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EdAction
Maple River Education Coalition PAC
105 Peavey Rd, St 116
Chaska, MN
55318
952-361-4931
http://www.EdAction.org
E-mail
March 14, 2005
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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