Policymakers' neoliberal education reforms have altered the landscape of publicly funded early education in the United States and across the globe. Practically speaking, these reforms expect early childhood teachers to prepare their students for success in elementary school and later life by providing them with a specific set of knowledge and skills. This creates a new set of challenges for early educators who strive to prepare their culturally and linguistically diverse students for school in a manner that addresses their individual, cultural, and sociopolitical needs. The study discussed in this article set out to examine how teachers who were identified as meeting their students' various needs prepared them for success in elementary school. In doing so, it became apparent that these teachers struggled to define their practices as well as the construct of effective teaching in ways that went beyond policymakers' neoliberal conception of the early education process. This article examines this tension and considers what is possible for teachers and the field of publicly funded early education in these highly structured neoliberal systems of governance.
Kindergarten in the United States has fundamentally changed. It is the new first grade where children are taught increased academic content and experience more standardized testing. There is much debate among education stakeholders about these changes, but such discussions are often siloed— making it difficult to know whether these changes reflect these stakeholders’ understandings of kindergarten specifically or public education in general. This explorative video-cued multivocal ethnographic study addressed this issue by examining how local, state, and national education stakeholders made sense of the changed kindergarten. Such findings provide insight into what it is they viewed driving these academic and instructional changes, what opportunities for further reform exist, and whether these stakeholders will work to support and/or alter such changes.
As policy-makers continue to implement early childhood education reforms that frame the field as a mechanism that is to ready children for elementary school success, questions arise as to how the multiple variables in the readiness equation, such as the child, family, and program, are affected by these policies. The instrumental case study presented in this article looks at this dilemma by examining how a collection of prekindergarten stakeholders in the United States aligned their academic performance expectations for students with their district’s standards-based kindergarten through grade 12 education system. Such an analysis highlights the issues that arise for early educators who are asked to define the ready student within a standards-based education environment. Through this case study, the author makes suggestions for early childhood advocates and educators that can assist them in working with policy-makers and administrators to develop a balanced vision of the readiness equation that takes into account not only children’s academic skills and knowledge but also the capacity of the family, the school, and the community to prepare these children for school success.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.