charter-school movement expands into early childhood programs, where per-pupil funding is higher and, advocates say, early intervention might lead to bigger gains in academic achievement.

LEAP is part of the nonprofit KIPP chain, which started with just one middle school in Houston 15 years ago and now is the largest charter operator in the country. LEAP is among dozens of D.C. charters now offering preschool and pre-kindergarten classes.

“In the first generation of charters, I think most of the charters were middle schools, because a lot of people saw at-risk students in those years,” said Jack McCarthy, a charter school veteran who leads the AppleTree Institute, a District-based nonprofit group that began as a charter high school operator in 1996. AppleTree opened its first preschool 10 years ago.

Between 2002 and 2010, the number of children enrolled in District charter preschools and pre-kindergartens jumped tenfold, from 430 to 4,346. At D.C. public schools, by comparison, more than 5,200 children are enrolled in preschool and pre-kindergarten. (In the District, preschool programs generally enroll 3-year-olds and pre-kindergarten programs enroll 4-year-olds.)

“People are starting to realize that you can avoid a lot of the pain” of teaching students who are behind, McCarthy said. “It really dramatically reduces the number of children needing special education if you provide evidence-based interventions in the early years.”

Samuel Meisels, president of the Erikson Institute in Chicago, a graduate school that trains professionals in child development, says charter schools might bring imaginative ideas into the field. But he warned that there are potential pitfalls as charters, which tend to have an intense focus on academic preparation, expand into preschool. Charters are often known for their rigid classroom structures, and many early education experts advocate unstructured play as the best way for young children to learn.

“It isn’t something where you take the KIPP method and apply it to another age group and expect that it will work the same way,” Meisels said. “Some of those elements may be problematic for young children, so I only hope they are keeping that in mind as they move downward in the age range.”

Decades of research have shown that high-quality early education programs improve the academic abilities of disadvantaged children and also lead to better social skills. But research also has found that those benefits can fade over time. A 2010 study of Head Start, a federally funded program for low-income children, found that early gains in literacy skills tapered off by the end of first grade. Other research has tracked similar fade-out effects for other early childhood programs.