We’re a very privileged group here on Apt. 11D. Sometimes we have to sit back and acknowledge that. Even those of us with modest incomes are rich in other ways.
Half of all Kentucky’s school children are not prepared for Kindergarten. What does that mean exactly? Well, at Kindergarten Intake, kids are asked their name and age, to recite the alphabet and count to 30. They also evaluated in terms of physical well-being, language, cognitive skills, self-help and social-emotional skills.
In some schools, only 14 percent of the incoming Kindergarteners can pass that test.
“We have six different languages represented in this year’s kindergarten class,” said principal Zac Eckels. “A lot of students that come to us who have never had the formalized structure that we have in a school building. We have kids from refugee camps, they were at a camp two weeks prior to coming here.”
In addition, some students come to kindergarten not knowing how to hold a pencil or have never seen a book before. Some are still wearing diapers, Eckels said.
Apt. 11d 
Diapers?!
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I will say that when I went to K, yes, as an immigrant who didn’t speak English, and didn’t know what a swimsuit or a winter coat was (but, as an example of the many colors privilege comes in, did have parents who could ask folks what those were and where to buy them), knowing ones ABC’s was not a requirement of kindergarten. I’m probably wrong, but I remember being moved to the 1st grade once I could count to 30 and say my ABC’s (in English).
I know of a 2nd grade class, in the NE, where there are 10 english language learning students (a third of the class). And, they nearly all speak different languages. And, these days, 2nd grade is when you are supposed to learn to read well enough that in the next year you “read to learn’ (rather than learning to read).
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I wonder how many of those skills I had as a kindergartener. I really, really doubt I had all of them.
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Exactly. I’m so in favor of assessments to catch learning challenges as early as possible but the pushing down of academics over the past x years is troublesome. No one can read before they are able to read.
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And whoever is evaluating these kids certainly shouldn’t say, “Oh, they aren’t ready for kindergarten, let’s leave them home for another year”!
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Kids who have never seen a book before. Ugh. That just breaks my heart. I have shopping bags of kiddie books that I’m donating to the Good Will. Shopping bags of books that my kids touched and read, while other kids have none.
Books are so plentiful and disturbingly cheap. We should be giving them away at supermarkets or something.
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Giving books away will do no good if someone is not willing to read them to the kids. And as you note, kid books are cheap. Money isn’t the problem for THIS (kids with no books) issue.
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What a strange article. The implication in the piece is that the reason why students are not ready is because they are not native English speakers and lack the requisite language training. On the other hand, that is likely the case in Jefferson County, which is the most urban part of the state and would attract a larger immigrant community. But that won’t account for the rest of the state, which is predominantly rural (leaving aside Lexington, which is also urban but likely a bit richer than Louisville).
This article’s implications is that KY’s problem is that “poor immigrants need early childhood intervention or their kids won’t be able to read by 6th grade” which, while perhaps not intending to, could feed an anti-immigrant/anti-non-native speaker framing of the problem. But these are state level data, which speaks to native speakers having problems as well. (Not only that, Jefferson county was one where over 50% were considered ready, although just at 50%.)
At the end of the day, I do wonder at the breathlessness of the assessments here. Many people cannot afford to send their children to daycare. Many also do not imagine that stay-at-home parent time to be meant to go alongside pre-k curricula. I think day care should be affordable and easily available to all that want it, but the logical conclusions of some of these pieces is not clear to me. The article implies that there are gaps between arriving to kindergarten knowing certain facts and later school outcomes (regardless of potential control factors such as income) but there is no empiricism added to bolster that implication.
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The article is a little vague about what is being measured. Does it mean that 50% of the kids cannot answer the specified questions, in any language? Or are there other components of the test that kids are flunking? Is it purely a matter of English proficiency? I’ve had friends who arrived in America at age 10 without much English–all the pre-K intervention in the world will not do much for kids like that. Even for those who come here as infants, pre-K programs probably won’t teach much English if it isn’t spoken at home. Really, the article is a mess.
That said, we (and our children) are indeed fortunate, to grown up in houses with many books (in many languages) and where the life of the mind is valorized.
