Robert Pondiscio wrote an article for US News defending Common Core’s requirement that all children in kindergarten must learn to read. [Full disclosure: Robert is a friend though I don’t agree with him about Common Core.]
Peter Greene disagrees with Pondiscio.
Robert writes:
“I’m a fan of the Common Core State Standards, but I recognize there are many reasonable and honorable areas of disagreement about them, both politically and educationally. However one recent thread of opposition strikes me as quite unreasonable: the idea that Common Core demands too much by expecting children to be able to read by the end of kindergarten.
“A recent report from a pair of early childhood advocacy organizations (Defending the Early Years and Alliance for Childhood) makes the argument that “forcing some kids to read before they are ready could be harmful” and calls for Common Core to be dropped in kindergarten and “rethought along developmental lines.” It’s a really bad idea. Early reading struggles left unaddressed tend to persist, setting kids up for failure. Common Core is not without faults, but its urgency about early childhood literacy is not one of them.
“The first red flag in the report is its insistence that Common Core is “developmentally inappropriate.” That sounds scientific and authoritative, but it’s a notoriously slippery concept, harkening back to the day when Piaget theorized that children go through discrete developmental stages. As Dan Willingham, a cognitive scientist at the University of Virginia points out, “children’s cognition is fairly variable day to day, even when the same child tries the same task.” What critics seem to be saying is that Common Core is simply too hard for kindergarten. But that’s clearly not true either.”
Peter Greene responds:
“There is a world of difference between saying, “It’s a good idea for children to proceed as quickly as they can toward reading skills” and “All students must demonstrate the ability to read emergent reader texts with purpose and understanding by the last day of kindergarten.”
“The development of reading skills, like the development of speech, height, weight, hair and potty training, is a developmental landmark that each child will reach on his or her own schedule.
“We would like all children to grow up to be tall and strong. It does not automatically follow that we should therefore set a height standard that all children must meet by their fifth birthday– especially if we are going to label all those who come up short as failures or slow or developmentally disabled, and then use those labels in turn to label their schools and their teachers failures as well. These standards demand that students develop at a time we’ve set for them. Trying to force, pressure and coerce them to mature or grow or develop sooner so that they don’t “fail”– how can that be a benefit to the child.
“And these are five year olds in kindergarten. On top of the developmental differences that naturally occur among baby humans, we’ve also got the arbitrary age requirements of the kindergarten system itself, meaning that there can be as much as a six-month age difference (10% of their lives so far) between the students.”
As for myself, I agree with Dan Willingham, who was quoted by Robert. Children’s development is highly variable, making it impossible to set a hard and fast deadline, such as, they must be able to read at the end of kindergarten. My own children learned to read before they started kindergarten (I read to them and with them daily), but others in their class started reading in first grade; a few became readers as late as second grade. Now they are all adults, and no one remembers when they started reading, except their parents.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Any argument that includes “forcing some kids to read…” fails the honorable and reasonable criteria.
I agree. College does not begin in kindergarten! Kindergarten begins in kindergarten! It’s amazing , yet pitiful, what people will do for money!
I’ve been following the debate about Common Core in early childhood and can only agree that the standards ask too much for some children, especially in NY, where children as young as 4 years, 8 months can be starting kindergarten. I’m not a professional, only a parent, but I read to my child constantly during the early years. He simply could not organize his skills in kindergarten to read and resisted doing so in a way that left me thinking that real damage would be done if we persisted. The same was true during the summer after kindergarten. It was only midway through first grade that he was able to pull all of his skills together and make the leap; before that, it was torture for him. Several years later, he’s a straight-A student and, more important, reads omnivorously for pleasure. His case is not unique; there were quite a few students in his classes in the early grades who read late, much later than my son.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out that your son actually became a fluent reader earlier than many of those “early” readers.
“It’s a good idea for children to proceed as quickly as they can toward reading skills”
Why?
There is a lot to be learned about the world through other means and senses. It is not necessarily a good thing to rush into the analytic mode.
