Bowing to the pressure from the school district and from disgruntled parents, the teachers at the parent cooperative recently started handing out weekly homework assignments to the four-year-olds. This was by no means unique for this preschool, just a symptom of a national trend of putting more and more pressure on three- and four-year-olds to learn academic facts. If kindergarten was the new first grade, as some educators claimed, it certainly seemed like preschool had become the new kindergarten.
