Stop Choosing a Preschool by Its Curriculum

Montessori. Reggio. Play-based. Academic. Most parents start the preschool search by comparing the names on the door. Those names tell you something real. They just don’t tell you the thing that matters most.

It usually happens around the third preschool tour.

The first school tells you it is Montessori. The second talks about Reggio Emilia and child-led exploration, the third describes itself as play-based, and by the fourth someone is explaining a proprietary curriculum with an impressive name.

By the end of the week, a parent who simply wanted a good place for a three-year-old has become an amateur expert in comparative education.

Which approach is best? Is Montessori too structured? Is play-based structured enough? Should a four-year-old already be reading?

These are fair questions. I asked all of them. I also had a spreadsheet.

I should say plainly that I have a stake in the answer, because I founded a Montessori-inspired school. Discount what follows accordingly, and then read it anyway, because after more than 20 years in education I have come to believe that most advice on how to choose a preschool starts in the wrong place. I chose a preschool four times as a parent before I ever ran one, and I got it wrong at least once.

The label is real information. It is just a smaller piece of the picture than the search makes it feel. Montessori isn’t the goal. Neither is Reggio, or play-based learning, or an academic curriculum. The child is the goal.

What a Curriculum Label Actually Tells You

Let me be clear about what I am not saying. I am not saying these approaches are interchangeable, because they aren’t, and the research doesn’t let us pretend otherwise. Researchers who have compared the models find that the choice does register in what children get, and the differences aren’t random. They tend to look like whatever that model was aiming at in the first place.

Montessori, Reggio Emilia, play-based programs and more academically directed approaches make genuinely different choices about the environment, the adult’s role, materials, pacing, freedom and how children spend their days. Those choices matter.

A program built around children doing things for themselves is telling you that independence matters. A program built around projects and questions is telling you that inquiry matters. A program built around direct instruction is telling you that explicit academic learning matters.

So the label isn’t noise. It is a statement of intent. But intention and outcome are not the same thing.

Which changes the question a parent should be asking. Imagine two parents touring the same preschool. One asks what curriculum the school uses. The other asks what her child will become capable of doing there.

Those sound similar. They lead to completely different conversations. The first produces a discussion of materials, lesson plans and educational philosophy, delivered fluently by someone who has delivered it many times before. The second takes you into a classroom.

Curriculum is the vehicle. Development is the destination.

What to Look For in a Preschool Beyond the Curriculum

When adults think about school readiness, we gravitate toward things we can count. How many letters does she know? Can he count to twenty? Can she write her name?

Those things matter. Language, literacy and mathematical thinking are real parts of early childhood, and I will come back to them.

But imagine another list.

Can she tell someone what she needs? Can he stay with something when it becomes difficult? Can she wait for a turn she doesn’t want to wait for? Can he make a mistake without immediately looking for an adult to fix it? Can she walk into a room believing, I can do things here?

These are harder to put on a report card, and they may be among the most consequential things happening in the first five years. There are formal names for most of it: independence, language, concentration, self-regulation, problem-solving. Children don’t experience them as a developmental checklist. They experience them as childhood.

Which is part of what makes them so easy for an adult to miss. Development often hides inside ordinary moments.

What the Label Doesn’t Tell You: Whether Anyone Is Doing It

Both of my daughters went to Montessori schools. Between Austin and San Antonio we enrolled in four of them over about a decade, and I chose every one of them the way I am now telling you not to.

They were not the same place. Not nearly. The rooms ran at different speeds, the adults held themselves differently, and what a child was trusted to do without asking varied more than I would have believed before I saw it.

My older daughter finished kindergarten in Austin. When we moved, the school we chose here placed her back into the primary classroom. She spent that year cleaning windows and mirrors.

I want to be fair about this. Window washing is real Montessori work, and a good room is full of it. It builds concentration and care and a child’s sense that she is capable of looking after her own environment. It is a genuinely good thing for a four-year-old to be doing.

It is not a year.

I had picked all four of those schools on the strength of the same word. A sign on a building is a claim. It is not evidence.

Reviewers at the National Institute for Early Education Research, looking at exactly this question, began with a blunt finding: no single curriculum or approach has been proven best for all preschool programs. Their second point was more practical. A curriculum is only as good as a teacher’s ability to run it. If teachers cannot implement it, it will not work, however good it looks on paper.

So a school can describe itself as child-led while the adults do most of the talking. It can advertise STEM while children spend their time following instructions toward an answer someone has already decided. It can promise independence while a child needs permission for nearly everything she does.

And when those same reviewers looked at which programs produced benefits that actually lasted, what the strong ones had in common was not a method at all. It was “a deliberate and intense focus on language development,” through real back-and-forth among children and between children and their teachers.

Not materials. Not a philosophy. Conversation.

Which is why the interesting part of a preschool tour begins after someone has finished explaining the philosophy.

Five Seconds in a Preschool Classroom

A four-year-old is trying to tell his teacher about something that happened at home.

