Petition to Save Early Childhood Education in New York City

We, the undersigned, New York City’s Early Childhood Educators, Social Workers, Intervention Specialists, Directors, Administrators, Parents, Professors of Early Childhood Education and concerned community members, demand that NYC’s Division of Early Childhood Education leadership halt all restructuring and roll out of costly and inappropriate corporate curriculum.

We object to the replacement of free, carefully researched, developmentally appropriate curriculum—that was created to honor the cultural and linguistic diversity of NYC children—with the multi-million dollar, private equity owned, pre-packaged Teaching Strategies’ Creative Curriculum, and its accompanying assessment tool GOLD in DOE funded Early Childhood programs.

CONTEXT

Deputy Chancellor of the Division of Early Childhood Education, Kara Ahmed has spent unreported millions purchasing and forcing a one-size-fits-all scripted curriculum on all early childhood programs. Previously, programs had access to free curriculum provided by the DOE, or, if they chose, the option to use an approved curriculum or develop an emergent curriculum responsive to their student population. This abrupt change was without regard for programs’ previous successes or educators’ expertise – One-Size-Fits-All is the mandate.

• Amid massive budget cuts, including the reduction of 3K options, the DOE  have spent a minimum of six and a half million dollars on the purchase of the curriculum kits for its early childhood program.    
• Over 30 million dollars have been spent on ‘professional development’ provided virtually with prerecorded webinars, by inexperienced “corporate product managers” who do not live in New York City or have experience in our early childhood systems, or in-person ‘experts’ flown in from out of state.                                              
• In a city school system in which students use over 146 languages other than English to communicate, Creative Curriculum is only available in English and Spanish.                                                                
• The mandated Creative Curriculum and Teaching Strategies Gold assessments require time consuming ranking of rote skills on 75 levels of mastery determined by the company selling the product,  not based on teacher knowledge of child development and cultural responsiveness.                                                                                            
• There is no separate curriculum for 3K and Pre-K, so both ages are being forced to use the same curriculum.                                                 
• Teaching Strategies Gold assessment requires the uploading of pictures and videos of children to a third-party vendor.                         
• The DOE presented one inadequate parent info session on the use of Teaching Strategies Gold assessment with so little time allocated for Q&A that they were only able to answer one question.                     
• Early childhood coaches and social workers have been reduced to program compliance officers. 

DEMANDS:

Allow Curricular and Assessment Choice

• Respect the curricular decisions of teachers, leaders, and communities.  
• Allow for a range of curricular approaches that support widely accepted principles of early childhood education like those articulated by Trust for Learning and New York State’s early childhood learning standards.
• Welcome acclaimed learner-centered emergent approaches and offer free guidance like the DOE’s Units of Study as well as purchased curriculum options.
• Allow similar choices in approaches to early childhood assessment.

Hold A Public Forum on Early Childhood Education

• Invite parents, teachers, leaders, early childhood scholars, and Division of Early Childhood staff to a public forum on the future of early childhood education in New York City.

Investigate

• Private equity firm KKR’s relationship to Teaching Strategies
• Money spent on Teaching Strategies/KKR
• Pressure to purchase Teaching Strategies products, creating corporate profits
• Deprofessionalizing of early childhood educators
• Validity of TSG data
• Validity of pre-populated TSG lesson plans
• Cronyism and lack of experience in high-ranking DECE management
  ‘Pilot year’ mandate 

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