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My daughter has two close friends, one who arrived in grade 1 and one who arrived in grade 2 speaking no english. They are fluent now by grade 4 and were by the end of grade 1/grade 2. Kids learn a second language so quickly when immersed.
And yes, the luxury and the luck in having a home full of books and access as well to the arts. Doesn’t it give you such joy so see your kid(s) reading?
I’m a first generation Canadian and we grew up poor but one of my fondest memories is the family trekking to the public library every weekend to take out books.
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I came to the U.S. speaking o English at 5. After 5 months in kindergarten, I was moved to 1st grade, and by the end of the year, was probably at least fluent. I’vealways used my anecdote as evidence I favor of immersion. But, I think the data is less clear. He students learning skills (including, say, that though I could not speak English, I was very verbal in my native language, and had at least pre-reading skills in that language, and that no one spoke my native language at school, except my sister, and that at least one of my parents spoke proficient English played important roles in the success of immersion for me.
I think schools are struggling to address all these needs. As everyone points out, though, the solution isn’t to send the kids home.
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A wild card here is that it’s often tricky to extract answers from small children.
A lot of these kids may know the answers but not want to talk to strange adults.
They may mostly be measuring social skills, without knowing it.
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Good point – cultural differences can play a huge part. For example, a lack of eye contact may indicate respect but for us it may indicate “possibly on the spectrum”.
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I’m not sold on the idea that school readiness has much to do with early childhood academic preparedness. And while I love books and think they are important, I also think that the importance of reading to young children is overstated.
The thing that is crucial in the early years that many low-income or otherwise at-risk children are not getting is support for the development of executive functioning skills. There is a growing body of research that executive functioning is the key difference between at-risk children and their low-risk peers. How do we help children develop these skills? It’s hard. Much harder than giving them books or talking about reading. It would mean making sure parents and their children have safe places to live, a basic income to sustain them, their mental and physical health needs are attended to. Expensive social welfare stuff that Americans aren’t really interested in funding.
There are some good early childhood programs using curricula that try to replicate these supports in a classroom setting. Tools of the Mind is one of the them. But it still doesn’t compete with supporting the family directly.
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And so much of this “academic preparedness” is based on developmental readiness which varies tremendously at this age. Let’s taking the ability to read. A few outliers will be reading in kindergarten. And some will struggle to be fluent readers by grade 3. The majority will all be reading by age 8 or so barring serious, diagnosed learning challenges.
In other words, you create the environment but they’ll be reading when they are reading.
But I do agree that reading to kids when they are young and even past when they are reading themselves is important. Critical, even. There is so much that they learn hearing fluent readers read to them. And there’s probably some intangible benefit similar to “families eating supper together” that happens when your parents read to you.
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I’m also pretty dubious about the merits of reading to babies, but I have a 2-year-old at home (along with a 12-year-old and a 9-year-old) and I have a few thoughts on the helpfulness of reading to toddlers, based on recent experience.
1. With younger toddlers, I think there’s no shame in just scrapping the text and just talking about the pictures, because that’s what the child is actually interested in, and they’ll learn more from talking about the pictures than from hearing wordy text that is only loosely connected to the illustrations. We have a board book entitled “The Story of the Lord’s Prayer” where the text is based on the Our Father, but the illustrations show a preschool girl going about her day at home and at school. I just explain what’s happening in the pictures, because that’s what is most relatable for our 2-year-old (look, the family is having toast, bacon and eggs for breakfast!). When she’s bigger, I’ll read her the actual text more often.
2. We recently started doing some potty training and I have a small library of 4 different numbingly similar toddler propaganda books about how awesome it is to use the potty. Over the last week or so, I’ve read them literally dozens of times at the 2-year-old’s request, and it’s quite interesting how incredibly serious she is about them. We read them and read them and read them again. (Again, I feel quite free to occasionally paraphrase or amplify.) I more and more get the feeling that she is pulling a lot of information out of the books
But I don’t think it’s necessarily just books that have this effect on toddlers. I suspect toddlers do something similar with movies, which explains the tendency to watch the same thing over and over and over again. They’re studying them, I think.
