Challenging the School Readiness Agenda in Early Childhood Education

Miriam B. Tager

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317204664
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

Challenging the normative paradigm that school readiness is a positive and necessary objective for all young children, this book asserts that the concept is a deficit-based practice that fosters the continuation of discriminatory classifications. Tager draws on findings of a qualitative study to reveal how the neoliberal agenda of school reform based on high-stakes testing sorts and labels children as non-ready, affecting their overall schooling careers. Tager reflects critically on the relationship between race and school readiness, showing how the resulting exclusionary measures perpetuate the marginalization of low-income Black children from an early age. Disrupting expected notions of readiness is imperative to ending practices of structural classism and racism in early childhood education.

1
Introducing the Non-School Ready Child

“Lina, are you with me?” Ms. Franklin calls from the front of the rug.

Lina is sitting by the bookshelf, off to the left side of the teacher. Her brown chemically straightened hair is sticking out on both sides of her head and the rest is pulled back with a black hair tie. She is wearing a sweater dress with colorful zigzags. Her first grade teacher, Ms. Franklin, is sitting on a blue cushioned rocking chair around five feet away, next to a free standing wooden easel with chart paper on it.

Lina is moving around, twisting her head and looking everywhere. She looks down at the rug. She does not look at Ms. Franklin. Ms. Franklin has a globe in her lap and is describing it to the class.

“Many years ago the Inuit nation crossed over into Alaska …”

“From the North,” calls out a boy.

Ms. Franklin holds up the Do Not Interrupt sign. “Remember not to call out,” she says. Other children raise their hands. Lina does not. Ms. Franklin calls on another boy with reddish hair, who talks about the Inuits moving to Alaska to set up their homes. After a few minutes Ms. Franklin turns to Lina and again says,

“Lina are you with me?”

Lina looks up but still does not look at the teacher. She rocks sideways on her butt. She looks at the chart paper as Ms. Franklin starts to write with a marker. Lina is not raising her hand. She is not smiling. She looks around the room as others respond to Ms. Franklin. Ms. Franklin fills out the chart with their responses. Lina flattens her hair with her hand. Pieces of her hair stick right back up. She yawns as she moves her head up to look at the ceiling. She pulls at her hair. She takes out the hair tie from the back and pulls her hair tight, trying to smooth out the sides. She puts the hair tie on again.

“Lina what did they used to do when they cut holes in the ice?” Ms. Franklin says suddenly, staring right at her. Everyone turns to look at her. There is a pause.

“Fish,” she says, her hands are still in her hair, smoothing out the sides. She takes out the tie again and shakes her hair out. She puts a clip in the front and puts the hair tie on her wrist. She holds her nose with her two index fingers and then strokes her hair again. Now Ms. Franklin is asking about the environment. Her right arm goes up, stretching it back to her neck. Ms. Franklin notices and thinks she is raising her hand.

“Lina… (pause) do you know what I mean?”

“No,” Lina says as she shakes her head. Lina plays with the tie on her wrist.

“Hold on,” Ms. Franklin says to the class as they talk and move around, “I know I am keeping you at the rug too long… you will go back in a minute.”

“Lina who does it harm? If ice is melting …”

“The one with the big …” Lina starts.

“Big what?” asks Ms. Franklin.

“Polar bears,” says Lina.

“Why?” The teacher looks around for another person to answer.

“I am going to see if you are listening about now and then,” says Ms. Franklin. She is looking at Lina. She then opens a book and shows a picture of an oil field.

“What is the problem that affects the Inuit culture?” she asks.

A boy calls out.

“Why are you raising your hand if you are calling out at the same time?” Lina is leaning against the bookshelf now.

“Drilling for oil. What do you think it does to the land and to animals?”

Ms. Franklin leans in over a girl with long brown hair. “Sit nicely.… What do you think?” No answer from this girl who is wearing pink boots.

Lina smooths down her hair again. She smiles at a nearby boy. She sits on her knees inching out of the corner. She comes closer to the teacher.

“What is it Lina?” Ms. Franklin asks.

