Since the adoption of regional education goals in 1988 and national goals in 1990, most efforts to achieve Goal 1 – readiness for school – have focused on children's development in the preschool years. The 1992 SREB report Readiness for School: The Early Childhood Challenge provided a framework and guiding principles for addressing the problems faced by preschool children and their families.
But it is not enough to help children be ready for school. Schools must also be ready to meet the needs of all children. In far too many cases, schools today are as unprepared to help all children achieve success as are many of the children themselves. Achieving Goal 1 will require fundamental changes in the way most primary schools look and function.
Evidence of the need for change is plentiful. According to the 1004 Kids Count Data Book, almost 11 percent of infants in the SREB states are born to unwed teenage mothers, and one of every three teens fails to complete high school on time. Both rates have worsened since the mid-1980s. During the same period, violent crime arrest rates for youths age 10-17 have nearly doubled, while violent deaths for teens age 15-19 have risen by 14 percent.
The economic and social costs to society of these and related problems are enormous, and the seeds that ultimately produce those unwelcome harvests often are sown during the early childhood years – birth through age eight. Research has found strong evidence that even violent criminal behavior in later life can be linked to problems occurring in early childhood.
The youth who have generated these dismal statistics are products of schools that have changed relatively little in the past two decades. Aside from the addition of computers, the typical primary classroom today looks much as it did prior to World War II, when almost ten percent of the 18 million young men drafted for military duty were found to be "mentally deficient," a euphemism for illiterate.
The second half of the twentieth century has been a period of astonishing and unprecedented growth in scientific knowledge and understanding. Advances in the biological and physical sciences have revolutionized health care, communications, and countless other fields. Despite equally dramatic gains in our knowledge of how children develop and learn, however, educational change has not kept pace. The hospital or the telephone switching operation of the 1990s would be almost unrecognizable to someone who last worked in those industries 25 years ago. The typical primary schools classroom, in contrast, would look quite familiar to a time traveller from the 1950s or even earlier.
Broad agreement exists among experts in child development and early childhood education about the ways children learn and the ways schools can enhance rather that inhibit that learning. The purpose of this report is to examine the changes needed to make all primary schools – kindergarten through grade three – part of the solution rather than part of the problem. Primary schools that are ready to meet the increasingly diverse needs of today's children will look different from those most of today's adults experienced. But the ultimate goal remains the same – to help all children acquire the social and academic skills they will need to achieve success in the fourth and fifth grades and beyond.
Accomplishing the needed changes will not be easy and will not happen overnight. Success will require school administrators, teachers, and parents to change their behaviors and their expectations of both children and schools. The resources and knowledge to make those changes are, to a large degree, already in place. But a fundamental shift is needed in the way those resources – human and otherwise – are used to give children the best possible start in school.
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