So, I’m a bit more of a believer about books and toddlers, but I feel like there are some important nuances.
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And there’s something about it being a caring adult reading/telling the story over and over too. Just like how I believe that scientists miss the boat on the benefits of breastfeeding when they focus on analyzing breastmilk.
There’s also the benefit of physical contact/closeness by the same caregiver every few hours for months on end.
Back to the reading, I believe that there’s a cultural transmission of the structure of story. And that intrinsic knowledge ends up making a lover of books later on. Plus, like has been mentioned, understanding that books go one way, that English is left to right, top left to bottom right, cover pages, beginning, middle & end, etc.
PS Do you have “Everybody Poops” – a big hit back in the day in our house.
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“With younger toddlers, I think there’s no shame in just scrapping the text and just talking about the pictures, because that’s what the child is actually interested in, and they’ll learn more from talking about the pictures than from hearing wordy text that is only loosely connected to the illustrations.”
One of our kids’ favorite books was “Goodnight Gorilla.” Few words, but we would talk and talk about what was happening in the pictures.
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“And there’s something about it being a caring adult reading/telling the story over and over too. Just like how I believe that scientists miss the boat on the benefits of breastfeeding when they focus on analyzing breastmilk. There’s also the benefit of physical contact/closeness by the same caregiver every few hours for months on end.”
Yes. Reading to toddlers is a sort of command performance, where they know that they have your total undivided attention for at least the length of the book.
Books with illustrations are also helpful for learning what toddlers mean when they make unintelligible utterances–it’s a sort of Rosetta Stone for deciphering their speech.
“PS Do you have “Everybody Poops” – a big hit back in the day in our house.”
I have:
Once Upon a Potty (the late 1970s classic with little Prudence)
Joanna Cole’s My Big Girl Potty
The Potty Book for Girls
Too Big for Diapers (with Ernie from Sesame Street)
They all kind of run together.
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“They all kind of run together.”
I see what you (well, ok, somebody) did there.
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A friend who teaches kindergarten told me that what they really look for in terms of reading readiness are really basic skills like “can the child tell if the book is upside down? When they pretend to read do they know that print goes from left to right in English — that you start at the top of the page and end at the bottom? Do they know that the spine of the book goes on the left and the part where you turn the pages goes on the right?” These are the kinds of things that we assume are intuitive, but apparently they’re not. If someone had literally never read you a book, you wouldn’t know these things. She said it’s disturbing when kids come in not knowing them because it means they’ve had zero exposure to reading.
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I have to say, expecting kids to count to 30 and “know” the alphabet seem to be out of line with normal development. I wonder if the system gets rewarded in some ways for declaring students “unprepared” for kindergarten, such as lower standards set for test scores for such children? Or the ability to file for funds from some source for remedial efforts?
I’m not sure my “privileged” children could have counted to 30 on the first day of kindergarten, nor that they were able to recite and write all the letters of the alphabet,* which is what I would define as “know” the alphabet. Being able to sing the song just means the child has memorized a song. If knowledge of the alphabet had been expected, then why did all the 1st grade classrooms display the letters of the alphabet in a frieze around the room?
*except for the one who was reading in preschool.
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I agree. At least, I’m not sure mine could have done either of those things on the first day of Kindgergarten. He may have. He was really stubborn at the time.
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I can tell you that my daughter couldn’t do all of these either at the beginning of kindergarten. And she’s doing quite fine now in grade 4.
MH, WHERE could that stubbornness come from???
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I feel like some school districts assume that since one kid can read in K or pre-K, therefore ALL should be reading at that age. For me it’s like assuming that since some kids walk at 9 months, then we should be expecting/training/encouraging ALL to be walking at 9 months. You know, despite the fact that most/all will be walking by 16-18 months.
Barring learning challenges, they’ll all be reading when they are developmentally ready to read.
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Right. My older son could not do some of these things prior to entering K and no one thought anything of it because he goes to a school with other privileged children. The teacher’s comments after his assessment were along the lines of, children are special snowflakes who learn at different rates so don’t worry [I wasn’t worried] if there are other children in class who are more advanced at this point. And they were right: he is now well above average and doing just fine. But when at-risk children aren’t ready for K panic sets in because people know that they are not getting support at home to help them learn.
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Ian failed Kindergarten intake. He could write his name and was in the 99.9th percentile for reading at that time. But he just sat in the room and screamed for an hour. Actually, he didn’t even make it the whole hour. They had go into the auditorium and pull me out to take him home. While all the other mothers stared at me. Ah, fond memories.
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The demographics at my kids’ schools are 40% ELL and 75% Free/Reduced Lunch. I think those Kindergarten screening tests do more harm than good in a district like ours. When nearly half the class is learning to read in their second language, it’s just a different dynamic. (And frankly, I met some of the brightest, amazing, creative kids in our kindergarten classes…but I guarantee they failed Kindergarten screening) I think the overemphasis on screening/testing/measuring at an earlier and earlier age makes teaching the critical Kindergarten skills so hard for the really good teachers out there.
And different states/districts use different tests. The one Kentucky uses looks interesting. (Brigance) I don’t like the one we use here in WI (PALS). It’s just a lot of testing here. More every year.
Standarized Testing is probably a good industry to invest in, though….
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How does this play into leveling, or tracking, in Kentucky? I could see all sorts of unintended consequences. If the system creates classes based on the assessed level of kindergarten readiness, right there you’ve created a distinction. All the children from educated families to the left, all others to the right…
I suppose one could teach 4 year olds to count to 30. What would they not learn in that time, though? How much time outside, observing nature, or playing with each other, is sacrificed to meet supposed academic standards?
Kids who have not been exposed to books by the time they’re 4 might be at risk. They are certainly at risk if the district decides they’re less able, on the basis of a readiness standard which might be developmentally inappropriate, and then separates children into different groups.
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Garbling the result of iPad posting and general flakiness.
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I think there’s a big difference between a kid who has been exposed to books and big words and music by five (even if he/she doesn’t know their ABCs) and a kid who has never been exposed to those things. A kid who doesn’t know how to hold a book. And in addition to that lack of exposure, is malnurished and/or traumatized in some way. None of our children have had those experiences.
There have been plenty of studies that show that the lack of good experiences (and exposure to bad experiences) leads to long-term problems.
The screening tests are really to weed out kids like Ian from the mix. The tests don’t do any harm. Every kid is admitted no matter what their academic levels. As long as they don’t scream on the top of their lungs for forty minutes. The tests give the Kindergarten teachers a sense of what their needs are going to be for the following year (and to send kids like Ian to specialized programs.)
There is actually a really cool study that looked at kids who were given a book at the end of the fourth grade with no instructions to read the book. Just the book. The kids who got the book, even those who didn’t read it, did better on tests later that fall.
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So, what is the mechanism that resulted in the book helping them do better on the test later that fall? As described, the story that he kids that didn’t read it, but just had it, did better, makes no sense. Were the books magic? Something is missing from the story.
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I’m stressing out about an article right now, so I’ll have to get it for you later. I think I make have linked to it on this blog at one time or another. The authors of the study, I believe, concluded that the possession of the book by kids, who up until then had owned no books, gave them more confidence.
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Well, I will try to find it as well if I have time later. Because if it is owning gives confidence, it doesn’t have to be a book. It could be new sneakers, or a calculator.
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Promoting reading to children at a young age is treating the symptom rather than the disease. And we should treat the symptom, but it doesn’t really get at why the children aren’t read to in the first place.
(And I’m glad this is anonymous-ish because in my real life I am part of a group whose mission is simply to give books to young children and talk to their parents about the importance of literacy. So I do think it is very important. I also think there are other things that are just as if not more important.)
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I do believe in the importance of reading. I am by nature a contrarian, so I’ll go out on a limb and ask if being read to leads to a long-term difference in academic outcomes, once one considers all the other factors which accompany reading to children.
*Educated parents, who place importance on the reading culture.
*Resources to provide books, whether from a store, or the library–presumably that also means the child is adequately nourished and clothed, receives medical care, and has had nurturing interactions with caregivers.
