Academic Rigor in the Changed Kindergarten: Examining Teachers' Struggles and Identifying Opportunities for Transformation

• In Event: 21.039 - From Policy to Practice: Exploring the "Implementation Gap" in Early Childhood Education

Abstract

Kindergarten in the United States (US) has fundamentally changed (Russell, 2011). It no longer reflects the metaphorical garden that nurtures children for elementary school (Beatty, 1995). Rather, as Bassok, Latham, and Rorem (2016) suggested, it is the new first grade designed to academically prepare children for elementary school success by teaching them more academic content through: fewer “child-selected activities” and increased “teacher-directed instruction,” “the heightened use of textbooks, workbooks, and worksheets,” and teachers giving children more standardized testing (p. 14).

Much of this change is the result of the implementation of standards-based accountability reforms, which narrowed the focus of schooling to improve students’ academic achievement (Author a; Lee & Reeves, 2012). Other drivers of this change to kindergarten include: empirical studies revealing substantial cognitive development in children (Fox, Levitt, & Nelson, 2012); the expansion of publicly funded preschool (Barnett, Friedman-Krauss, Gomez, Horowitz, Weisenfeld, & Squires, 2016); parents making significant investments in their children’s learning prior to kindergarten entry (Kornrich & Furstenberg, 2013); and research documenting the immediate and long-term effects of high-quality preschool and kindergarten programs on children’s academic and economic careers (Heckman, Moon, Pinto, Savelyev, & Yavitz, 2010).

As these changes have taken hold over the kindergarten classroom, much of the research examining the impact of these policies has been either on how kindergarten teachers responded to or try to amend their practices primarily to attend to policymakers’ concerns while addressing children’s learning needs (e.g., Bauml, 2016) or how such reforms affect their conceptions of such education constructs as school readiness (e.g., Author). Little is known about how these primary implementors of policymakers’ reforms, the kindergarten teachers themselves, would like to amend these demands for standardization and accountability so that they can engage in practices that reflect their professional conceptions of teaching that support all of the children in their classrooms.

Using an explorative video-cued multivocal ethnographic (VCME) research methodology (Tobin, Wu & Davidson, 1989; Tobin, Hseuh, & Karasawa, 2009), the study examined in this paper addresses this issue by investigating how 22 kindergarten teachers in WV (n=9) and in TX (n=13) would like to alter kindergarten so that it reflects their understanding of schooling through an explorative video-cued multivocal ethnographic (VCME) research study (Tobin et al., 2009).

Examining how these street-level policy implementors (Lipksy, 1980) envision changing kindergarten offers the chance to consider how the current narratives that have made it the new first grade might be rewritten so the compromises that have been going on for decades might be stopped (e.g., Dombkowski, 2001; Freeman & Hatch, 1989). Furthermore, by illuminating the instructional practice they see making kindergarten specifically, and public schools in general, “better places for teaching and learning,” we consider how the gaps in the current implementation process might be closed in a manner that reflects those who live and breathe these policies on a daily basis (Erikson, 2014, p. 4).

Authors

• Christopher P. Brown, The University of Texas at Austin

• Da Hei Ku, The University of Texas at Austin

• David Barry, Boston Public Schools

• Joanna Englehardt, The University of Texas at Austin