On her time at Beaver …
It certainly is a place and a time in my life that is very influential for me. It definitely has impacted the work that I do now and, really, my whole life. I was lucky enough to have amazing teachers, including Mr. McCarthy, who just passed away recently, as well as Bea Kleppner who is a bit of an icon. She taught a class when I was there which was an anthropology class. As a student in 1976 or 1975, that was pretty unusual, pretty progressive. I ended up majoring in anthropology at Stanford and it was kind of as a result of her. I ended up living overseas and teaching English to doctors and nurses for two years and also worked for OxFam when I was a student at Stanford.

The other thing that I talk about a lot to people is that Beaver had just gone co-ed a few years beforehand, so it was still mostly women. At the time, Beaver was like 75% Jewish and 25% African-American and then just a few of us who were not one of those two categories, so for somebody like me, it was pretty unusual. Of course, I didn’t know anything, so I thought most of the world was like that. When I got to Stanford I was like, “Wait, where are all the people who are different than I am?” Again, influencing my anthropology. I continued to explore that, going overseas and working with different cultures.

On founding All Five …
The program that I started, All Five, comes from being in early childhood education for most of my adult life and seeing that children, when we know that their brains develop at a faster rate than at any other point in a person’s life, were being treated really differently just because of their socioeconomic background, even more so than because of their race, in our community. I worked for Head Start and some other low-income programs and I saw experienced teaching that was very didactic and directed, very much telling children what to do, not asking them questions. And we know from research that asking even young children questions is the way to get them to start thinking, for their cognitive skills to develop, and for their speech and language skills to develop.

If you’re telling children what to do, you’re not providing them with the opportunity to actually talk. That’s something that we see a lot these days is low-income children who don’t have the speech skills. There’s lots of reasons for that but one of them is because they’re being told what to do rather than being asked an open-ended question that provides them with an opportunity to give an answer.

“If you’re telling children what to do, you’re not providing them with the opportunity to actually talk.”

– Carol Thomsen ’77

On equity in education…
Children in high-income communities were being treated to the latest research. These were the children of the young faculty members at Stanford who were studying for their PhDs at Stanford, so these were families that were already well-situated to have their children be successful. I just thought that it was really unfair that children who needed it the most were not given what they mostly needed at the most crucial time in their lives and children who really would be fine in any case were being given the Cadillac of education.

I started the All Five program to address that, and the way that I decided to do it was that 50% of the children and families who go to All Five come from low-income backgrounds and that’s based on a requirement by the state. We have a state reimbursement contract with those families, so they have to qualify according to the reimbursement matrix. These are all working families, but they’re all low-income families. And then 25% come from middle-income families, and these are families that in California are making just over $100k a yea. While that may seem like a lot, for a family of four [in the Bay Area] it certainly isn’t wealthy and it really is that middle income pack. These are teachers and people like that who are just not able to pay the full cost of full-time year-round care, but also deserve that for their children, just as everybody else does. And then 25% of the families pay the full cost of our program. We have those people and don’t give all of our slots to low- or middle-income families because the high-income families are really our accountability. The belief is that if our program isn’t good enough for some people who pay and can actually afford to do that, if they don’t want to come here, then our program isn’t good enough for anybody. So we really try hard, and have been successful so far, in having a waiting list of those high-income families as well as a waiting list of the middle- and low-income families. That’s how our program sort of shows that it is of the highest quality. The cost of early care and education is extremely high because ratios have to be high. It’s a very people-intensive business model, so the cost of our program is currently $2,200 per month for full-time, year-round care. We’re open 10 hours a day, 50 weeks per year. We’ve been open for four years.

On Beaver’s influence on her educational philosophy…
Beaver was and continues to be a very progressive program, and my overall education philosophy tends to be very progressive. I think that one of the things I know from Beaver is that even though I wasn’t a traditional learner, Beaver’s teachers helped me figure out my strengths and how to use those to work in the areas where maybe I wasn’t as strong. For instance, I don’t have a very strong memory, but they helped me to find ways to overcome that and highlight other areas. I feel like that is a crucial piece of how to help very young children develop and discover who they are. Not to focus on their weaknesses or challenges, but a strength-based approach. I think that Beaver gave that to me and I carry that with me in my approach to children.

As you can imagine, many of the children and families that we serve come from challenging backgrounds because of their socio-economic status, often also because of their immigration status. It’s easy for some people to label children with challenging behavior who come from situations like that. One of the things we strive to do here is to focus on the children’s strengths, these families’ strengths, and how we can harness that to bring them to the next level. I was privileged to experience that in my own life at Beaver.

On her current focus as a school leader…
In early childhood education, one of the most progressive ways to practice with young children, whether it’s in a year-round program or a full-day program or part-day program, is using a model called emergent curriculum. It’s actually an organically-grown model, but it’s somewhat based on more trendy terms such as Reggio, an approach that was founded in Italy based on children’s interests and what children want to do. We call ourselves an emergent curriculum model because we want to find out what are the children’s interests and what is it that’s going to ignite their interests. What’s going to bring them together to find and use those interests to teach them and guide them to recognize and honor their own curiosity? Even if they have a challenging circumstance, even if they’re not talking and they’re already four years old, there’s a way to get in and find what that child is interested in and then use that to expand and learn more.

On an old Beaver friend…
I was just recently thinking about one of my closest friends from Beaver, Reggie Brothers, who has worked for the Department of State for a long time. He and I were the Master and Mistress of Ceremonies at Beaver because there were not enough girls and boys together to have a junior/senior prom so we had a junior/senior banquet and he and I were Master and Mistress of Ceremonies. We couldn’t figure out what kind of hook to use for our program or schtick, so at the very last minute, we decided to switch clothes. He wore my long dress and I wore his suit. I still have a picture of that that I’ve been meaning to send him. He’s gone on to do some pretty extraordinary things and we’re still in touch.