At the Thomas B. Fordham Wonk-a-Thon, where they ask what should happen next, Elliot Regenstein, a lawyer, states that The science of reading doesn’t start with kindergarten—it starts at birth. Fordham should look in the rearview mirror at the consequences of forcing young children to read before they’re ready, as NCLB and Common Core both began pushing overly demanding standards and high-stakes assessments on early childhood.
The Science of Reading is troubling because it pressures early learners to read, everyone on the same page and earlier than ever before, often through heavy phoneme drilling. After all these years, few consider whether five-year-olds may need more time or whether the introduction of formal reading instruction should, in fact, be delayed until first grade, as it used to be.
High-stakes standards have been foisted on students for years. The expectation is that children move along learning at the same pace, which isn’t how children learn at all. Isn’t it time such standards share the blame for poor NAEP scores? Instead, Regenstein is promoting what already doesn’t work with kindergartners to the earlier years!
We never used to expect kindergartners to read, and yet now that’s the norm. If children need more time, however, they may never catch up, feeling like failures. No wonder kids don’t like to read anymore (Horowitch, 2024).
This “reading starts at birth” jargon is often deceptive. Of course, learning to read involves many language elements that begin at birth, especially oral language. Children hear stories read to them and connect pictures with words. They eventually recognize the letters of the alphabet, practice sounds, and learn to print their names.
Pick up a child development book like Your Baby and Child From Birth to Age Five by Penelope Leach, or Child Behavior From Birth to Ten by Ilg and Ames —my personal favorites —and you can document what to expect from a baby from the moment they’re born.
Instead, the push is now for higher standards in preschool —and for babies, even earlier! One envisions parents holding their infants in front of the computer screen for baby phoneme instruction.
Regenstein preaches more standards out of sync with earlier child development. It’s like pressuring kindergartners to read isn’t enough; they’ve got to go lower.
Some of Regenstein’s points are decent. Expanding free preschool, providing access to great early childcare for all children, and ensuring that early childhood teachers have credentials are long overdue. He can yell that from the hilltops.
But it’s presumptuous to assume that teachers haven’t known how to work with children in developmentally age-appropriate preschool settings. Is he aware of the HighScope Perry Preschool Project?
The study showed:
HighScope’s longitudinal study confirms the lifetime effects of high-quality early childhood education, such as intellectual and social development in childhood and future school success, economic performance, and reduced commission of crime in adulthood. The Perry Preschool Study indicates that the return to the public on its initial investment in such programs is substantial.
See: Educating Young Children by Mary Hohmann and David P. Weikart (p. 358-9, 1997) for great early-childhood friendly activities.
Regenstein’s messaging goes off track. His emphasis on standards and statewide assessments for the preschoolers is nauseating. He and his EduWonk friends are caught up in the world of NAEP to define children as failures who need more of what never worked to begin with!
In his Fordham report he says:
Implement statewide assessments that track progress toward kindergarten readiness goals. These assessments should include a focus on essential pre-literacy and early literacy skills—helping teachers to improve their engagement with children and giving policymakers a window into what is working and what isn’t.
We know what great early learning involves; what’s needed is the will to do it, and for policymakers to follow a child’s development to be connected to how they learn and quit pressuring children to learn earlier.
The disturbing words Regenstein uses include alignment, more instructional minutes which likely means drilling children on sounds, and data driving, and tracking, which raise privacy issues, all which promotes cookie cutter results. If standards are out of line with a child’s development, children who may learn to read well if formal instruction begins later, may be pegged unnecessarily with a learning disability.
While child development experts have clearly outlined the stages children move through to learn and grow, and it’s well understood that children don’t arrive at these stages always at the same time, the SoR is claiming a revolution, rehashing the old, and pushing children to read at an earlier age, now preschool, even at age three or earlier.
But high stakes standards are nothing new. They haven’t worked with older students so why would they work with early learners?
Here’s a great way to help your babies read.
Reference
Horowitch, D. (2024). The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books. The Atlantic, https://readwise.io/reader/shared/01ja6jx0b0ytqhe120wq9hdtdv/
I think there may be some misunderstandings here. For anyone interested in what the science of reading actually involves, the Reading League has clear, evidence-based information at thereadingleague.org.
I appreciate the Reading League, but I disagree with much about the Science of Reading for the reasons stated above.
Kindergarten should not be first grade, and you put this comment on the Chall post. Jeanne Chall was an expert and saw phonics as being important. I do as well. But she also pointed to first grade as the time to teach phonics.
