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/
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