How Education Stakeholders Made Sense of School Readiness in and Beyond Kindergarten

ABSTRACT

The focus on improving children’s readiness for kindergarten has intensified globally. While most studies examine this issue prior to children entering kindergarten, little is known about how education stakeholders make sense of readiness once children enter kindergarten. This article addresses this gap by examining how a range of stakeholders made sense of kindergarten readying children for elementary school. Our findings suggest that while context played a significant role in their conceptions of readiness, their understandings of this construct differed from previous work in that stakeholders no longer worried about children’s readiness to learn. Rather, they wanted to ensure children learned enough to be successful in school and beyond. Moreover, they shifted the responsibility for such readiness from the child to the entire system. Still, these stakeholders focused on children’s future learning. Such attention to the future not only ignores the present but also framed children at risk for success in and out of school. Such findings suggest education stakeholders should conceptualize school readiness as a multifaceted process that occurs in the present. This may allow for new policies that expand both the conceptions of the ready kindergartner as well as the practices that align with these stakeholders’ conceptions of readiness.

KEYWORDS:

• Academic achievement
• kindergarten
• policy
• readiness
• school reform

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the Spencer Foundation Small Grants Program and the Big XII Faculty Fellowship Program for their support of this study. They would also like to thank Dr. Jennifer Keys Adair, Dr. Melissa Sherfinski, Natalie Weber, Dr. Joanna Englehardt, Dr. Karen French, Robert Donald, and Hye Ryung Won for their assistance in conducting this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We did not employ the nativist view of school readiness in our analysis of data. A nativist frames readiness as “a within-the-child phenomenon,” which means children are ready to succeed in school based on their “maturational processes” (Meisels, 1999, p. 50). Such a conception of readiness takes kindergarten and/or schooling out of the readiness equation (Brown, 2010); as such, it does not align with our research question.

2. Different colleagues assisted the lead researcher each of the three days.

3. The authors would like to thank the editors of this journal and the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and insightful suggestions in strengthening this article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Big XII Faculty Fellowship Program; Spencer Foundation [201700116].