It’s undeniable that education reform has quietly eaten crow, so the trendy new pivot is to early childhood education interventions. That being said, a focus on interacting with infants is not a bad idea, since kids are coming to kindergarten with severe delays from being put in front of a phone since infancy.
It’s certainly critical to interact with infants, as stated, and I’m always interested in research on reading picture books to babies. I swear my own child learned a bunch of vocabulary from Richard Scarry’s Busytown books, and reading came easily. Language development involves much more than is usually discussed or promoted by the SoR proponents.
But are kindergartners coming to school with delays? Or are the expectations increasingly more difficult? My point. I get what you’re saying about iPhones and cringe when I see parents handing them to kids in waiting rooms, etc., instead of books, but this idea that kindergartners are behind before they get started and then said to be failing is a huge concern.
Thank you for your comment.
The question isn’t just when to teach phonics but how and toward what end. Two excellent sources on this topic that, among other things, call out the Reading League’s propaganda by name: Robert J. Tierney and P. David Pearson, Fact-Checking the Science of Reading (Literacy Research Commons, 2024 – available at https://literacyresearchcommons.org/); and David Reinking et al., “Legislating Phonics: Settled Science or Political Polemics?”, Teachers College Record 125 (2023): 104-31 – available at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.1177/01614681231155688.
Thank you, Alfie Kohn! Two terrific resources. I appreciate the links.
Well, I have to say, when I write a blog post I’m never sure if anybody is going to read it – so I am glad that somebody did! And I appreciate your points. I wanted to respond because I actually think that we agree about more than your post suggests, and while there may be points of disagreement I hope this response is helpful in clarifying what they are.
In my experience there are two major ideas relating to early childhood policy that are thought of as being in tension that really shouldn’t be. One is the idea that strong early education is necessary to help kids get off to a good start in school, particularly the kids who don’t come from a privileged background; the other is the idea that early childhood education should be play-based, fun, and developmentally appropriate. My blog post focuses on the former, and yours on the latter – but I don’t think those things are in conflict at all. Indeed, I take your response to be informed by years of scar tissue from having K-12 leaders mistakenly push bad practice into early childhood, and I couldn’t agree more with that concern (https://www.flpadvisors.com/uploads/4/2/4/2/42429949/why_the_k12_world_hasnt_embraced_early_learning.pdf_final.pdf)..
I also totally agree that early childhood assessments shouldn’t be used for accountability purposes; indeed, I’m on record saying as much (https://www.startearly.org/resource/uses-and-misuses-of-kindergarten-readiness-assessment-results/). But I do believe that assessment can be a useful tool for improving classroom instruction, as discussed in this article in the National Association for the Education of Young Children’s magazine from a few years back (https://www.naeyc.org/resources/blog/joyful-learning). My blog post did not explicitly state those beliefs and so I can see why you flagged that, but please know that I am absolutely not in favor of early childhood assessments being used for accountability.
The issue of standards may be a little more complicated. I am certainly not here to defend the developmental appropriateness of every single state standard out there, but in general my experience has been that states developing their early learning standards are pretty thoughtful about including experts in child development and paying attention to the “whole child.” When I talk about alignment of standards, I am mostly thinking about pushing that approach upwards; I think we might actually agree that having the K-3 standards look more like the early learning standards would in many cases be a much better approach.
As for teachers, I share your view that many teachers know how to work with children in developmentally age-appropriate preschool settings. But too often that doesn’t happen, for a variety of reasons, including: (1) teachers aren’t actually trained in developmentally age-appropriate practices, so they default to practices that would be better used with older children (or in some cases wouldn’t even be appropriate for those children); (2) instructional leaders in school settings don’t understand child development, and so they push teachers to use practices that aren’t developmentally appropriate; and (3) teachers who are trained in developmentally-appropriate practices for young children are paid so little that they choose to do some other job instead, potentially teaching older children. There is as you say a lot of great teaching going on in the early childhood years, but there’s not enough of it because we don’t pay and support teachers in those years as if we desire to have that great teaching at scale.
I definitely that words like “alignment” and “more instructional minutes” don’t exactly have a positive history with early childhood educators, and I can see how they evoke all of the bad possibilities you identify. My broadest point in the blog post was that if states care about supporting early reading, the best strategy to achieve that will be to include the early learning years in their approach. There are surely strategic and tactical differences in how best to do that, and I don’t want to gloss over that part – especially given the history of state and K-12 leaders misunderstanding how teaching practice and assessment should work in the pre-kindergarten years. But I am grateful for your response to my blog post, and I think we share the hope that policymakers will increase their support for early education and be thoughtful about child development in doing so.