The Reading Rush: What Educators Say about Kindergarten Reading Expectations
A student sits at the kitchen table of her Washington, D.C.-area home. She rubs her eyes as she cries. A book lay open in front of her. The six-year-old kindergartener shouts in desperation at her mother, “I can’t do this! I don’t know how to read!”
Many kindergarteners are experiencing similar outbursts with the national push to get them to read and write by year-end. For some students, this is a walk in the park. But the majority of educators who responded to an NEA Today Facebook post on reading-age appropriateness, say most kindergartners aren’t ready.
“Parents think their children will learn letter recognition and sounds. They are shocked to learn what is expected in kindergarten,” says Hilda Kendrick, a kindergarten teacher in Jeffersonville, Ind. “The reading requirements stress out teachers and students.”
Kendrick explains that the Indiana Academic Standards and the College and Career Readiness Standards for reading expect kindergartener to not only read, but write sentences, too. Under the Common Core State Standards, kindergarteners do more than just sing the ABCs. They are guided to develop a deep understanding of what the alphabet does and how each letter blends to make words.
Pennsylvania kindergarten teacher Holly Mariucci says, “There are a lot of kids who aren’t ready for that. There’s so much pressure on them to perform.”
The root of this pressure could be traced as far back as 1983, with the Nation at Risk, which lambasted the state of U.S. schools and called for a host of much-needed reforms to right the alarming direction that public education was seen to be headed.
Since this scathing indictment, most schools have taken drastic steps to meet the report’s challenge to adopt “more rigorous and measurable standards” for learning.
In 2002, No Child Left Behind scaled up expectations that trickled down to young learners. Subsequently, “the law placed pressure on students in kindergarten, first, and second grades to pass the third-grade standardized test,” says Shyrelle Eubanks, a senior policy analyst for NEA and a former kindergarten teacher in Maryland.
But Eubanks says children can do more in kindergarten. “It is not developmentally inappropriate to learn to read in kindergarten. It’s the approach that could be developmentally inappropriate.”
Peggy Martin-Lockhart of the Greater St. Louis Area agrees, saying it’s okay to expose early learners to print so they can begin to recognize site words, “but you can’t The Reading Rush: What Educators Say about Kindergarten Reading Expectations - NEA Today: