The National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) has this to say about kindergarten or what they term school readiness, "NAEYC believes it is the responsibility of schools to meet the needs of children as they enter school and to provide whatever services needed to help each child reach his/her fullest potential." (naeyc.org, Position Statements, Where We Stand) According to the NAEYC school readiness requires families to have access to resources that will allow them to help their children succeed. They also believe that all young children and their families should be able to access high quality early education programs that can give the young child the foundations needed to be ready for school, and that programs need to identify children who may be at risk for school failure in later years and begin providing them with the services needed. Their position statement on school readiness states, "School readiness must be flexible and broadly defined." (naeyc.org, Position Statements, Where We Stand, School Readiness) The NAEYC also strongly believes that all children should begin kindergartn at the age their state has deemed appropriate. There is no proof that holding children back from entering school until an older age provides them any gains in academic or social development.
The journal entry from Wiley online library that really caught my attention is one on Head Start and School Readiness. Since I currently work in a Head Start program I am very interested as to how Head Start stacks up against other preschool settings when getting young children ready for kindergarten. In this journal entry, Behavioral and Cognitive Readiness for School: Cross-Domain associations for Children Attending Head Start, they looked at how a child's social and emotional maturity effected the status of their cognitive and academic abilities. It is stated in this journal article, "Classroom participation and prosocial behavior each accounted for unique variance in cognitive readiness. Aggressive behavior, in contrast, was not correlated with academic knowledge, and was associated with low levels of executive function skills. In multiple regressions, aggressive behavior paradoxically enhanced the prediction of child cognitive readiness." As a student looking to obtain professional status in the early childhood setting, and particularly with Head Start, I find this very interesing. This information brings up the question, so public pre-K programs fare the same? This is somethign I will look into for future information.
Hi Tina, It's really interesting that parents are so concerned and yet, as you say, don't know what to think. The professional articles seem focused on much more specific concerns that aren't likely understandable to the general public, which raises the question of how one is going to get answers to the other.
ReplyDeleteI also think that last quotation is quite interesting: are they saying that they found that the more aggressive a child is, the easier it is to determine that child's readiness for school? It isn't quite clear to me from the quotation what the implications of their findings are.