At Hamilton Elementary School in Northeast Baltimore, Jennifer Naughten's pre-kindergarten class of 4-year-olds is seated on the floor in an attentive semicircle.
The class is discussing a previous day's outing to the Maryland Science Center. Later, they will draw pictures of what they saw for their parents.
"Who remembers what type of animals we saw?" asks Mrs. Naughten, in warm, encouraging tones reminiscent of "Miss Nancy" and "Miss Sally." "Nathaniel? Do you remember an animal we saw yesterday?"
Nathaniel screws up his face in fierce concentration.
"A turtle?" he offers.
"Good!" exclaims Mrs. Naughten, clapping her hands. "And how did the shell on the turtle feel?"
Nathaniel looks puzzled for a moment, then shrugs. "It felt fine," he says.
Mrs. Naughten smiles. "I know it felt fine," she agrees. "But did it also feel hard or soft?"
"Oh," says Nathaniel. "It felt hard."
Children -- 3- and 4-year-olds -- are cute. No doubt about it. They are clever, energetic, and always eager to learn, and it used to be that parents kept them close to home until they reached kindergarten or first grade.
But that's rapidly changing.
Twenty-five years ago, only about 10 percent of the nation's 3- and 4- year olds attended school. By last year, that had quadrupled to over 40 percent. And by 1995, most educators expect the percentage to multiply yet again.
"In the 1989-1990 school year, public schools enrolled over 1 million 3- and 4-year olds for the first time in our nation's history," said Samuel G. Sava, executive director of the National Association of Elementary School Principals.
"As you can see," he continued, "this is a whole new role for the public school system and it is coming about because of some major changes taking place in our society: the increasing divorce rate, the increase in mothers in the work force."
In Maryland, the percentages and numbers of youngsters attending either a public or private preschool program are even higher.
State officials estimate that nearly 65 percent of all kindergartners last year had attended a preschool program.
"We're seeing more and more parents seeking some sort opreschool experience for their children," said JoAnne L. Carter of the state board of education's early childhood education office.
"And public schools are responding to that need. It is," she said, "just one more way the public schools are trying to serve the family."
"Census figures indicate that 77 percent of the Maryland children under 12 years old had mothers in the labor force," noted Janet Singerman, deputy director of the Maryland Commission for Children.
"That's an estimated 588,157 children under 12 with working mothers," she continued. "Now, we have found, anecdotally, that about 40 percent opt out of formalized care. Still, the need, the demand, obviously is great."
Noted Meg McFadden, a licensed day care provider in the city, "Even those few parents who are home with their children during the day find that there's no one else at home for their children to play with. They find they have to go out of their way to find playmates, and eventually many of them also start looking for a preschool program."
But the demand for preschool training is one thing. More importantly, educators are convinced such programs also benefit the child.
In fact, there appears to be near-unanimity among educators on the importance and benefits of pre-kindergarten programs -- which is startling enough in a field in which there seems to be as many philosophical approaches as there as PhDs and M.A.s.
"Developmentally appropriate early childhood education has been demonstrated since 1886 to be good for little children," said Sandy Skolnick, director of the Maryland Commission for Children.
Perhaps even more surprising is that public officials at the national, the state, and the local level also support the concept.
Last year, the president's education summit proclaimed that by the year 2000 all children will enter kindergarten or the first grade "ready to learn." The main vehicle toward achieving this national goal would be through quality preschool programs funded federally by Head Start or Chapter One and by state and local governments.
"It is one of our highest of highest priorities -- getting youngsters into quality programs," said Joseph L. Schilling, state superintendent of schools.
"There is too much solid information about the value of such programs for us not to be doing this," Dr. Schilling continued.
In its on-going study of the long-term effects of the state-funded pre-kindergarten program, the department of education found that pre-K graduates averaged up to 13 months ahead of their peers on standardized achievement tests when they reached the eighth grade. They were less likely to be retained in grade, and less likely to drop out. Fewer pre-K students were referred to special education programs in later years compared to their peers who did not participate in a pre-kindergarten program.
