Stand Against the Word "Readiness"By Tom Drummond, North Seattle Community College In my advocacy for young children and their families I prefer to advocate positively, FOR things rather than against. There are too many people saying no. But in this case, I think AGAINST is warranted. We have to clear away some rubbish lying about before we can build the future we want for our children. I would like to discuss
the word "readiness." The January 2004 issue of Young Children, published by the National Association for the Education of Young Children, has an article entitled, "School Readiness Assessment" by Kelly Maxwell and Richard Clifford, edited by Diane Horm. These quotes from
their article seem both sensible and agreeable: That is exactly the problem I want to address: if it is indeed the school's responsibility, why do we want to define children as ready or not? Odd, isn't it? One would think that given the murkiness of clearly defining "education" in a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-multi society, the present search for defining and assessing readiness for that education is, at best, useless, at worst, a diversion. The idea of "readiness" itself shifts the focus to the wrong place: the child. It is like the old joke about the drunk searching for his keys under the streetlamp across the street from where he dropped it. Why? "Because the light is better over here." It is indeed odd, yet the public discourse about "readiness" grows stronger every year, while few are talking directly about its bias. It is, as I see it, another form of institutionalizing discrimination. I invite you to travel into this with me. If one were calmly thoughtful about the problem of young children becoming successful learners the logical thoughts, it seems to me, would go this way. 1. In the common sense view, many parents are concerned about the future lives of their own children. Part of parent's concern is wanting one's children to be successful in school, whatever "success" means. Of course, we all know, all our children are different, with different talents and perspectives, so success is rather undefined in its positive sense, other than the reality that those who do very well in school make a lot more money in their lives. The other part of parent's concern is wanting one's children to avoid the one's own remembered feelings of failure, self-doubt, and despair. We all know how schools have destroyed parts of us. 2. Schools ought to be enabling all children to be successful. Isn't that truly the goal we share? But the goal is not happening. We see that schools do not enable ALL children to live more fully developed lives. We share this concern, and we collectively recognize the essential reasons for this; we do have the following documented and widely agreed-upon facts. 3. The differences among children in various skills, knowledge and dispositions at age 6 are amplified by the time they reach high school. A little difference when young is a huge difference when older. School spreads people apart. (Benjamin Bloom, Human Characteristics and School Learning, 1976) 4. Children who have quality early experiences prior to 18 months (much brain research) and use and hear complex language (Betty Hart & Todd Risley, Meaningful Differences, 1995) generally do just fine in school, in their own unique ways. They can play the game. Their synapses are not "pruned" and they find it natural to use language to think with and to acquire with. 5. The essential developmental task of young children is becoming themselves in a community of others. Most of their important development as human beings occurs in opportunities where they get to play with other children, the more diverse the better. Through play and daily life, they become socially adept and physically competent; they can lead and follow, make friends, lose friends, and restore friends. They come to know others and build the being of others (fascinating thought when you consider it). In natural ways they become able to initiate actions for their own betterment, the betterment of others, and the betterment of the community. They inquire, investigate, and represent in paint, and blocks, and clay. They come to love. This becoming is integrated into daily life, on the farm, in the desert, and in our best schools. 6. Therefore, it seems logical that if we want all children to "succeed," we need to provide good experiences for them, what John Dewey would call "educative" experiences, ones that lead to openness, renewal, and engagement, and lead on into the next learning. 7. To achieve this, we invest in quality early education in a wide variety of settings for our youngest children, just as parents with power do for their children -- staying home, or hiring nannies, or buying quality school experiences. To provide for the education of all children, it is essential that resources be transferred from the most wealthy. Since the need for resources continues, that transfer extends beyond the early years. It means, as well, that we invest in smaller and fully funded public elementary through high schools and teachers. It naturally continues on into higher education after that. One of the great strengths of this country is its widespread commitment to public education. We know its value for everyone. It is, despite the current rhetoric, a common good. This rational flow of thought, of course, assumes it is valuable and beneficial for ALL OF US to invest in a common good, even if we don't have our own children, because the returns multiply back for us, as bread upon the waters. It benefits all of us economically (bright, inventive, hard working, and