“Children’s development is highly variable, making it impossible to set a hard and fast deadline.” Totally Agree. My oldest child learned to read when he was 2, my middle child in first grade and my youngest in fourth grade. They are all adult readers who devour books regularly. Learning to read is an individual skill that is influenced by many factors.
Most successful readers have role models as readers and ready access to books and reading materials.
The debacle that was Reading First should have taught us that you cannot “force” children to learn to read. We have now gone from mandating that children be readers by the end of third grade to insisting they read by the end of kindergarten.
Reading First was the beginning of sucking all the pleasure out of learning to read. Why would anyone want to learn to read at all anymore when faced with xeroxed text that is taken from a complete book or document, instead of having the pleasure of holding a real book and enjoying it from cover to cover??
Oh, I forgot – pleasure and fun are now considered “fluff” in school. We don’t have time to “waste” smiling and laughing and sharing a good story. Let’s get that bothersome stuff out of the way so we can get to the ad nauseum questioning (inquisition, more like) of what the author’s one meaning and one purpose are!
Does anyone fondly recall the days when one could read something, gain one’s own meaning from it, and simply enjoy the story and pictures? Or is it me just being nostalgic?
@Tellman… I sure do remember the days when I could read something for enjoyment and personal reflection. This is was made me want to read more and I have no doubt that important vocabulary was acquired from reading. I find it hideous that a child cannot read a book without “sticky notes” to jot down “essentials” like tone of voice or author’s purpose or being forced to stop and create a graphic organizer for monitoring understanding. Some doctoral student may have gotten the highest honor in his/her doctoral program for these “reading for test taking strategies” posing as reading for comprehension. Joy must enter into the equation when learning.. not “joyless”.
Yes! I also find it hideous that teachers are encouraged to constantly question children while reading a book to them aloud.
I have read hundreds and hundreds of books to young children without stopping every page for this nonsense. I would only stop to very briefly explain something I knew they did not know which was essential for following the story – such as the meaning of a word.
Dr. Seuss must be turning over in his grave!
I agree with you 100%. These children are having their childhood stolen fron them. The DOE doesn’care–all they care about is raising a generation of robots who will keep their mouths shut and do whatever Big Government tells them to do. The love of learning has nothing to do with it.
Again. People with no expertise in early childhood education spouting their opinion as if it were fact. Readers of these articles don’t even question it. They assume he is an expert. As an early childhood educator with a Masters degree and 18 years in education I can tell you that exposing young children to early literacy is great, but expecting them ALL to read in K is ridiculous. As a child born in the mid 60s most of my generation did not even attend Kindergarten. My own opinion is that forcing this on them has created a generation of children who feel bad about themselves because they can’t achieve this arbitrary benchmark. It’s emotional abuse. That is an opinion based on experience teaching high poverty students in early childhood classrooms in public schools.
I am copying this response that I first posted on Huff Post’s posting of Curmudgucator’s column on Facebook. It’s long, I know.
“Giving each child the earliest best possible shot at learning to read is an admirable and worthwhile goal”. Up to a point, yes. But it depends on what is meant by “best possible shot”. In schools today that means subjecting very young children to discrete activities designed to develop phonemic awareness – the ability to segment sounds in the English language – and phonics – the ability to recognize sound/symbol relationships. Children that come to kindergarten without these skills are therefore subjected to more intense teaching to learn them. These activities come at a cost: they are in lieu of choice time, play, arts and crafts and listening to lots of great stories – not leveled readers, literature – read by the teacher or on audio.
If we want children to get the best possible shot at learning to read we should surround them with opportunities to use and listen to high quality language, to write their own stories through pictures which the teacher transcribes into print for them, to learn sound/symbol relationships in the context of shared poems, chants and stories, to have lots and lots of picture books to choose from and “read” on their own and with a friend, even if reading at this stage involves engaging in the story through its pictures more than the text. These kinds of rich experiences are what develop both the neural structures and the interest to learn to read.
