Mother learns of literacy gap between U.S. and UK

That's my girl, I thought, as Olivia tore away from us to join the other 5-year-olds for circle time—legs crossed, hand stick-straight in the air in response to the teacher's question about how the kids spent Father's Day. My husband and I exchanged knowing glances, convinced she was a shoo-in for admission and left Olivia with her uniform-clad peers so we could tour the British prep school in the quaint red-brick Victorian building.

The e-mail came a week later. It asked us to please call the head teacher, the equivalent of a school principal in the United States. The head teacher and I exchanged pleasantries, and then she laid it out. My daughter, who commonly invokes the Mandarin word for little brother and usually wins at the game hangman, has a significant "learning gap" when compared with her British peers—especially in literacy. Dumbstruck, I said nothing at first and then started to protest. I took a deep breath and then remembered all I had heard about the differences between early education in the two countries.

Britain has a national curriculum with specific goals and schools there are rigorously inspected and evaluated. Most kids enter school at age four, instead of five as is the case in the United States, and pre-kindergarten programs tend to be more academic than in the United States. American programs are often more play-based than academically structured, and standards vary widely from state to state and between public and private settings. It's not an open-and-shut case as to whether one country's approach is better than another. Read more of this posting by Nancy Zuckerbrod for The Associated Press in The Niagara Falls Review online.