“Daniel is making that swizzing noise again,” she says, while looking at the boy.

“Lina can you face this way? Lina, what are we talking about? What are they drilling for?”

“What do you mean?” Lina asks.

“Are you listening to our conversation?” asks Ms. Franklin.

“Yes,” she says.

Ms. Franklin turns away and calls on another boy. Lina moves her head from side to side then slides backwards into the corner again.

What does an identified non-school ready child look like? In what ways is he¹ perceived as non-school ready? And why do we, as early childhood educators, continually engage in the practice of sifting through children looking for what they are lacking and then classifying young children as being non-school ready?

In 2014, I conducted a qualitative research study on school readiness and how the non-school ready child is perceived/evaluated by the early childhood teacher. During this study, I observed five different low-income Black² children in kindergarten and first grades, and followed them around over a course of six months in order to understand how they were being documented as being non-school ready. I interviewed their teachers as well, and during this process I realized that the promotion of school readiness in actuality is a deficit construct that further marginalizes the so-called non-ready child and perpetuates discriminatory practices.

Lina, the only girl in the study, is identified within the first two weeks of school. She takes too long at finishing tasks, has trouble adapting to the rules of the classroom and is non-verbal. She is also African American, and her teacher is upset to hear that Lina’s parents believe there is a “bit of a racial issue” involved in Ms. Franklin deciding to send Lina out of the room for academic intervention³ services. The parents are worried that Lina will eventually be classified and placed in a special education environment. Ms. Franklin believes that special education testing may help clarify Lina’s emerging academic issues. At the end of first grade, the parents refuse testing, and Ms. Franklin reluctantly promotes her to second grade. In most cases, however, the identified non-school ready child is referred to the team and is either removed from the regular education classroom or remains, but is pulled out for most of the school day for services.

An identified non-ready child, in most cases, is a non-White child from a low-income/working class background whose parents are working multiple jobs in order to survive. He derives from differing backgrounds (i.e., African American, Haitian, East African, Dominican and etc.) that are culturally out of sync with the normative early childhood program discourse based on White middle class values (Burman, 2007; Cannella, 1997; Lubeck, 2001; Randolph, 2013). The parents can lack the language background (English Language Learner) or concertive cultivation (Lareau, 2003) necessary to navigate the schooling process. In short, this child is outside the system even before he enters the system, and once inside is quickly identified as not fitting into the early childhood schooling structure. With the increase of higher standards, this child is failing before he starts. He is classified as non-school ready and is syphoned off to special education, retained or excluded from mainstream schooling.

We all embody different ideas about childhood that draw on a variety of circulating discourses that help us make meaning of school readiness in low-income Black children. My goal is to disrupt the everyday identification of school readiness (children who are labeled non-school ready) and question the ongoing usage of this term within the early childhood community. The term school readiness has a variety of similar definitions, but the one I am utilizing relates to “the preparedness of children to learn what school expects or wants them to learn” (Edwards, 1999, p. 1). Specifically, this refers to reading and literacy skills, math skills and the socio-emotional behavior of a child entering kindergarten or first grade. The expansion of this term includes how children fare at being able to adapt to this normative school culture. Lina, according to Ms. Franklin, has not adapted well to the culture of school. She is a good example of how a child who is identified as non-school ready functions or does not function well in an American public school.

School Readiness

School readiness, as a term, appears for the first time in the 1960s during the implementation of Head Start, a nationally funded preschool program designed for low-income urban young children. The founders of Head Start, including Zigler and Styfco (2010), utilize the term school readiness in order to justify the need for Head Start programs in poor urban areas. The program is designed to give low-income non-White families a ‘head start’ on formal schooling. Many longitudinal quantitative studies (Barnett & Boocock, 1998; Lara-Cinisomo et al., 2004; Zigler, 2006) over the last forty years have been conducted to prove that children who are classified as school ready fare better in later formal schooling. The belief is that by attending to the issue of school readiness, children fare better throughout their schooling careers and also have more success in the job market as adults. This application of school readiness is ironically utilized as an attempt to close the gap of inequalities in the early childhood schooling years.