capable producers), benefits all of us socially (caring and bonded to each other in our communities), and benefits all of us physically (humans invested in responsibility for life, in all its forms, unending, on the planet). It seems not only logical, to me, but also essential to life. But the present power holders in the United States do not want to allocate the public's own money for public education or public school teachers or, for that matter, any public agency. We have in power an authoritarian, populist, corporatist administration that does not care about a common good. The present power holders apparently want to avoid creating educated people, for educated people might become immune to propaganda and advertising, and worse still, might become a political constituency united against them. So the powerful unite with corporate media to prohibit a national discussion of the 7 numbered ideas above. The public's common resources, largely raised by taxing the lower and middle classes, are, in their mind, allocated, not for the common good, but for the military to "defend" investment interests and wealth extraction abroad and for vital assistance to insider friends to promote corporate profits, and, in turn, to ensure their own re-election. Authoritarian populist power acts for power and greed for a few, directly opposite what most people would call the common good. In the dominant discourse about education, the powerful twist the goal around from helping children to blaming them. Instead of looking at schools as the source of the problem, they say the problem lies within the children. They turn us away from examining what we can do together for schools, children, and families to force the question, "Are the children ready or are they not ready?" Naturally, if we think this way, we have to assess the children on certain abilities the powerful decide upon. They continue, throughout elementary school to test them constantly, as if to hold these "no-good" public employees "accountable" for learning. The corporatist aim is to divert discussion from constructing ideal provisions for early education to the assessment of each child's "readiness". This word "readiness" implies that someone is making a judgment about another human being, in a predictive way, in reference to some context in the future. The idea is based on the fact that we do see older children, mostly poor, from certain backgrounds, failing in middle school and high school. (Of course, nothing will be done to help schools engage those older ones, other than make existing under-funded schools compulsive, take attendance every period to catch the skippers, take the doors off the toilets, and make schools more like jail.) The prediction is made that some children fail in school because they were "not ready". The emphasis upon "readiness", set into the national discourse in Goals 2000, to address the complexity of background factors that work against young children, a worthy goal, has codified a looking at very young children as future failures instead of capable people who haven't failed anything yet and want to play. Without investing in health care, support, early education, family wages, or parent education, Goals 2000 leaves a legacy of a word to mask that inaction: "readiness". Certain children are "not ready" is the part unspoken. "Readiness" is a negative idea, like "learning disability." It is not defined by what one can do, but by what one cannot do. "Readiness" blames the "not-doer." It implies the "not-doer" and his or her parents are deficient. So the child needs fixing or therapy or some kind of correction. "Readiness" promotes the idea that some young human beings are OK and some are NOT. This twisted version of caring focuses on identifying the bad ones. If we can find the NOT's, somebody will (might) do something to correct that condition. Of course, it goes without saying, the "ready" ones are fine. The end result is a way of thinking that creates a stigma for a varied group of young human beings -- the "not-ready." We can hear the rationale for this in corporatist speak: "Yes, it's unfortunate that we have to do this, but we do it to help them." The reality they do not mention is that nobody will do anything about helping the NOTs because there is no money for it. They also are not mentioning what the research makes clear: if we want cognitive and linguistic abilities we have to have spaces for children and families from birth to three years of age, in the window where these neural pathways are formed. The limitations on providing funding for those spaces for children in our country were set in the ground rules: corporatists and their politicians started this focus on "readiness" at the same time as they cut the amount of taxpayers money allocated for schools and teachers and passed new regulations squeezing states harder. New money for children is never allowed to come to the floor for a vote. These same people have created a huge federal deficit to ensure the "bleeding hearts" cannot ever provide that money. Tax breaks for the wealthy allow them to fund private schools for their own elite children. Som of those in this authoritarian populist movement openly proclaim, "We will nibble at the public sector until it is so small it blows away." What is most distressing is how many in the education establishment accept this tyranny. For evidence one can examine this excerpt is from a document funded by the American Federation of Teachers: "Nonetheless,
the lack of quality early childhood education programs in the United States
is evident in the significant percentage of children starting kindergarten
