My preschool has adopted literacy standards for their program.could i know the advantages of using standards?

Question

i am preschool teacher and i have been teaching for 15 years without formal program standards in language arts and i am skeptical of using them to plan for and assess young children.can anyone explain me about the advantages of using standards for young children?

Answer 1

Standards help in many ways.  They give you something as a teacher to test for, and ways to assess each child.  

Think about what you taught before the standards were adopted.  The children were probably learning the same things, so not much will have changed in that aspect.  At that age group there is only so much you can test for, and assess.  Having a set of standards allows for you as  the teacher to have guidelines, and know how each child is doing in your classroom.

Answer 2

We are talking about children five and under, are we not?  What kind of literacy standards could possibly be applied fairly to a child that age?

When I was three my grandmother stayed with us, and taught me my letters by giving me a peanut butter cookie for every alphabet.  She also taught me how to read the recipe and bake the cookie, but when we were done she would sit me down and read to me, with her finger tracking the words.  The end result is that I was reading at a grade four level on the first day of grade one.

Did having that kind of grandmother make me smarter or more gifted than another child who did not?  The authorities thought so.  Time and my first grade class have proven them wrong.

Expecting a four or five year old to measure up to any kind of fixed standard is moronic.  Only in an ivory tower can some tenured idiot expect uniformity of learning styles and opportunities.  Frankly, it pisses me off enormously just thinking about how some academic can take their pet theory out into the field and s***w children up for life in the name of progress.

They took me and my reading skills and skipped them to the third grade.  By puberty I was so out of place I developed neuroses years ahead of my time, and in addition to the social skills I did not learn were the issues of numeracy.  All that because some theorists got their hands on me.

I did well after I got away from formal educators, and at my elementary school reunion I discovered that the kids I left behind did well, too.

Who sets the standards for the standard setters?  Tell them for this "gifted" child that they should concentrate on things that have measurable absolutes and stay away from children.