“People are frustrated because these education policies have been top-down for so long…” — Nancy Carlsson Paige, Senior Adviser, Defending the Early Years

Defending the Early Years (DEY) was featured in the article Is Common Core killing kindergarten? (Boston Sunday Globe, 6/14/15). Read the full-article here. DEY is a Boston-based nonprofit project directed by BTU member Geralyn Bywater McLaughlin. DEY is pushing back against the Common Core and aims to mobilize the early childhood community to speak out with well-reasoned arguments against inappropriate standards, assessments, and classroom practices. Here’s an excerpt:

“Last spring, Susan Sluyter quit teaching kindergarten in the Cambridge Public Schools. She’d spent nearly two decades in the classroom, and her departure wasn’t a happy one. In a resignation letter, Sluyter railed against a ‘disturbing era of testing and data’ that had trickled down from the upper grades and was now assaulting kindergartners with a barrage of new academic demands that ‘smack of 1st or 2nd grade.’ The school district did not respond to a request for comment…”

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