Ahh. There’s no place like home, especially if you’re a kindergartner whose been sitting and working all day on phonics worksheets, or seated in front of a screen doing reading exercises.
Once you get off that school bus it will be time to finally make a break for it. Play awaits! Looking at those pictures in books are fun too. Books are friends. They take you places you’ve never been, even if you sometimes have to guess at the words.
But, what’s this? There’s mom, beckoning you with more reading instruction at the kitchen table!
Face it kid. You can’t get a break from the pressure. Play is a distant memory. Reading for fun is for later, if ever, after you learn letter sounds and rules and get out of those dull A level books.
Across the country, parents are being instructed by their children’s teachers on how to teach their kindergartners to read. They’re told how to analyze and instruct four and five-year-old children on learning how to sound out words and read sentences at home.
Here’s the 2020 manual promoted by the Georgia Department of Education, along with the Regional Educational Laboratory Southeast called A Kindergarten Teacher’s Guide to SUPPORTING FAMILY INVOLVEMENT IN FOUNDATIONAL READING SKILLS.
It involves scaffolding, timelines, direct instruction, and strict skill alignment. It provides a video for every instructional goal, with a kindergartner who willingly sits for the camera and bustles through every instructional step. Reading is reduced to managed objectives that must be mastered.
This idea that parents of kindergartners must be reading instructors to keep their children from failing to read is troubling. It creates a sense that there’s a crisis. But the only crisis is that children in kindergarten are being forced to read early, and, when they fail, it is considered a crisis.
Some parents have figured out that kindergarten is too difficult, so they hold their children back, a strategy called redshirting. Thus children enter kindergarten as 6 year olds and kindergarten for them becomes more developmentally appropriate. It truly becomes the new first grade.
Other parents worry. In New Haven, Connecticut, reading coaches train parents how to teach their kindergartners reading. A mother expresses her concern. Her child is reading picture books but creating her own story about the pictures. (I’d say, maybe her own story is better.)
Mom says, What can I do to push her to be her optimistic self? How can I help her grow? Just because she’s a kindergartener doesn’t mean she can’t be reading at a second-grade level. I just want her to be the best she can be.
Mom wants her kindergartner to read at a second grade level! What kind of pressure are parents and teachers putting on children?
Who’s considering child development and what’s appropriate for this age?
Few remember when kindergarten was a half day and reading readiness was this:
- I can read my name.
- I can write my first name.
- I can count to 79.
- I use books the right way.
- I listen nicely to stories.
- I can tell rhymes.
Or read the chapter “Childhood as Test Prep” in The Coddling of the American Mind. Authors Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt lament how things have changed for the worse.
Kindergarten in 1979 was devoted mostly to social interaction and self-directed play, with some instruction in art, music, numbers, and the alphabet thrown in (p.187). They cite research that indicates we are now in the era of “drill and kill” and today’s kindergarten is “sedentary.”
All of a child’s actions are micromanaged by adults who have either been convinced by corporate school reformers, or journalists, with no teaching background, far removed from the classroom, that teachers know little about teaching, and they need to push children to read earlier than ever before.
How many children are currently not making reading progress because they were pushed too hard and too early to learn to read?
In New Haven, the reading coach at least has the good sense to remind the mom to make sure she reads books to her child, but she is telling the parent that kindergartners should read 12 books a week!
It is difficult to know how many children will have difficulty reading or dislike reading in the future because they were introduced to reading under so much pressure.
Some children might learn to read early, and we should encourage children to enjoy books and the sounds of words, but kindergarten is too early to be forcing children to read and making it into a crisis when they don’t.
Resource
Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. The Coddling of the American Mind. (Penguin Press: New York, 2018) p. 187.
My boys are two and a half. I feel like I have to spend the next couple of years gearing up for a fight over kindergarten academic homework. This baloney can stop any time now.
I don’t envy you with this business, Peter, but at least you get it. Think about the parents that don’t.
I have a 17 yr old and a 15 yr old. Before they entered K, I was told that they must know 50 “sight words”. Both of them learned them, we had 2 miserable summers and both of them now hate reading. “Would that I could. reverse the hands of time”….I would…..and I would tell that stupid reading teacher to shove those words where the sun doesn’t shine.
I am sorry. It’s important to realize how old your children are now, Lisa. This push for children to read in kindergarten has been going on for a LONG time. And they wonder why NAEP scores aren’t great.
I hope your young people turn it around and learn to like reading. Thanks for commenting.
Please keep in mind that the reading teacher is probably following a directive from her administration. Very few teachers agree with the current standards for grades K-1.
You make an excellent point! I agree. I know teachers worry about their jobs. I also know great teachers who do what they must, but still manage to protect their students from crummy reforms. Thank you, Michele.
Excellent article. Regrettably, my district and state are pushing reading in their preschools now and testing the preschoolers using FAST. The administrators claim they are tracking “proficiency.” Thanks to FERPA, the children’s FAST data can be kept and used by researchers. It’s nuts.
I think this is what you are referring to. https://www.fastbridge.org/.
Why? Tracking frightens parents. I wonder how many parents know this is being used. Did the school board inform parents?
Our district is pressuring kids who are newcomers to learn reading before they even develop vocabulary. It’s insane!
School districts need to gather early learning teachers and let them decide the programs that will be used. They should include parent representation too.
I’m a reading specialist. I taught my own kids how to read as soon as they were ready. It is a wonderful family bonding moment.. Reading is an epidemic in our country. Parent engagement is an epidemic. Teachers and parents working together for their child’s education.
I do not understand what you are trying to say–”reading is an epidemic…” What does that mean? I associate the word “epidemic” with the rapid spread of an infectious disease, and, at the very least, the spread of some negative event.
After a successful test run this past summer, New Haven is also implementing a more play based curriculum in four schools in consultation with the Gesell Institute.
https://www.newhavenindependent.org/index.php/archives/entry/play-based_learning_schools/?fbclid=IwAR2dQzReBmM9lcTJH0pB2_0pK73AL0lzVzwnGF1RwOq_cYnX6OWEU7kpKTM
That sounds good, Kathy. Thanks for sharing. I like anything connected to the Gesell Institute, but it troubles me to read that Common Core is “mandatory.” I know that’s the deal around the country, but it is still worrisome that these unproven standards foisted on schools by the likes of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation are written in stone.
I too hate that Common Core is driving curriculum and wrote letters to the editor opposing it for four years until I was elected in 2017 to the BOE in a suburb about 20 miles north of New Haven. I recently presented my research about the developmentally inappropriate expectations forced on our youngest students and their teachers to my fellow BOE members. My BOE was receptive and we have formed a subcommittee to look into this.
I believe the only way to make headway is for local BOEs to step up and make changes!
The state testing doesn’t happen until the end of grade 3 so there’s wiggle room in the early grades to move those expectations up to a higher grade. The state doesn’t approve curricula; local BOEs do! The testing is what forces adherence.
I keep telling my BOE that expecting all children to be reading by the end of kindergarten is counterproductive because it is so stress inducing. My own two grandchildren attend a public Montessori magnet school in Hartford and the oldest did not have the reading lightbulb go off until the middle of first grade when she turned 7. Now as a second grader she is reading just fine. Learning is a journey, not a race!
Correct in every way. We are going to have to solve this problem one local board at a time. The problem is, in our rural area, the tendency toward self-deprecation and an inferiority complex. Policy tends to be made on a state level by those who have not experienced the wide difference in readiness due to poverty. Nor have they experienced the fact of children working on farms and in houses to make ends meet. You cannot do the laundry and learn about Ramona at the same breath.
You have said it correctly. But the effect of this idea are way more sinister than you have depicted. Parents of students redshirt if they can afford it. Those who do not have an extra 10,000″or so lying about send their children on to school, hoping they can swim in this meet. They usually do not, since it is hard to compete with people a year older than you are and possessing all the advantages of a higher standard of living.
