School readiness is one of the bigger topics in early learning today. But, it turns out only seven states actually assess students when they start school to get an idea of statewide trends, a new report found.

Still, all 50 states have guidelines on what kids should know when they enter school, the report adds. So, why do assessment tests matter?

The answer is the achievement gap – the academic divide between too many at-risk students and other students – remains a persistent challenge, one that quality early learning programs are trying to narrow and eventually help eliminate.

One study found that the average cognitive scores of our nation’s most affluent children are 60 percent higher than those of our poorest children before they enter kindergarten.4 Furthermore, low-income children are more likely to attend lower-quality schools, making it unlikely that these gaps can be closed later through schooling alone. – “A Review of School Readiness Practices in the States: Early Learning Guidelines and Assessments.” Early Childhood Highlights, Child Trends, 6/17/10. (See brief for footnotes.)

Overall, the issue brief examines the state of school readiness efforts and what should be considered when conducting assessments. It is not only about reading, writing and arithmetic, as many teachers and researchers know. Social-emotional and behavioral skills are important.

And students are not the only group that needs to be ready for school. Schools and families also need to be ready, the brief suggests.

“Statewide school readiness assessments help policymakers monitor how “ready for school” children are over time.  But without high-quality services for at-risk children during the early years, and schools that are ready to receive children from diverse backgrounds and with varying needs, it is likely we will continue to see wide variation in children’s school readiness skills upon entering kindergarten,” Dr. Tamara Halle, author of the brief, said in a statement.

Quality Progress: The excellent EarlyStories blog has a good and quick review of efforts to improve quality in early learning programs, “In some states, quality issues step to head of the class.” (EarlyStories has a new Internet address, so you may want to update your bookmark.)

Check it out.      

At Birth to Thrive we are keeping a close eye on efforts to rewrite the defining federal education act, and it’s newsworthy when the Council of Chief State School Officers puts its name on a report about pre-kindergarten’s importance in school reform.

The new report, Redefining ESEA: The Critical Role of Pre-K and the Early Grades in School Reform Efforts, contains a lot of ideas and questions for those who will write, debate and vote on reforms to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (No Child Left Behind), including creating a new title for early learning and ensuring those in that field are part of professional development for educators.

Plus, if we want to know why students are and are not learning, we should “ensure that longitudinal data systems include children before age 5.”

This report is only the latest sign that the Council of Chief State School Officers has endorsed adding early learning to the debate.

“Chiefs across the nation are confronted with these most serious challenges—how to eradicate deeply rooted domestic and international achievement gaps,” the council wrote in A Quiet Crisis: The Urgent Need to Build Early Childhood Systems And Quality Programs for Children Birth to Age Five.  “They now recognize that the seeds of inequity are sowed early in children’s lives, and thus their leadership of education reform must expand to encompass early childhood interventions.”

We love to ask questions here, and Redefining ESEA – an effort by the school council, Pre-K Now, the Pew Center on the States and the New America Foundation – raises a whole bunch of thoughtful ones.

• “How do you provide the most stability and protection from future cuts?”
• “To what extent will greater investments for early childhood, preschool, pre-K and preK-3rd programs lead districts to feel that they have to borrow from already existent programs?”
• “How do you measure progress in a 4- or 5-year-old? What tools are developmentally appropriate?
• How do you account for children’s different levels of ‘readiness’ when they arrive at school?”

The best, toughest and arguably most important question is: “Where will the money from?”

Extra Credit: It may not focus on preschool or pre-kindergarten, but the new National Assessment of Educational Progress at Grades 4 to 8 is worth reading as one measure of how well students are prepared before they enter K-12.

Here is the bottom line: “Reading scores up since 2007 at grade 8 and unchanged at grade 4.”

The New York Times magazine ran an interesting article Sunday about the rise of standardized testing in kindergarten, and after a little digging I learned those tests are invading early learning classrooms.

Peggy Orenstein lays out a tight argument against shoving standardized tests in front of kindergarteners.

Instead of digging in sandboxes, today’s kindergartners prepare for a life of multiple-choice boxes by plowing through standardized tests with cuddly names like Dibels (pronounced “dibbles”), a series of early-literacy measures administered to millions of kids; or toiling over reading curricula like Open Court — which features assessments every six wpoeeks.

According to “Crisis in the Kindergarten,” a report recently released by the Alliance for Childhood, a nonprofit research and advocacy group, all that testing is wasted: it neither predicts nor improves young children’s educational outcomes. More disturbing, along with other academic demands, like assigning homework to 5-year-olds, it is crowding out the one thing that truly is vital to their future success: play. – “Kindergarten Cram,” NYT Magazine, 5/3/09.

This kind of assessment of young children should not be confused with what Washington state is considering. Thrive by Five Washington, the state Department of Early Learning and the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction continue to research options for a statewide kindergarten assessment process that could better inform individual student instruction upon entering kindergarten and help improve both the early learning and K-12 systems. The assessment process would not be a barrier to kindergarten. Driving this work is the desire to give all children the chance to start school ready to succeed – or get them help as soon as possible.

I checked in with Alliance for Childhood executive director Joan Almon about what’s happening, and she surprised me with worries that those tests are seeping into preschools.

Nearly 20 years ago, Almon saw Head Start classrooms use computers to teach numbers. She has also seen instructors use songs to teach kids how to darken those test bubbles. Part of the problem is mounting pressure on schools to perform under the federal  No Child Left Behind Act, which should come up for revision or reform in the next couple of years.

“They made the stakes so high,” Almon said in an interview. “The pressure to get children ready for testing has come down the ladder.”

The good news is that Almon detects a backlash among parents sick of all the tests and the disappearance of play.

“I think we are beginning to see a backlash. I can’t say it is huge yet,” Almon said. “It is just the very beginning it of it.”  

But, there are two sides to this issue. Parents may have an abstract worry about all those tests, but it is countered by anxiety about giving their baby every advantage to succeed.