*Enriching activities, such as visits to parks, playgrounds, and varied places.
I suppose I’m expressing it badly, but I get concerned when the signs of an upper-class childhood become the markers for school readiness. That seems likely to stigmatize children who are developing normally, and who would likely have every chance of being successful, as long as they (and their families) aren’t judged deficient for not following upper-class habits.
I’ve looked up the Common Core Standards, and in both cases Kentucky’s kindergarten readiness standard (for entry to kindergarten) seems to exceed the skills the Common Core expects of students entering kindergarten. During kindergarten, in math, the expectations for “counting and cardinality” are:
Know number names and the count sequence.
1. Count to 100 by ones and by tens.
2. Count forward beginning from a given number within the known
sequence (instead of having to begin at 1).
3. Write numbers from 0 to 20. Represent a number of objects with a
written numeral 0-20 (with 0 representing a count of no objects).
(…)
5. Count to answer “how many?” questions about as many as 20 things
arranged in a line, a rectangular array, or a circle, or as many as 10
things in a scattered configuration; given a number from 1–20, count
out that many objects.
For reading, “print concepts:” 1. Demonstrate understanding of the organization and basic features of print.
a. Follow words from left to right, top to bottom, and page by page.
b. Recognize that spoken words are represented in written language by
specific sequences of letters.
c. Understand that words are separated by spaces in print.
d. Recognize and name all upper- and lowercase letters of the alphabet.
To praise the Common Core, the next section is very important: 2. Demonstrate understanding of spoken words, syllables, and sounds
(phonemes).
a. Recognize and produce rhyming words.
b. Count, pronounce, blend, and segment syllables in spoken words.
c. Blend and segment onsets and rimes of single-syllable spoken words.
d. Isolate and pronounce the initial, medial vowel, and final sounds (phonemes)
in three-phoneme (consonant-vowel-consonant, or CVC) words.* (This does
not include CVCs ending with /l/, /r/, or /x/.)
e. Add or substitute individual sounds (phonemes) in simple, one-syllable
words to make new words.
Looking for such markers of phonological awareness can make a huge difference in a child’s life. There are children who have been exposed to lots of print media who have not developed that awareness. It’s a sign of potential reading disabilities.
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That last section is definitely important. The ability to screen as early as possible for learning challenges is critical. When you break down the various skills/mental gymnastics/tasks required to read, there are SOOO many different ways that learning challenges can play out.
And even with this knowledge, even at “good” schools, kids fall through the cracks. Their learning challenges around reading aren’t apparent til grade 3 or so.
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In other words, screening good, unrealistic standards of performance – not good.
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OK. I’m in the midst of writing an article and it’s making me a bit batshit crazy right. So, please excuse any crankiness. I am not responding to any one person. In fact, I may be responding to some weirdo on my Facebook feed right now.
1. Public schools have to educate every child at the age of 5. Even kids like Ian. If they can’t educate a child in their school, because they are big screamer heads, then they have to pay private school tuition.
2. These kindergarten screening tests aren’t real tests. They certainly aren’t standardized tests. Kids are brought into a room with a bunch of adults, and they try to assess whether the kids have certain basic skills, like the ability to sit still in a circle group, hold a pencil, follow directions. And, yes, some basic ABC stuff, but that’s less important that knowing how to sit at a desk or sit quietly on a mat.
3. Even if the kids royally fail the test, the school still has to educate them. Sitting quietly on a mat is still a developing skill for lots of kids at age 5, especially boys.
4. Schools use these tests to pull out the hardest cases, like Ian, and to help the teachers know how to arrange their program on Day 1.
5. There are kids who have much, much less than our kids. When I taught in the South Bronx, my first mission every Monday morning was to feed the kids. I brought in cereal from home and fed them. They were starving. Some hadn’t eaten much all weekend. It’s hard to learn when you are hungry.
6. There is a good and worthy debate to be had about whether or not kids should be expected to read by the time they are five. That is a debate for privileged people like us. Kids in poverty, as they are in many places in Kentucky and in the South Bronx, come to school with enormous gaps in knowledge that go way beyond the reading by kindergarten debate.
