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You may have been laughing when Donald Trump responded to word of possible Russian involvement in DNC hacks by joking that the country should hack Hillary Clinton’s email server, but some House Democrats are taking it very seriously. Representatives…

I remember few details from kindergarten: a giant slide in the middle of our classroom, a mid-year visit by Smokey the Bear, the gentle voice and red hair of my teacher.

Kindergarten was its own little world within the school — a nurturing cocoon — with its own special playground, its own tiny buses, its own half-day schedule.

This spring when my son’s wonderful teacher recommended an additional year of preschool for him, instead of advancing with the rest of his class to kindergarten, I didn’t panic. After all, the school he was attending was small and academically challenging, and I understood he might not be ready for its particular standards. The teacher’s concerns — that he had trouble writing his letters, didn’t focus all the time in class, didn’t answer questions about literature with enough detail — didn’t worry me much. He was four. Just a little boy who liked garbage trucks and Sesame Street. We were moving to the suburbs anyway, and I figured my son would do just fine at our local public school, where he would spend his days listening to stories, playing in sandboxes, making friends, and learning the basic routines of classroom life.

My son would probably do just fine in public school kindergarten, but only if he could go back in time and attend kindergarten in 1980, not 2016.

Months after this conversation with his teacher, I realized that my son would probably do just fine in public school kindergarten, but only if he could go back in time and attend kindergarten in 1980, not 2016.

My son is not ready for kindergarten in 2016.

Kindergarten — which means “garden for children” in German — is not kindergarten anymore. It’s yesterday’s first grade, or even second. Kindergarten’s academic standards are dramatically more rigorous than even a decade ago (“find textual evidence”; “read texts with purpose and understanding”; “distinguish between similarly spelled words by identifying the sounds of the letters that differ”).

A 2014 study from the University of Virginia compared kindergarten teachers’ expectations for their students in 1998 to today. The differences were striking. In 1998, 31 percent of teachers thought that kindergarten students should be able to read by the end of the year. By 2014, that figure is now about 80 percent. More than a third more kindergarten teachers now think that kids should enter school already knowing the alphabet and how to hold a pencil.

In 2014, about three-quarters of kids in kindergarten took at least one standardized test. In 1998, the researchers didn’t even bother asking that question on the survey. Overall, the researchers found huge decreases in the amount of self-directed, creative play time — dress up, art, sand and water play — and increases in the amount of time students were involved in teacher-directed, whole-class instruction.

I have a doctorate in educational development and policy, and in graduate school, as the Common Core standards were being developed, I was a passionate champion of higher, common standards for our nation’s students. Yet I took it for granted that the standards would be determined by experts in each age range to be developmentally appropriate.

Unfortunately, the Common Core academic standards for the younger grades were not written by early childhood professionals or scholars. Of the 135 people on the committees that wrote and reviewed the Common Core Standards, not one of them was an early childhood teacher or early child development expert.

Of the 135 people on the committees that wrote and reviewed the Common Core Standards, not one of them was an early childhood teacher or early child development expert.

Kindergarten today ignores a basic fact of young children’s development that is well-known by early childhood educators: normal development in young children occurs at very different rates and in very different ways. For example, the average age that a baby starts to walk is 12 months, but some kids start walking at eight or nine months and others (like my toddler daughter) at 15, or even 16, months. Some may crawl before they walk; some–like my daughter–skip crawling altogether. My daughter is now 19 months old and walks just as proficiently as the other toddlers in her class who learned to walk several months before she did.

Similarly, the average age that a child learns to be an independent reader is about six and a half. Some learn to read at four, and others at seven, and both extremes are developmentally normal. In fourth grade, kids who learned to read at four are typically not any better at reading than those who started at seven. Countries like Finland and Sweden, which outpace the United States in international testing, do not even start formal academic schooling until age seven.

We need to respect children’s individual developmental timelines. The idea that “earlier is better” for reading instruction is simply not supported by research evidence. Children’s long-term achievement and self-identities as readers and students can be damaged when they are introduced to reading and literacy too early.

Where does that leave my family? I’m sad that my son won’t experience kindergarten as a gentle transition into the rhythms of school, as a space primarily for exploration and play, and as a place where building strong relationships with adults and other children is the primary annual goal. I’m sad that our culture of testing and assessment has moved down to even the youngest grades.

And I’m angry. I’m angry that in kindergarten he may be expected to meet standards that are not developmentally appropriate for him. I’m angry that our educational system ignores what research and evidence from other countries tells us is best for our children’s emotional, social and academic lives.