There was a thing. It was in the yard. It was grey, and it had a tail, and it was, it was.

He stops. The word is in there somewhere and he cannot reach it, and he makes a shape with both hands, which is what you do when the language runs out.

Any adult could finish that sentence. It would take less than a second, and the conversation would keep moving.

Instead the teacher crouches down to his height. “It was in your yard?”

And then she stops talking.

What follows is about five seconds of silence, which does not sound like much until you are the adult standing in it. Every instinct says fill it.

Then his whole face changes.

“Possum!”

Think about what actually happened there. No worksheet, no specialized material, no lesson plan. A child had something he wanted to say, he could not find the language for it, and an adult gave him just enough to stay in the conversation without taking the work away from him. He searched. He found the word. He finished his own thought.

Researchers at Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child call this serve and return. The child offers something, the adult returns it, the child offers again.

Waiting may have been the hardest thing that teacher did all morning. It was also the lesson.

How to Choose a Preschool: What to Watch on the Tour

Every school can explain its philosophy. It is the easiest part of the job and the part they have practiced most. So on your next visit, spend a little less time on the explanation and a little more on the room.

Someone spills something. Watch what happens next, and watch how fast it happens.

A child cannot get something to work. Count how long before an adult steps in.

A child asks a question. See whether the teacher supplies the answer, moves the class along, or becomes curious alongside her.

And notice what the children do when nobody is directing them, which may be the most revealing thirty seconds of the visit.

Then ask about the curriculum. Not because it doesn’t matter, but because now you have something to weigh the answer against.

A good school should be able to tell you not only what it does, but why, and what it expects those choices to build in a child by the time she leaves.

But What About Letters and Numbers?

None of this is an argument against academics, and I want to be careful here, because the false choice between developing a child and teaching her something is one early childhood does not need.

Young children can learn sounds and quantities and how the world works while also learning to wait, to explain themselves and to keep going when something is hard. These don’t happen in sequence. They grow together.

Think about the child who will eventually sit down to read. She needs letters and sounds. She also needs enough concentration to stay with a story, the language to follow it, the confidence to attempt a word she has never seen, and the ability to get it wrong without deciding she is finished.

The academic skill and the developmental capacity are not competitors. Each one makes the other possible.

So yes, ask how a preschool approaches literacy, and ask how it builds mathematical thinking. Then ask about the child who will be doing the learning.

The One Question I Would Ask on Every Preschool Tour

If I were choosing a preschool tomorrow, I would still want to understand the philosophy. I would want to know what the school believes and why it does what it does.

And then I would ask something more specific: Who will my child become here?

Will she become more able to do things for herself? Will his language get richer? Will she learn that being frustrated is survivable, and that it passes? Will he find out what it feels like to solve something without an adult doing it for him?

Those answers are not on the sign. They are in the hundred ordinary moments that make up a child’s day.

The spilled water. The unfinished puzzle. The disagreement over a truck. The question nobody expected. The button that will not go through the hole.

The teacher who knows when to help, and the teacher who knows when not to.

Montessori isn’t the destination. Neither is Reggio. Your child is.

So on your next preschool tour, don’t ask only what they are going to teach your child. Ask who your child is becoming there.

Sarit Kapur is the founder of Edquisitive Montessori, serving families across the Boerne and San Antonio area, and host of the podcast Conversations for the Beginning Years. He has worked in education for more than 20 years and is the father of two daughters.

The only way to judge a preschool is to stand in one. Come watch ours.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I compare preschools with different curriculums?

Compare them in the classroom, not on the label. Every school can explain its philosophy, so spend less of the tour on that explanation and more on watching the room: how adults respond when a child struggles, how much of the talking children do, and what children do when nobody is directing them. Then ask about the curriculum, because now you have something to weigh the answer against.

What should I look for in a preschool classroom?

Watch how quickly an adult steps in when something goes wrong, whether children are allowed to solve small problems themselves, and whether conversation runs in both directions instead of a teacher narrating the room. Look for real back-and-forth between children and teachers. Reviewers who studied which preschool programs produced lasting benefits found that the strongest ones shared a deliberate focus on language development, not a particular method.

What questions should I ask on a preschool tour?

Ask what the school expects your child to be capable of by the time she leaves, and why its choices are meant to build that. Ask how it approaches literacy and mathematical thinking. And ask the question that cuts through the rest: who will my child become here? A good school can answer not only what it does, but what it is building.

Is Montessori better than a play-based preschool?

No single curriculum or approach has been shown to be best for all preschool programs. Montessori, Reggio Emilia, play-based and more academic approaches make genuinely different choices, and those choices do show up in what children get, usually in the direction each model intended. But a curriculum is only as good as the teachers running it, so execution in a particular school matters more than the comparison between models.

Does the preschool curriculum matter?

It matters as a statement of intent. A program built around children doing things for themselves is telling you independence matters; one built around projects and questions is telling you inquiry matters. What the label cannot tell you is whether anyone is actually doing it. Curriculum is the vehicle. Development is the destination.