7. This is no way a judgment on kids in poverty or their parents. This isn’t their fault. I think we can acknowledge these gaps and seek to close them. There are people who want to cover up these problems. Some for political, selfish reasons. Some out of genuine compassion. I don’t think that’s fair to those kids.
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good luck on your article! Regarding #2, I think this may vary from district to district. The PALS series are real tests (they go from Pre-K on up…) and they are very much considered “standardized” by the teachers at our school. The one they used in Kentucky looked much more interesting and less “test-like” They are also starting the MAP (computerized) tests in Kindergarten classes in some schools. The focus on testing in Kindergarten makes me slightly crazy, especially for a high poverty school like ours. (We can be labeled a “failing” school for low test scores, due almost entirely to our demographics.) As for #5, almost all our teachers bring in food. daily. It amazes me how much our teachers do that goes way beyond classroom teaching.
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I’m a little uneasy with the “it’s not your fault your impoverished family sucks” vibe here. Are we saying we need every family to behave as if it’s middle class, or we consider that family broken and in need of government intervention?
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Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library is a great example of a nonprofit addressing this issue: beginning with her home county in TN and now spread nationwide in different regions, IL sends each child in that area one age-appropriate book per month from birth through age 5–for free. Over 770,000 children in the US are currently registered. All parents need do is register their children and keep their addresses current–no financial information is required and there is no real approval process. Another example is that in my own city, all public schoolchildren have access to free breakfast every schoolday, no need to register or be approved.
Can we really not all get on board with the value of ensuring that kids have breakfast or books?
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Lack of money is not why kids do not have books. Hang out in trailer park (I see several trailer parks regularly – I have relatives there.) There is no lack of toys. Children’s books, and children’s activity books are very cheap. One of the cheapest kinds of toys you can buy. If I bring them as gifts, unless they are very fancy pop-ups, they are not really appreciated. Now, maybe they are magic, and just putting them in the house changes everything, but I don’t think so.
Can we really not all get on board with focusing on the actual problem instead of the symptom?
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Have you paid attention to our government recently? No, I do not think we are capable of focusing on systemic changes to clear problems. Sometimes attacking symptom by symptom is the way to get some actual changes made.
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Are an animist? Because just putting books in a house where no one reads to the kids does nothing. Unless of course you believe in the study Laura describes. Just give them a book!!! They don’t even need to read it!!! Test scores will rise!!! This is a belief in animism or magic.
These programs cut off at age 5. They make YOU feel good. But they don’t even treat a symptom. Who do you think signs up for this? Someone who already reads to their kid. Better would be to send 6 books a year starting at age 8 or so, once they have started learning to read, make sure they have something to read. Maybe even let them choose a book every other month.
Instead, saying this is a dumb program results in being told that you don’t care about the kids. Or, we can’t do the things that would actually be effective, so let’s waste money on something completely ineffective. Because that is a brilliant way to convince people you actually do know how to do something effective and useful.
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I think one of the things these book programs do is offer possibilities for individual children, potentially individual outliers. I’ve always been a sucker for those stories, because, I think, systemic change is difficult, but sometimes, individual lives can be turned around by simple gestures.
Books, given to a child, can be such an example, a book that inspires or causes someone to ask to have it read, or just the feeling of being cared about.
A photographer on a facebook page I frequent recently shared a link to a ministry that serves hot chocolate to the homeless. She wrote that waking up one morning, in the cold, and wet, to people offering her hot chocolate was a factor in her turning her life around. In general, I want services to the homeless to be offered systematically and I’ve always been opposed to this kind of feel good giving, But, in this photographers eyes, it was the personal connection that mattered, that a group of regular citizens cared enough about her to treat her like a human being, to personally look her in the eye and hand her a cup of warm chocolate, something they might enjoy, as well. I do believe that human link can make a difference (and, it would be the mechanism through which I could imagine a book in the house having an effect, in spite of it being unread).