School readiness refers to reading and literacy skills, math skills and the socio-emotional behavior of a child entering kindergarten or first grade. The teachers in this study expand this definition by including a myriad of social expectations. Examples of such social expectations of behavior include: children’s ability to sit still, to listen, keep their hands to themselves, share materials, raise their hands and walk in a line. Since there are children who are unfamiliar with these cultural routines because they have not attended preschool, or have had limited preschool or subpar pre-school experiences, there can be a culture clash when they first formally attend school. Numerous quantitative studies on school readiness (Barnett, 1998; Lara-Cinisomo et al., 2004; Magnuson et al., 2004; Rock & Stenner, 2006; Zigler & Styfco, 2010) conclude that there is a racial disparity in the school readiness skills of White middle class children and low-income Black children. According to Zigler, 35% of all entering kindergarten children are deficient in school readiness (Zigler, 2006; Zigler & Styfco, 2010). “If students enter kindergarten at a disadvantage, early gaps in understandings of literacy and math tend to be sustained or widened over time; this is particularly true for children of poverty” (Linder, Ramey & Zambak, 2013, p. 1). Therefore, school readiness is an issue for all populations, but is more acutely related to certain marginalized populations (low-income non-White populations) due to perceptions and assumptions of the dominant school and teacher culture that tend to be deficit-based.

Background of the Study

This book is based on my dissertation study of a narrative inquiry into how White middle class early childhood educators perceive or make assumptions when identifying school readiness in low-income Black children. This book differs from my dissertation because instead of focusing on how White middle class teachers perceive school readiness in young low-income Black children, it highlights the point of view of the young low-income Black child who is identified with this label. I believe this helps us, as early childhood educators, get a glimpse of what they struggle through on a daily basis.

The data collection includes an online district-wide survey of kindergarten and first grade teachers (n=24). Five of these early childhood educators (White and middle class) filled out the interest section on the survey and as such are identified as the participants of the study, which includes in-depth interviewing. I also observed the five different classrooms of each teacher participant I interviewed in order to follow one low-income Black child per class who has been identified as non-school ready. In addition, there are two different focus groups: one for the participant teachers (in Grayson School) (# 1–5), and one designed as an interpretative focus group at a non-participant school in the same district with k/1 teachers (# 6–11).

The study is conducted in a suburban/urban school district in the New York tri-state area with approximately 6,000 students in grades K–12. It is located within a few miles of a large metropolitan city, which has high populations of low-income Black children. Five elementary schools participated in this study, two of which are border schools with large populations of low-income Black children (55% and 35%, respectively). The former school that is the primary focus of this study is an elementary school that is located two blocks from the border of this large metropolitan city. I refer to this school as Grayson School. The five participating teachers in this study work in this one school. Two of them are multi-age teachers (grades 1 and 2), and the other three are kindergarten teachers. The identified non-school ready children in this study are respectively from each of their classrooms. The school’s population consists of around five hundred students in grades K–5, one principal (Mr. Dodd) and one vice-principal (Mrs. Holland). It is housed in an old building (circa early 1900s). There are portable classrooms located in the back of the school near a large field with play equipment and a natural garden where the children grow vegetables. Behind the school there are low-income multi-family houses in poor condition. The neighborhood is a low-income Black area of town. None of the teachers, including those who reside in this town, live in this particular section of town.

Grayson is a designated Title One school, and 43% of the students qualify for free and reduced lunch, the highest percentage in the district. This figure would be much higher if White children did not opt-in. Many years ago this was a majority low-income Black school, and the district decided it needed to attract middle class White families from the other side of town. The district changed principals and the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introducing the Non-School Ready Child
• 2 The Historical Context of the Non-School Ready Child
• 3 The Ecology of School Readiness
• 4 Higher Demands: Putting Pressure on the Identified Non-School Ready Child
• 5 Blaming the Parents
• 6 Young Black Lives Matter
• 7 Inequities and Inequalities in Early Childhood Education Programs
• 8 A Call for Action
• References
• Index