Family move reveals differences in early education

LONDON -- That's my girl, I thought, as Olivia tore away from us to join the other 5-year-olds for circle time _ legs crossed, hand stick-straight in the air in response to the teacher's question about how the kids spent Father's Day.

My husband and I exchanged knowing glances, convinced that she was a shoo-in for admission, and left Olivia with her uniform-clad peers so we could tour the British prep school in the quaint red-brick Victorian building.

The e-mail came a week later. It asked us to please call the head teacher, the equivalent of a school principal in the United States.

We were back at home in Washington D.C., thinking about what to store, ship and toss as we prepared for our family move to London. The change is a big one for all of us, but I didn't realize quite how different things would be for Olivia until that phone call.

The head teacher and I exchanged pleasantries, and then she laid it out. My daughter, who commonly invokes the Mandarin word for little brother and usually wins at the game hangman, has a significant "learning gap" when compared with her British peers _ especially in literacy.

Dumbstruck, I said nothing at first and then started to protest, suggesting there had been a terrible misunderstanding _ maybe even a language barrier. OK, that one didn't make sense. I took a deep breath and then remembered all that I had heard about the differences between early education in the two countries.

Britain has a national curriculum with specific goals, and schools there are rigorously inspected and evaluated. Most kids enter school at 4, instead of 5 as is the case here, and pre-kindergarten programs tend to be more academic than in the United States. American programs are often more play-based than academically structured, and standards vary widely from state-to-state and between public and private settings.

It's not an open-and-shut case as to whether one country's approach is better than another. On a recent international reading test, U.S. fourth-graders and their peers from England had the same results. They weren't all that impressive. Students from the two countries posted lower average scores than students in Russia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Luxembourg, Hungary, Italy and Sweden, along with several Canadian provinces.

In math, kids in the United Kingdom, which includes Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, outperformed their American peers on an international test given to 15-year-olds.

Back on the phone in Washington, I listened as the head teacher suggested sending Olivia back to a "nursery school," to a reception class, generally the British version of pre-kindergarten. But Olivia is turning six this fall. We were being asked to put her with kids much closer in age to her 3 1/2 year-old brother than herself. That was not something she would swallow easily, and should we?

An e-mail from the school followed. It politely spelled out exactly what the kids in that school were expected to master by Olivia's age: telling time; fractions _ whole, half, quarter and thirds; counting in 5's up to 50; reading books (something called the pink new level) and starting to write "news" independently.

I thought about Olivia's school experience over the last year. She planted basil seeds with her beloved pre-k teacher. She learned all about insects, drew a fantastic picture of Saturn, and she definitely mastered the monkey bars.