One of my fondest giving memories is receiving notes through a Donors Choose campaign for trumpets I’d donated to a music program — the sentiment that came through was that the children were amazed that there was someone, across the country, who didn’t know them but who thought trumpets were important. It seemed to make a difference that I was attaching value to the music. Do I expect to change the world this way? no (and in fact, I have a lot of problems with Donors Choose campaigns, which do seem to be bubble gum and ducktape solutions to systemic issues of funding). But, in small ways (and if they don’t grow too big), I think they can help, not harm.
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That good and worthy debate is important for these children, too, because if we decide normal preschool year include an academic daycare and/or an ambitious college-educated SAHM so the kids can hit kindergarten and read ASAP, well, then the kids who don’t have that very privileged background are sunk.
The readiness tests are fine – baselines are important. What bugs the shit out of me are quotes like this that betray a very privileged idea of what experiences he expects incoming students to have had and implies an insufficiently flexible idea of what schools can and should teach:
“We need to make sure parents understand that learning doesn’t start when their child goes to kindergarten, learning starts the minute they are born,” Hargens said. “Reading to them, making sure they have access to lots of vocabulary words – there are lots of little things parents can do to help their child.”
These types of learning experiences are NOT necessities. They are excellent if parents enjoy and have time for them or are anxious about their children falling out of the middle class. If parents are impoverished or just moved to a new and strange country or have been living in refuge camps, they are probably at their limit making sure their children stay as healthy and safe as possible.
Any principal who wants to school those parents on reading to their kids and making sure their vocabularies are growing is a complete asshat. How about “we need to make sure educators understand that children come to school with a variety of experience and schools cannot expect all parents to do the same level of preparatory work on the school’s behalf”?
American schools are notorious among the educated immigrants I know for expecting parents to do half the teaching at home. I have seen that and I am out of patience with it, frankly.
I want to ask Eckels exactly how many incoming kindergartners are wearing diapers. That’s a sign there is something wrong – seriously depressed and isolated families, developmentally disabled children. Social services or sped should be involved, but I’m guessing it was one kid and he’s exaggerating to make it sound like he has a whole classroom full of diapered kindergartners.
/cranky
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There’s a rather huge difference between reading v. Recognizing letters by Kindergarten.
Nobody should judge families in povertythat can’t prepare their kidsfor Kindergarten in the same way as middle class families. And, yes, public school have to be prepared to teach kids at all levels. However, we also have look at the research that shows that these early learning gaps never close.
Re: the kids in diapers. That does sound like developmental issues. In that case, the school district was legally supposed to be involved at age 3. But they only deal with those issues, if a parent formally requests help.
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Stephen Dubner covered the whole ‘books in the home’ bit in Freakonomics. I teach this in my intro research methods course. Having 100 books in your home is an INDICATOR that something else is going on — like active, involved parenting by someone who is highly education. The books don’t cause anything, including kindergarten readiness. It’s a spurious correlation.
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I also think that there may be issues with moves.
A lot of times, when a family moves, there may be frenzied dumping of random stuff (like books, for instance). If a family has accumulated 100 books and managed to hold onto them, that suggests that their living conditions are reasonably settled and organized.
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How about well loved books ON the dining room table during the daily family supper? Two markers in one for future success and mental health!
I’m being flippant but I do agree – these things stand for so many other factors that create healthy families and kids.
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If a family moves many times and manages to accumulate and hold onto over 1,000 books, you should pity the husband. I hear.
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On the other hand, kindergarten readiness is sometimes underestimated because school officials are covering their butts. If test scores are bad, they can say “well, it’s not MY fault.” In our last school district, the middle school kept failing the NCLB tests. It was on a watch-list, because the scores were so bad even compared to towns with a similar SES. I went in to ask the principal “what’s up with that.” She said, “well, you can’t do much when the kids are stupid.” Really.
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We kept Autistic Youngest in daycare during her JK year because she wasn’t yet toilet-trained. She could read and count but couldn’t pull up a zipper, etc., etc. There are a lot of factors – immigrant, poverty, lack of enrichment, developmental delays – that can tip a kid over into “unreadiness” by such standards.
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