Getting Schools Ready for Children:
The Other Side of the Readiness Goal

Executive Summary

By the Year 2000:
All children will be ready for the first grade.

Goals for Education: CHALLENGE 2000

Achieving the first national and regional education goals – readiness for school – requires more than just helping children be ready for school. Schools must also be ready to meet the needs of all children, including those who are less ready than we would like them to be. The benefits of high quality preschool programs and other measures to improve children's readiness can be lost very quickly when students enter schools that are not ready to help them sustain those gains.

Making schools ready for all children will require fundamental changes in the way most primary schools look and function. Our knowledge and understanding of how children develop and learn has expanded dramatically in recent decades. There is broad agreement among experts in early childhood education about the ways schools can enhance rather that inhibit learning. Yet the typical primary school classroom in the United States has changed very little.

The resource to make the needed changes are, to a large degree, already in place. But a fundamental shift in the way those resources are used must occur. Failure of primary school students to master basic skills and develop positive attitudes toward learning leads to problems that typically can be addressed only at high cost and with marginal chances of success in later grades. Focusing more of the resources now used for remediation on assuring success for all students in the primary years would yield a far greater return on our investment.

This report identifies changes that schools must make in their kindergarten and primary programs if they are to contribute to rather than hinder progress toward achieving Goal 1.

• All schools should implement developmentally appropriate curriculum, instruction, and assessment practices in kindergarten and grades 1-3.
• Results on standardized norm-referenced achievement tests should not be used to assess the progress or potential of individual pre-school or primary-age children; each child's progress should be compared primarily to his or her own previous performance and to standards for development of critical skills.
• Strategies such as holding "at-risk" children out of school or requiring them to repeat kindergarten or a primary grade have been proven ineffective and even harmful and should be eliminated as options for most children.
• Funds currently used to provide remediation in later grades should be available to schools to support early intervention services that have been proven effective in helping individual children achieve success, most notably, intensive one-to-one tutoring by certified teachers.
• Schools should create an environment that encourages and assists parents in becoming actively involved in their children's education, and that rewards teachers for helping them to do so.
• Schools should adopt formal, written policies and procedures to improve communication between teachers and parents (or other caregivers) and to ease the transitions of both children and families as they move from preschool to school and between kindergarten and the primary grades.
• Kindergarten and primary grade teachers, as well as elementary schools administrators, should be required to have formal training in child development and early childhood education.
• Schools should have substantially increased flexibility in the way they spend state and local funds to help all primary age children achieve success, but should be held accountable for producing the desired results.

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