Kindergarten Readiness Is In Trouble

The US General Accounting Office has a new study declaring that fewer than half of students were actually ready for kindergarten-- which is just one way of looking at the data.

For their report, the GAO reviewed 11 studies that looked at kindergarten readiness; the GAO also looked at kindergarten readiness in five states as measured by the states' kindergarten entry assessment (KEA). The five states were Connecticut, Florida, Kentucky, Maryland, and Ohio.

Some of what they found was unsurprising. Publicly funded preschool enrollment "positively affected students’ kindergarten readiness in literacy, math, or both." Also, the highest rates of kindergarten readiness were found in "students who were Asian, White, or not economically disadvantaged." Districts with lower poverty rates have higher rates pf kindergarten readiness in four of the five states. Zero surprises here.

The marquee finding in the report is that the majority of kindergarten students were not ready for kindergarten, as measured by the states' KEA. 

The states cannot really be compared to each other because each has its own KEA. But each shows a range of students with a median percentage of kindergarten-ready students that falls below 50%. The reports breaks some of that readiness down into categories (again, varying by state), but it still doesn't look good.

The conclusion is alarming-- most of the littles aren't ready for kindergarten.

But wait a minute.

If I'm teaching and a test comes back with a greater than 50% failure rate, I have a couple of choices for explanations:

A) I didn't do my teaching job very well

B) The test isn't a very good test

C) I gave the test before the students were ready to take it, and whose fault is that, exactly

Every time one someone starts chicken littling about kindergarten students not being ready, I flash back to talk I saw education expert Yong Zhao give at the Network for Public Education convention in 2015, during which he pointed out that we should not ask if the five year old is ready for school, but instead ask if school is ready for the five year olds.

The average, median five year old does not meet your standards for height, then your standards are wrong. If the average, median five year old does not meet your standards for kindergarten readiness, then your standards for kindergarten readiness are wrong. They are misaligned. Or maybe they're  aligned only for littles from a particular demographic. Maybe you're still stuck in that Common Core induced push-down of standards where kindergarten is the new first grade and infancy is new preschool and fetuses should be learning their letters and numbers in utero. 

If the majority of littles in your state are not "ready," then that is on you-- not them, not their parents. It is the institution's job to be ready for the children, not vice versa. You can say that you wish five year olds knew basic algebra and wrote in complete paragraphs, but they are who they are, and you have to take them as they are.

So yeah-- the results of this study show that somebody is not ready for these children tp enter kindergarten. But it's not the children.