I want to protect my son’s childhood, and I want him to grow and learn at his own pace. Increasingly, the early grades of our country’s public schools are not the place for kids like him — kids who are not ready at five to become “proficient” readers and writers — to thrive.

Jessica Smock is a writer, editor, former educator, and a mom to a five year old son and a toddler daughter. She has a doctorate in development and educational policy from Boston University. This fall her son will attend a Waldorf school, at which literary instruction does not begin until first grade.

A version of this post originally appeared on Motherwell.

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Moving is the worst. And the best. It can signal a fresh start or a devastating end. Whatever your style, wherever you settle, at the end of the day, the most important thing is finding a place to call home. Check out more from our “Get The F Out” moving package here.

I have never been in love with a person, but when I am asked to explain my relationship with New York City, I often find myself relying on the language of romance. “It just feels like it’s meant to be,” I’ll say, starry-eyed. And, like many great love stories, it almost didn’t happen.

In 2013, I was running from two things: a customer-service job I hated, and a city where I was horribly lonely. I had moved to Boston only eight months before, looking for a new start. It only took the fading of a gorgeous New England summer into a dark, long New England winter to realize I’d miscalculated my grand life relaunch. I didn’t know where else to go, and while I daydreamed of moving to New York, I also entertained the ideas of taking up organic farming in New Zealand, going to grad school in California, or following in the footsteps of my fellow millennials and just moving home for a few months to plan my next moves.

I decided to take the plunge after two casual conversations. The first was with my mom. We met up in New York City one freezing long weekend in February. At our first dinner, after squeezing ourselves into a booth at a ramen place in the East Village, I confessed that I was thinking of leaving Boston for Manhattan, even though I didn’t have much of a plan. My mom first fell in love with New York in the ’80s, when she would visit college friends who shared a grimy one-bedroom just blocks from where we now split $8 Tsingtaos while trying to converse over the thumping bass of old-school hip-hop. Giddy off the energy of the city (and one too many overpriced beers), she listened to my complaints and didn’t hesitate in offering advice. She asked me how many people I knew in the city, and after I hit double digits, she interrupted me.

“You should do it. You should move here,” she told me. “If you know that many people, I think that’s a good enough start.” We didn’t talk about particulars, but I knew that I’d have my parents’ support, both financial and emotional, to get started.

A month later, I was once again complaining about life in Boston, this time to my friend Jon on Gchat. “Should I just quit my job and move to New York?”

“Do it!” he urged. “You can crash at my place!” In the thick of his first serious relationship, he had more or less moved into his boyfriend’s apartment, leaving his Williamsburg bedroom unoccupied for weeks at a time.

A few days later, I gchatted him with the news, “Jon! I quit my job. I’m moving into your place in three weeks.”

“Wait, really???? You did?”
Realizing too late that his offer had been more theoretical than real, I dug in my heels. “What’s a fair rent to pay you? Half your monthly rent?”

The next day, I listed my apartment and all my furniture on Craigslist. Within a week, I had a subletter, a recent Brown grad who came by with his parents and took over the lease on the spot. Less than a month later, in April 2013, I packed my remaining possessions and my cat into a rental minivan and headed for New York. I put everything except two weeks’ worth of clothes (and Pickles the cat) into a storage unit in East Harlem, paying the signing fees with my leftover Christmas money. Despite not having a full-time job or a permanent address, I was on my way.
I used to tell people the idea of moving to New York had never occurred to me before that miserable winter in Boston, and it was a lie I believed for a long time. After college, a solid number of my friends decamped from Philadelphia to move to New York, which baffled me. I found NYC to be too confusing and big; I had difficulty remembering if it was the avenues or streets that ran north to south. I wanted to stay in Philadelphia, where I had gone to college, or eventually move back home to Tennessee. Boston, a hail-Mary pass for post-grad satisfaction, felt crazy enough. Never in my post-college daydreams did New York seem like a possibility.

But then, nearly a year after moving here, on a gray March day, walking through the lingering snow slush, I suddenly remembered, apropos of nothing, that I had always wanted to move here. My mother, in an attempt to get me out of the house and out of her hair during a slow summer, had enrolled me in a musical theater camp. Even though the camp was in Chatanooga, it began a one-sided romance with New York that lasted until I realized I absolutely couldn’t sing (at around age 14). Because once I knew I loved Broadway musicals, that meant I loved Broadway, which meant I wanted to be on Broadway. Thanks to Rent, I even thought I’d do well crashing as an artist in a condemned warehouse. I wrote songs about my big-city dreams — songs that (bless them) only live in my memory. Then I grew up, and the New York of my adolescent ideals faded until it never felt real in the first place. Nowhere is that magical.

