It’s just before lunch, and Payten Watkins-Carlson is heading to a Spanish lesson with her class. It’s her first day at Creme de la Creme, and the 3-year-old has already packed a lot into her morning.
It started with a great big gush of sobs when her mom waved goodbye, an image that left Karen Carlson with a slightly queasy feeling as she scanned a bank of closed-circuit TV screens for a glimpse of her daughter.
In computer class, Payten picked out Elmo software and worked on letter recognition. In the mirrored dance studio, she bounced to the music and tumbled on mats. With the art teacher, she made a fragrant collage from a pile of fresh flowers and gobs of glue. For storytime, she sat in a circle with her classmates at Coconut Theater, a bamboo enclave decorated with a giant jungle mural. Outside, there were pit stops at the Trike Garage and climbing gym.
But when it was time for Spanish, Payten took a pass. She sat down with a book about colors, tuning out specialist teacher Damary Cortes as she led a trio of other 3-year-olds in song: “Mi cabeza, mi cabeza (my head, my head).”
Payten is among the first children from the western suburbs to experience an elaborate–and controversial–new “mini-university” concept in preschool– espousing, in effect, that no child should ever be bored or unhappy. Creme de la Creme opened a $5 million facility last month in an office park just off Interstate Highway 88 in Warrenville, with room for more than 300 children in a location designed to capitalize on the boom of affluent families flocking to Naperville.
In the wake of the American Academy of Pediatrics recommendation that parents ban TV for children under 2, the subject of what is appropriate stimulation for young children is increasingly a subject of wide and heated debate.
While in the first case the suggestion is that TV dulls a child’s natural creative instincts, critics of programs like Creme say that virtual non-stop activity may distort a child’s natural learning rhythms.
The sheer extravagance of a center that more resembles a theme park than a preschool has inevitably provoked discussion.
“Instead of a typical day care where she just kind of plays, I wanted to give her a head start on her learning–more than what I had when I was a kid where I didn’t know anything until I went to kindergarten,” said Carlson, who works full-time for Andersen Consulting and commutes to Chicago from her home in Warrenville. “I was quite impressed. And she’s as happy as she could be.”
Dubbed a mini-university for the preschooler set, the 20,000- square-foot facility may sound like a school, but it looks like a theme park–with its Victorian streetscape and trout-filled brook, the tennis courts and water park, the hair salon and pint-size TV studio. Its precocious academic rigors stem from the “child-as-sponge” theory–that it is never too early to start soaking in new information, citing research that suggests the first five years are critical for brain development.
“If spoiling your children means too much fun, too much education, too much security, too much love, then OK, we’re spoiling our children,” said Creme’s president Bruce Karpas, who left a lucrative career as a pay-per-view TV executive to launch the Creme preschool vision nationwide.
“Where we’ve screwed up as a society is thinking that school starts at 6. If we can get parents to start valuing these first five years, we can change this ridiculous situation,” Karpas said.
While much has been made of Creme’s eye-popping opulence, what has child development experts howling is its fast-paced curriculum.
Every half hour, every child over age 2 shifts to a new activity with their primary teacher, a schedule that Creme officials insist is stimulating but one that early education experts say distorts a young child’s natural methods of learning.
“It doesn’t make sense developmentally. There are a lot of things children need to learn at this age, but it’s not all this academic stuff,” said David Elkind, a child development professor at Tufts University and the author of “Miseducation: Preschoolers at Risk.”
“They think they are giving the children a head start, but they’re teaching 3- and 4-year-olds like they are 7- and 8-year-olds. I’ve seen these kinds of programs come and go, and there’s no evidence any of this works.”
Elkind argues that such rigors are not only a waste of time, but they teach preschoolers a rote learning style that may hurt them in later grades. Still, he knows exactly why Creme will have no problem filling its classrooms.
“In today’s society, it’s no longer the car you drive or the house you live in. It’s what school your kid gets into–that’s the new status symbol,” he said. “There’s tremendous pressure on the kids and parents to succeed. But just because you have money, that’s no excuse for pouring it into stuff that’s no good for kids.”
Creme’s schedule does allow for down time–for snacks and naps, to dress up like a princess or make dinosaurs out of Play-Doh. And every child has a primary teacher, who gets to know the child’s style and can make adjustments based on personality and interests. A teacher is free to toss out the schedule if her charges are detoured by, say, a snowfall or a bulldozer parked outside, directors say.
The problem, experts say, is that the class schedule doesn’t regularly allow children to pursue their own interests at their own pace and independent of their classmates.