Of course very young children can learn the discrete skills and schools these days are relentless about measuring their progress on them. It is also possible to have 5 year olds memorize multiplication facts. Does that mean they will understand multiplication or have well developed number sense – critical for later success in mathematics – or that they will go on to study math and science in college? No. It means they have learned facts disconnected from understanding or application.
There is no question that some children will need more intensive instruction in reading skills due to a learning disability. But much of what schools are doing now, owing to intense pressure from the No Child Left Behind legislation and Reading First “scientifically-based instruction” federal initiative, is forcing down the throats of younger and younger children what in many cases they just need more time and rich experiences to develop on their own.
“…what in many cases they just need more time and rich experiences to develop on their own.”
Yes!
I am an infant-toddler teacher in a program that uses an assessment system called GOLD. We have to collect data on babies’ “literacy skills” (as well as “math skills).Not only does it not take into account developmental differences, it ignores individual differences…some kids love to be read to over and over, others prefer playing with blocks, or doll play. Although they identify the skills that SOME children of that age display, it labels others who do not as not meeting “widely held expectations” in “literacy”
And then teachers are “encouraged” to “teach to the test” (yes-with infants) to coax the emergence of that skill in hopes of boosting the program’s #s of children meeting these objectives? I have a name for it-malpractice.
The unspoken assumption that common core is the best and indeed the only way to get children interested in reading in kindergarten is totally absurd. Don’t let common core pushers slip things like this by you. I trust the knowledge and experience of early childhood educators above that of any pundit, especially when that pundit goes on an anti science attack against them.
I also reject the following subtexts: that early childhood experts are somehow stuck in an ossified past, that they are not actively researching and learning as a means of improving their knowledge and expertise. The idea that only CC$$ can solve “early reading struggles” that would otherwise be left “unaddressed” is absurd on it’s face.
All of these arguments that kids can’t possibly develop at the same rate or learn the same material just tells me that we need to completely abolish our system of age-based grade levels. Personalized learning all the way.
Your overgeneralized argument automatically leads to the bogus conclusion that the only solution to developmental problem is to let unknown private corporations and Fed-bedded organizations create curriculum, instruction, and assessment based on fracking PARCC business.
“Fed-bedded organizations”
TAGO!
Pondiscio quotes: “As Dan Willingham, a cognitive scientist at the University of Virginia points out, “children’s cognition is fairly variable day to day, even when the same child tries the same task.”
This being said, my question is this: If children’s cognition is fairly variable day to day, how can a one shot standardized test be an authentic assessment?
Michelle Brokaw: so much said in so few words.
TAGO!
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My neighbor’s son and my friend’s daughter read at three. Therefore, shouldn’t all children be readers by three? Kinder is way too late. The founders of Methodism started instruction at 5 1/2. My son wasn’t interested in learning to read, basically refusing to begin reading until the second half of Kindergarten, and he evaded “phonics” instruction. His vocabulary scores were in the 90th something percentile in first grade. In second grade, he was teacher for the day, and it was the first time even his teacher realized he could read fluently orally. You just never know.
But really what is the point? As a reading teacher in high school, I had a male student who had superior comprehension but read third grade books using synonyms for some basic nouns. A girl in the same class read aloud fluently at grade level but understood nothing. I had her read to the boy. Then he taught her what the text meant. Wonder how that would test out? He went to a college that could work with him. She got a job serving fast food.
MS Ravitch, has your friend any experience or knowledge of kids? As another post pointed out, it isn’t that you don’t begin the teaching of reading or dealing with reading issues, you don’t say “must.” It is too bad your friend doesn’t know any late bloomers.
“As a reading teacher in high school, I had a male student who had superior comprehension but read third grade books using synonyms for some basic nouns. A girl in the same class read aloud fluently at grade level but understood nothing. I had her read to the boy. Then he taught her what the text meant.”
Very curious about what you mean here. What do you mean when you say that this boy “read third grade books using synonyms for some basis nouns”?
Flerp, I think WCT may be referring to a common dyslexic behavior. A student who has dyslexia often struggles with word retrieval. They know what they want to say but can’t get the correct term out, so they substitute a synonym.
