I began this article with great interest; it basically describes DD's school. However, I didn't get very much out of it in the end. It seemed scattered.

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“In the gifted classrooms that I’ve been in, the majority of kids are reading at grade level or beyond, and they can write well, and then so much time is not spent on basic skills so they can spend more time on content and on comparing historical eras,” Professor Folsom said. “They are then able to do the more deep thinking work because less time has to be spent on the fundamental skills.”

This is absolutely accurate at her school. They don't need to spend the time on drilling and repetition; as a result, the kids get "more" in a lot of ways. Honestly, this is a huge advantage of the school for us. I'm not sure how you make this problem go away.

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“The only way it even conceivably can work is to give young poor kids the same sort of boost up that young affluent kids get, which is to make sure these kids get an excellent preschool education, make sure these kids get tutoring, make sure these parents know at what time in the circuit they are supposed to prepare their kids for what. And that is taking on a much larger task than tinkering with a test.”

I actually agree with this. Early childhood education is so important, but it's underfunded and the quality is incredibly uneven. DS is in a program this year where the teachers are obviously trained and they really work on these basic skills in depth. It's too easy for him, but he doesn't care and I see the value of it to the other kids. The program my DD was in was very different--great on creativity, but I don't think they got the skills that are being reinforced at DS's school. The kids mostly ptobably didn't need it, though.

Part of the problem with preschools is that different populations need different kinds of preschool. Kids from advantaged backgrounds don't need counting and letter activities...thay have that already, and in fact it may burn them out. Other kids desperately need to be brought to the same level these wealthier kids will already be at when they start K.