"So in fact," Dr. Schilling said, "it is almost criminal for us not to be doing this."
But there is a vast difference between the ideal and the reality.
The ideal is that parents want and need such programs, educators agree that children benefit from them, and public officials on each level of government -- the national, state and local -- have vowed to provide them.
But the reality is that money for new programs is scarce and is expected to get even more so, and those children from low-income families who might benefit most from a quality preschool experience are among those least likely to receive it.
And even when public officials set up programs -- with all of the best of intentions -- the actual implementation sometimes falls far short of the kind of quality early educational experience disadvantaged children need.
First, there's the question of money: "The good news," said Dr. Schilling, "is that we've more than doubled the number of pre-K sites over the past five years.
"But the bad news," he acknowledged, "is even with that, we're only halfway home. We estimate that we're only reaching about half of those disadvantaged children who would benefit most from a pre-K experience."
The state funds 162 sites in 23 of the state's 24 jurisdictions. Howard County opted not to participate in the pre-kindergarten program because of space problems.
This winter, the state asked the legislature for an additional $6.6 million to open 111 more sites by this September. They didn't get it.
State officials noted in a recent report that "preschool is least available to those who need it most -- poor children in general and poor minority children in particular."
In fact, a 1987 study by the Children's Defense Fund found that 67 percent of 4-year-olds coming from middle-class families were enrolled in a preschool program. In contrast, only 33 percent of the children living in poor families attended preschool.
Baltimore City illustrates the problem.
In the city, preschool programs are available through three different funding sources: the federally funded Chapter One and Head Start programs, and the state-funded Extended Elementary Prekindergarten Program.
In all, said Charlene Cooper Boston, assistant superintendent in charge of special projects for city schools, 105 of the city's 122 elementary schools have some type of pre-kindergarten program. Some 5,000 kids participate, or about half of the pre-kindergarten population.
Dr. Boston noted that many of the children who were not being served belonged to families that fell in an income gap. They were not affluent enough to pay for a private preschool program yet were not poor enough to live in communities that qualified for Chapter One or Head Start funding.
In addition, Dr. Boston said, many working mothers who would otherwise qualify choose not to put their children in pre-kindergarten programs because they are only two and a half hours, creating a day care problem.
Perhaps an even bigger problem than the lack of funding for expansion of pre-kindergarten programs is the question of the quality of the ones that already exist.
Educators say that quality pre-kindergarten programs must be "developmentally appropriate" to 3- and 4-year-olds -- meaning that children do their learning by directed play. They say that the curriculum should be "child-centered," focusing on the natural interests of the child, rather than dominated by the teacher.
"A lot of people believe that all you need do is water down the first-grade curriculum, and that the earlier you expose them to reading, writing and arithmetic, the better. Well, that is absolutely false," said Dr. Sava, of the National Association of Elementary School Principals.
"The big element in a good program is choice," said Amy Bloom Connolly, a trainer coordinator with the Maryland Committee for Children, as she observed a pre-kindergarten program at a private school in Baltimore County.
As Mrs. Connolly watched, the children were allowed to gravitate toward one of several play areas and choose their own games. The classroom teacher and her assistant went from group to group to focus the play around the theme of animals and Noah's Ark, encouraging each child to talk about their game.
"You'll also notice that this is a very long play period. That is another mark of a good, developmentally appropriate program, because that's how children learn, through play," observed Mrs. Connolly.
"In what we would consider an inappropriate program, you see the teachers most concerned with keeping order, discipline. You see the activities centered around the adult -- for instance, the teacher telling the children what to do. Or the teacher drilling the child, with very little interaction. You see a greater use of dittos and work sheets. You see a great emphasis on a set curriculum and an emphasis on testing, on accountability.
"What children learn," continued Mrs. Connolly, "is that school is boring. Everybody is yelling at me, and I'm no good. You end up training children for failure."