“The essence of an early education curriculum is play,” said Tom Layman, executive director of the Chicago Metropolitan Association for the Education of Young Children and a veteran with 29 years’ experience running child-care centers. He said he disagrees with the comparison of children to sponges, “which suggests a passive child and active adult.”
“In a good program, much of the activity is designed by the children. The building isn’t really the relevant point. The question is, do children have unstructured time where they can learn to express themselves and learn to create?”
Karpas has heard all the criticism before, the charges of hyperstimulation and the potshots at all the yuppie accoutrements. And for the most part, he dismisses it as naysaying from an industry too long accustomed to mediocrity.
“I’m not defensive about one thing we do here,” Karpas said. “There’s a lot of envy out there–I can’t afford it so I’ll knock it. We know not everyone can afford this. But what we want to do is raise the bar for what child care can be. The quality of child care in this country is despicable. I’ve seen some kennels that were nicer than some child-care centers.”
Despite its critics, Creme has proven wildly successful in Atlanta and Houston, where the concept was created almost 19 years ago. While there has never been a formal study of how children perform in school after they leave Creme, the school relies almost exclusively on word of mouth to fill its slots, Karpas said. If children were learning bad habits or having trouble adjusting to the comparably staid environment of grade school, the concept would have failed long ago.
Karpas is expecting similar success in the Chicago area, where there’s already a waiting list in some classrooms. He plans to open a second center somewhere in the northern suburbs next year.
Montessori School of Lisle is just down the road from Creme, but they couldn’t be more different in look and philosophy. The Montessori school is in a church basement, and its teachers don’t put much stock in rotating schedules or high-tech glitz. The school boasts a stable and well-paid staff, with all head teachers having been at the school for at least seven years. The philosophy behind the program is a century old, and the idea is to give all children ample time and freedom to pursue their own interests in a single classroom.
“It’s a very natural way for children to develop based on what’s inside of them,” said director Bonnie Gleespan. “Because (Creme) is a non-Montessori environment, it’s not something I’m at all threatened by.”
Kids Kampus in Naperville has lost a few families to Creme, who were drawn by the on-site enrichment programs and could afford the higher tuition.
But director Jackie Dudas said its center distinguishes itself by keeping staff ratios lower than state standards and requiring that all lead teachers have education degrees.
Creme is expensive, but not outrageously so. The full-time tuition for infants is about $1,200 a month, but part-time spots are available for older preschoolers starting at $345 a month.
Karpas said their strategy was to set tuition at about $200 more per month than the highest-priced centers in the market, with the idea that parents will be motivated to scrape together an extra $50 a week if they like what they see. And he argues he could charge twice as much for the program and still fill up the place.
“When you consider all the extras, it’s such a small price to pay,” said Mandra Warzecha, a Naperville mom whose 3-year-old daughter Faith came to Creme from a home day care. “I’m a little worried about what she’s going to do when she gets to grade school. But I’d rather have her with all that extra stuff than be stuck in one room all day. I just want her to learn all she can.”
For parents, it’s easy to get swept up by all those extras.
The security is impressive–an armed guard at the entrance, a computerized entry system customized for each family and a bank of 20 closed-circuit TV screens that reveals what is happening in every classroom and activity area in and outside the building.
There are conveniences parents crave–a outdoor “cabana” that offers free after-school treats, a worksheet that details every nuance of each child’s day, a store where parents can buy last-minute birthday party gifts and the uniforms their children wear every day but Friday.
Parents notice all the extras, but it’s not what they talk about when asked what drew them to Creme. It comes back to the curriculum and the teachers, who are paid about $10 an hour (a third more than the industry standard) and required to pursue at least 20 hours of additional training every year.
It’s too early to gauge the teacher turnover rate–an important measure of a center’s quality–but Karpas is confident Creme will have no problem holding onto its committed teachers, given the higher pay and more prestigious working conditions. The average turnover for a child-care center is 31 percent of the staff every year, according to statistics by the National Association for the Education of Young Children.
“In all of Illinois, no one has put this much energy into little kids,” said Keri Borkowicz, Creme’s art teacher and a parent of 2 1/2-year-old Creme student Kassidy. “I wouldn’t send my daughter anyplace else. As a parent, you want the best for your kids. It’s weird that everyone is so skeptical. I guess it’s because it’s something new.”
Professor Lilian Katz is willing to keep her skepticism at bay, even though she finds Creme’s curriculum questionable and its name “revolting.”
“So much day care is of such low quality that we have to be open to new ideas,” said Katz, a director at an early childhood education research program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “If these people are committed to getting quality teachers and paying them well and training them properly, then we should give it a chance.”