without the necessary skills to do well in school. Too many of these children
lack critical preliminary skills such as knowledge of letters and numbers,
how to hold a book, or how to interact positively with their peers or
teachers. When unaddressed early on, these deficiencies contribute to
the achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students--a gap
that has narrowed over time, but that still remains too wide." Federal money provides
carrots to the educational establishment to accept the idea of "readiness",
like this: Here is what is happening in a nutshell. The failure of older children at academic tasks in elementary and middle school becomes the rationale for pressing academic behaviors upon younger and younger groups of children. We pushed down 1st Grade into Kindergarten, despite the widespread protests of parents and teachers. Now we push down standards for "literacy" onto four-year-olds without any logic or sensitivity to human development, as well. The current authoritarian populist federal policy manipulates the system to reward direct instruction in academic tasks of four- and five-year-olds, rationalized with biased research, and punishments waiting for those districts that do not comply. Behind this approach is a fundamental assumption that we -- all of us, parents, teachers, and all those involved in early education in our country -- are incompetent. Parents, teachers, and care providers are the reason the children are deficient. If there could be a valid reason for our apparent "incompetence," it is the box squeezing so tightly around us: low wages for parents in the Wal-Mart economy, no support for wages for providers, no health care for children, and no support for the education of the early education workforce. It is all these people can do to squeak by, living on the edge in their love for children. Today the early education field finds themselves, without financial support, in a twisted national policy that stands in judgment of them and prescribes to them what they have to do. The box squeezes tighter each year on the poor as the rich hunt quail and send tax dollars to friends. We cannot, ethically, remain silent when the powerful pass laws and regulations that treat the early childhood community in inhuman ways and preclude providing resources to them. We cannot be mesmerized by corporate-sponsored (tax deductible, of course) funding of fancy brochures and TV programs that strum our heartstrings and pretend something is being done. Like ads for the goodness of the General Electric Corporation, these ease us into acquiescence, assuage the tyranny, and deny the existence of a serious national problem. One way we can fight back is to deny these power mongers the wool they place in our eyes -- the wool of "children being ready for school". It is a flawed idea. It allows the agreement that some children are deficient. Little ones, the ones you and I know and love, are flawed. The "readiness" idea is class-ist because these not-ready ones are predominantly poor. It is racist, because these not-ready ones are predominantly black and Hispanic. It is English-ist, because many come from backgrounds where English was not the native language. "Readiness", when applied to children, is a biased concept. We used to describe the reasons for school failure as being in the nature of the "lower classes," or in the nature of "Negroes," and we gradually stopped that. Then we said the problems were in the "at-risk" population, and we gradually stopped that. We seem to still call children "disadvantaged;" will we ever stop that? Now the buzzword is "readiness." In conceiving some children as "ready" we create children who are "not ready." It is the same tyranny in new clothes. It is reasonable to think of readiness of schools, on the other hand, just as we think of getting our homes ready for guests. It is not our guests who are ready or not ready for their visit. I invite you all to stand against the use of that word about children. We constantly have to examine the way words justify privilege, power, and difference. We confront our own integrity, or lack thereof, when we use the "ready" word to refer to children. It violates the most fundamental ethic of the early childhood profession: First Do No Harm. I call upon all those in the early childhood education community, institutions and individuals, and everyone who claims to be anti-bias, to avoid using or condoning the word "readiness." Let's bury this word. Tom Drummond
Some interesting sources: http://www.qesnrecit.qc.ca/kinder/en/program.htm http://www.naeyc.org/resources/journal/2004/btj01/Raver.pdf Here are some quotes
from Robert J. Sternberg, a major researcher on intelligence, published
on the web from an interview with Skeptic.com: "When I was
very young, I did poorly on IQ tests because I was test anxious. The result
was that teachers had low expectations for me and I wanted to please my
teachers. So I met their low expectations. They were happy and I was happy
that they were happy. I've been there and I've seen it happen to lots
of people I know. I got over my test anxiety and then did extremely well
on tests. All of a sudden the expectations were high. To a large extent
it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, either way. So when you tell me
that IQ predicts later success, sure it does. You get low scores on your
tests, everything starts to change in your life and you're on a downhill
slide. It's not a controlled experiment, because the very score itself
is having an effect on where you're going to be allowed to go." Sternberg, R. J. (1997). What does it mean to be smart? Educational Leadership, 5, 20-24. |