Levels of School Readiness Tied to Family Income & Education

A recent article in the Huffington Post caught our eye last week. We think it helps point out to those who want to cut social programs how important the relationship between early childhood programs and families really is to our littlest learners. A report by the Brookings Institute analyzed school readiness data from the Department of Education’s Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort and concluded that children of low income parents are less prepared for school than peers from middle and upper income families. Not surprisingly, the report also found that the higher a mother’s or father’s level of education the higher the child’s level of readiness. This means that some children walk in the kindergarten door and are already behind.

One of the good things about the report is it measured a child’s school readiness by pre-academic skills and behavior and physical health at school entry. This is a wider measure of readiness than we may typically see when it comes to assessing school readiness. Many districts misuse a narrow tool such as the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS), Developmental Indicators for the Assessment of Learning-Third Edition (DIAL-3), or Phonological Awareness Literacy Screening (PALS) to assess a child’s skills and assume that the scores indicate readiness or lack thereof. These testing instruments look very closely at a child’s response to isolated academic skills but do not consider other essential personal-social competencies and traits successful students must have in order to function well in a formal learning environment.

School readiness data from the Department of Education’s Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort was collected through early academic assessments in Math and Reading, teacher responses about Learning-Related Behavior and Externalizing Behavior, and parent responses about Physical Health.

• Reading Assessment: questions about basic/phonological skills, initial understanding, developing interpretation, demonstrating a critical stance, and vocabulary.
• Mathematics assessment: questions about number sense, properties, and operations; measurement; geometry and spatial sense; data analysis, statistics, and probability; and patterns, algebra, and functions.
• Learning-Related Behaviors: based on K teacher responses about a child’s ability to focus, work independently, work to complete a task, and a child’s eagerness to learn.
• Externalizing Behaviors: based on K teacher responses about whether a child acts impulsively, disrupts others, overly active, physically aggressive, annoys other children, and has temper tantrums.
• Physical Health: based on parent’s overall rating of a child’s heath (1-5 likert scale)

Our organization, The Source for Learning, Inc. and the National Head Start Association will be partnering to host a School Readiness Summit this spring. We strongly believe that our nation has a responsibility to seeks ways to improve children’s school readiness. For more than three decades educators have been debating what exactly school readiness is AND who should decide how and what to measure when evaluating a child’s readiness. Right now more than 25 states perform assessments in some way—some use formal instruments while others use teacher checklists. Check back for more information in the coming weeks…

Read the full report Income and Education as Predictors of School Readiness online. http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Files/rc/reports/2011/1214_school_readiness_isaacs/1214_school_readiness_isaacs.pdf