Except, for twentysomething me, it is. There aren’t choreographed dance numbers, or meet-cutes with Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, but after living here for three years, New York still feels like a miracle. It’s like one day I realized I could actually slip through the Looking Glass.

When I first arrived, everything felt so much more alive than anywhere else I’d lived before: riding the subway, or jostling through crowds at Union Square. Even being inside took on new meaning. I would be at home– which, really, could have been an apartment anywhere — and I would think, with a shock: New York City is outside! I reveled in those surprising moments of quiet, like watching the yellow cabs barreling up Lexington Avenue at 1 a.m., and it felt like I had found a secret that only New York and I knew.

Everything that made my heart swell into my throat was totally banal: foliage in Central Park, or dollar pizza slices when I was broke. I still crane to see the Statue of Liberty whenever the B train goes over the bridge into Brooklyn. I stop every time I can see the Empire State Building, thinking about people who have traveled from around the world to visit the top, and I just get to see it as I’m making my way out of Duane Reade with a Diet Coke and new tube of toothpaste.

One day, leaving a street fair on the Lower East Side, I found a canvas pouch with block letters that read “New York Is My Boyfriend.” I knew I had to buy it immediately. I love showing it to people — it’s almost a litmus test when I meet new friends — true New Yorkers just get it. But the real question I have now is this: Is New York my husband? Am I committed to this city for life?

It was a crush that drew me to New York. I moved not so much because I wanted to be in this city, but because I needed to leave the bad relationship I was having with Boston. If you asked me then, I would have said NYC would be home for the next two or three years, five max. Now, I’m three years in, and the idea of leaving in two years makes me feel queasy. I can’t imagine being satisfied — the city is too big, and there’s still so much to do.

Like any romantically involved couple, New York City and I have a few things to work on. At the height of the summer — with the crazy heat and terrible smells — I take every chance to escape for a weekend. But when my plane lands on the return flight, my stomach does flips when I see the skyline. I am home, reunited with my one true love.

By: Marshall Bright

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For years, I’ve said that when it comes to the challenge of fighting climate change, we will need every tool available to reduce carbon pollution and create opportunities for new clean energy technology.

Yet, despite a world that demands more carbon-free energy – not less – public policies have left some of the tools in the toolbox. Until now.

In August, with the help of Governor Andrew Cuomo’s leadership, the New York State PSC took unprecedented action in passing a Clean Energy Standard that, in addition to ensuring ample opportunity for more wind, solar, and energy efficiency, recognizes the important role of existing carbon-free nuclear power. This is a game-changer: never before has nuclear received economic credit for its environmental benefits.

New York State is now the first government to include nuclear in its clean energy policy, providing a mechanism that will help keep New York’s nuclear energy plants open. In the wake of an energy market that did not previously adequately value this power, the state faced the very real prospect of having these plants shut down.

The consequences of these shutdowns would have been dire, as New York’s existing nuclear power plants provide the majority of its carbon-free power. In fact, New York’s nuclear plants provide 61 percent of the state’s emission-free electricity and avoid 26 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually, equating to a societal value of almost $1.2 billion annually based on federal estimates.

Not only does New York recognize that meeting its own carbon reduction targets would be impossible without nuclear, achieving the carbon pollution reductions set forth in the federal Clean Power Plan would become virtually impossible in the near term. Any premature nuclear plant shutdown would represent a setback in the state reaching its clean energy goals.

The same goes for states across the country, where nuclear is the source of the bulk of our carbon-free power today. For example, in the case of the closure of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in late 2014, the plant’s output was replaced by natural gas-fired generators, which produced an additional 3.1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in New England in 2015.

And, a recent report issued by Bloomberg New Energy Finance found that if currently unprofitable nuclear energy plants were to shut down and were replaced with gas-fired generators, there would be an increase of 200 million tons of carbon pollution from power plants every year.

Across the country, a number of other states face the prospects of premature nuclear plant shutdowns, threatening our position as a clean energy leader. The timing couldn’t be worse. The ten hottest years on record have all occurred since 1998. More carbon pollution will only exacerbate the problem.

Now more than ever, states should look to New York as a model as to how they can fairly value all forms of clean energy for their carbon free attributes.

Last month’s news represents a meaningful step in the fight against climate change that will impact our energy policy outlook for decades to come. This is a worthwhile cause that Governor Cuomo should be acknowledged for undertaking, not only for the sake of cleaner air, but for establishing a common sense and fair policy of recognition for nuclear that ensures that nuclear power remains a vital component of our clean energy strategy for years to come.

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