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Maple River Education Coalition PAC
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Minnesota Baby Ed Alert, Part II

1.  Early Screening
2   Universal Mental Health Screening for Kids
3.  A Package Deal

[This is the 2nd part of our Baby Ed Alert. See Minnesota Baby Ed Alert, Part I for the Minnesota Early Learning Standards.]


1. Early Screening
Preschool screening is not just about numbers, letters and vision tests. The new Early Learning Standards (called the Early Childhood Indicators of Progress -- see Part I) will set the standards for early screening. This means that the state will be testing our kids beginning at 3 for state "social and emotional" outcomes. They will also test for mental health.

SF 906:

• Expands the state assessments from being mandatory for entrance into public kindergarten to being mandatory at age three. Because all childcare centers will have to comply with this, the mandate is extended to children who do not or will not attend public schools;
• Creates "community outreach plans" so all children will be screened by age three;
• Sets up goals toward getting all kids screened early and requires reports on progress toward those goals.

Early screening is already invasive. Does your family smoke? Drink? Own a gun? Do drugs? Is your home "unsafe"? Is your child "overly friendly"? Timid? Clingy? Distracted? Can't sit still? Early screening is asking these questions and more.

Is this what we want state government doing to families? Add the new Early Learning Standards, mental health screening, expanded data collection and permanent records, and we have a massive and expensive new invasion of government into the authority and privacy of families.

Two other bills add bribes to school districts to screen kids early -- the younger they are, the more state money a district receives! One of the bills also assigns a state tracking number to our little ones when they are screened, requires development assessments at the beginning and end of school readiness programs (based on the new Early Learning Standards), and makes the assessments part of the child's permanent record.

2  Universal Mental Health Screening for Minnesota Kids 
A powerful and well-funded lobby that includes the pharmaceutical industry intends to include mental health screening in the Early Learning screening. The Surgeon General’s Report on Mental Health, 1999, showed how difficult it is to accurately diagnose young children when it stated:

“The science is challenging because of the ongoing process of development. The normally developing child hardly stays the same long enough to make stable measurements.  Adult criteria for illness can be difficult to apply to children and adolescents, when the signs and symptoms of mental disorders are often also the characteristics of normal development.”

Mental health screening for young children is one of the recommendations from the controversial New Freedom Commission on Mental Health's (NFC) to the Governors of the states. The pharmaceutical industry had enormous influence on the treatment recommendations in the NFC report. EdWatch has written extensively on the problems related to mandatory mental health screening for young children, which leads to frequent misdiagnoses, inaccurate labelling, and an increase in drugging of our youngest children. It is also subject to abuse and misuse through identifying particular political philosophies as hallmarks of mental illness. (See "Myths and Facts," p. 3)

For more information on this subject, click here or here, or order our Mental Health Screening Briefing Book with articles, a CD-rom with those articles, a Power Point presentation, and excepts from a radio debate between Dr. Effrem and a member of the New Freedom Commission.

SF 1365 / HF 1513 adds mental health screening to the early childhood screening. SF 1365 will be heard in the Senate during the week of March 21st.

SF 905 links early learning to public health services and attempts visits to the homes of all poor families with children from ages 0 - 3. It ties child mental health to definitions of "school readiness" and extends school readiness outreach to families with children 0 - 5. It inserts itself into families everywhere --  at all welfare service locations, home visits, doctors, child care, foster care services, shelters, nurseries, and more. Do you get the picture?

3. A Package Deal
The pieces of this massive system are a package that is broken into many smaller parts. A single bill of the entire package could not pass the legislature. Farming out pieces to individual legislators brings more authors on board, because, individually, the pieces may appear innocuous. Some of the authors of these bills are not necessarily advocates of creating a massive new state bureaucracy to oversee a system to raise the children in Minnesota. However, that is exactly what this package is. Every piece is an important link.

Ready 4 K, for example, states on its website that theirs is a "comprehensive plan for early childhood care and education... A Five Year Plan. The R4K 2005 Legislative Agenda is the first stage for putting in place elements for an effective, coordinated early care and education system." Their legislative agenda includes every bill we are describing.

One goal listed on their website and not yet included in any current legislation, but which they obviously intend to add, is the following:

"Establish a new definition for child care which affirms that children are learning in all settings."

In other words, even homes would be defined as "child care," opening them up to government regulation.

False Early Childhood Crisis:
There is no kindergarten readiness crisis in Minnesota or nationally.
There is not anywhere close to solid agreement on what skills and characteristics constitute kindergarten readiness. There are, however, large, well-done studies that belie the statements by those with a vested financial and power interest in creating a false crisis that can only be fixed with another government program.

Commissioner of Education, Alice Seagren, wrote in the Pioneer Press last month that the multi-million dollar advertising campaign now in full swing in Minnesota to scare the public about a "crisis" misrepresents the studies they are using as the basis for their claims. "They [the studies] did not brand some students ready or not ready for kindergarten," she emphatically stated. She knows, because the studies they reference are from the Minnesota Department of Education.

Yet Ready 4 K, the well-heeled non-profit group that stands to profit handsomely from the expansion of government into childcare, continues its radio and newspaper ads unabated, even in a promotional video that they presented to a Senate sub-committee this month. Their school readiness data is false!

The federal National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) reported in their long-term, well done study of more than 22,000 children, "America’s Kindergartners," February, 2000 that:
•94% are proficient at recognizing numbers, shapes, and counting to ten
•92% are eager to learn
•97% are in good health
•82% basic pre-literacy skills such as knowing that print is read from left to right. 

Many legislators will point to the difficult situations, the most needy and uncared for children who require government intervention. Those concerns are valid, but they cannot explain the creation of this new government system that encompasses all Minnesota's children. The Early Learning standards will set the foundation for credentialing, training, rating private child care centers, and assessing every child at age three. In this case, the hard cases are simply being used by advocates of universal government managed early care as cover.

Minnesota can stop this if we choose to. It's up to us.

Next:  Minnesota Baby Ed Alert, Part III
          What to do

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