No research I am aware of suggests that reading earlier gives an individual a greater probability of being scholarly in later life.. Let the teachers decide. Faux policy makers go home.
I have seen the effects of pushing formal reading into kindergarten up close and personal with my granddaughter who has become someone who does not enjoy reading and would not choose it as something to do for leisure. This is so sad since she is a very bright child with an enormous vocabulary in spite of what she endured in kindergarten in New York City.
When I started teaching in New York City in 1967, 1/2 day kindergarten was a combination of play and learning, much of the learning accomplished through play. When I moved to NJ in the late 1970s, I no longer saw play as the center of the experience in kindergarten. I saw my older daughter sit at a desk in a classroom and complete workbook pages instead of playing to learn. Later, when, as a school board member, I helped bring full-day kindergarten to our small suburban town, my hope was that the extended time would slow down children’s days in schools and that we would go back to more play with learning. And that did happen for a while. My son had a really good kindergarten experience.
Move ahead to 2017, I am supervising a student teacher in a full-day kindergarten in my town, in a school that houses three grades: prekindergarten, kindergarten, and first grade. Children are being asked to engage in formal guided reading lessons, They are experiencing mostly full class direct instruction, free play is limited to 20 minutes on Fridays, pretend play, blocks, manipulatives, and painting, as well as other art supplies have been removed from the classroom. As a retired teacher and retired college professor of early childhood education, I was horrified.
Since I live in the town where my student teacher was experiencing this mode of teaching in kindergarten, I was able to discuss the situation with our superintendent. I could not do this in other towns where other students were placed. In the clinical situation, we are guests with no power to change the way teaching unfolds in a school or classroom. This situation is very sad.
We have allowed billionaires and hedge fund managers to push an agenda that has wreaked havoc with our schools and the education of our children. I think we are witnessing the pendulum swinging back a bit. I hope so. Teachers need to stand up for what they know is the best way for children to learn and what is developmentally appropriate for them. Thank you for this timely post.
“we are guests with no power to change the way teaching unfolds in school or classroom….”
But parents are paying customers whose voices have been suppressed. These are some of the reasons that school choice is becoming very popular. Why should our students have to sacrifice their love of education to an unwieldy, faceless monolith restricting their access to best fit programs and services? Please support universal vouchers. Don’t allow them to hold students hostage.
Your voices aren’t suppressed. You can organize with other parents and present your case respectfully to the school board. Teachers can do this too but it is a little more difficult, especially if they don’t have tenure. Teachers might be afraid they will lose their jobs.
The billionaires who are able to push these reforms into public schools want you to leave public education. Do you understand this? The money you get with a voucher doesn’t mean your child will get into a good private school. It either won’t cover the expense or the school might reject your child. It really isn’t your choice. It’s their choice. It does divert money to charters and schools that have no oversight.
Making kindergarten the new first grade is not that new. It started in the early 90’s when I was a child. Both acdemic and behavioral expectations much higher compared to previous decades. I was scolded for lying on my stomach during nap time while in kindergarten. Now nap time is no longer in kindergarten.
How were you supposed to lie?! Did they seriously prescribe proper nap time position?
I am a public school teacher currently a reading specialist working with inner city first graders. They don’t get what they need at home. Rather than utilizing the prescribed program I mostly do read alouds, large interactive poems, shared writing, and “driting.”
My own son, now in 3rd grade, is reading way beyond his years and resulting from the home being filled with books, rarely saying no when asked “will you read to me?”, a print rich environment connecting meaning to words, and bring models by reading for pleasure ourselves. He loves reading and I never have to force him to do it.
I am appalled that despite how much we know of child development we do the exact opposite in school now.
Of all the education reform I’ve seen in over 25 years of teaching, the pushing of grades down (4 to 3, 3 to 2, 2 to 1, and 1 to k)leaving kindergarten basically non-existent is the most harmful. I wouldn’t be able to teach kindergarten now bc it is so developmentally inappropriate.
It sadly seems designed to make children fail. You put it very well. All grades are age inappropriate. Thank you, Letitia.