“That sounds scientific and authoritative, but it’s a notoriously slippery concept, harkening back to the day when Piaget theorized that children go through discrete developmental stages”
Perhaps i am woefully behind the times (I learned about Piaget way back in the dark ages [the 90’s]), but Piaget has been debunked??
Always glad to learn about this stuff in the pages of a real science magazine like US News.
Apparently, Piaget was wrong and there is actually no such thing as “developmentally appropriate.”
Good to know, no reason that we can’t have little babies flying airplanes and operating nuclear power plants. We can pay them so much less than grownups like Robert Pondiscio.
Unlike almost every comment so far, I agree with Robert Pondiscio. Most comments mention pressure, “forced feeding” and “developmentally appropriate instruction.” However, if you visit any well-run kindergarten you will observe that our best teachers actually use games and activities to help those kindergartens who in early kindergarten don’t know letter names and their sounds, or in middle to late kindergarten can’t hear beginning, ending or medial sounds in a spoken word, or, in late kindergarten need to learn how to sound out simple three letter words. As Pondiscio states, those skills are learnable by the vast majority of students (and thus are developmentally appropriate), there is no evidence that teaching them in an proper manner is harmful, and no reason that learning them can’t be engaging.
Moreover, assuring that these foundation skills are learned in kindergarten greatly increase the chances that a student will learn to read in first grade and brings them up to par with those already who have already learned them. Conversely, not teaching these foundation skills to those that need to learn them can lead to tremendous frustration and failure later on. Finally, just because some time is taken to teach those students needing these basic skills does not mean that a rich oral reading and discussion program and engaging kindergarten activities shouldn’t be the primary portion of instruction.
A few students will not have fully mastered these skills even with skillful intervention and support by the end of kindergarten and that reality should be recognized and accommodated. Those few should never be held back, but it is unwise and unfair to deprive the vast majority of the chance to learn foundation skills (if they haven’t yet mastered them) which will tremendously improve their chances to learn to read in a timely fashion because a few might struggle. The idea that the failure to learn these skills will automatically be corrected as a student matures turns out to be incorrect for most children. What is more likely to happen is that the gaps in basic foundation skills entering first grade cause reading failure.
In California, we had an English Language Arts/English Language Development frameworks committee composed primarily of teachers with strong early primary representation, an instructional quality commission, and a state Board of Education comprised of professionals all of which publicly reviewed the standards and basically agreed with Pondiscio. There were also two 60 day review periods which generated several hundred comments. Only a small handful objected to the kindergarten chapter which was in line with Pondiscio’s article.
Finally, it is unfair to characterize this difference of opinion as early education experts all on the side against the Pondiscio point of view. There is strong research and professional support for the proposition that teaching these kindergarten foundation skills is not only “developmentally appropriate” and learnable for the vast majority of kindergarteners but that failure to bring these students up to speed early will put them at tremendous risk of failure later on and place them at a permanent disadvantage.
I appreciate your well wishes but such phrases as “well-run kindergartens” and “best teachers” paint a picture that puts the ideal ahead of the real.
IMHO, such things as best pedagogical practices and teacher autonomy and well-supported & well-resourced public schools should not be assumed.
Just in my experience alone, the criticisms raised by people on this blog of CSS and its conjoined twin, high-stakes standardized testing, are fully justified here in CA. With all due respect, anything else is—at best—wishful thinking.
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” . . . failure to bring these students up to speed early . . .”
That’s a big red flag for your argument. The words “speed” and “early” don’t apply here–too many false assumptions built into what you’re saying. Forcing kindergarteners to “read with purpose and meaning” if they aren’t ready for it (especially five-year-old boys who aren’t ready for it) is likely to backfire. Listen to reading specialist Colleen Rau on this KQED Forum program from January 31:
http://www.kqed.org/a/forum/R201501300900
She doesn’t have a problem with reading readiness activities and even reading skills for young children, but she speaks forcefully against the position you take at the end of your comment. The program also features Nancy Carlsson-Paige and Robert Pondiscio.
Pondiscio says that instead of worrying about who wrote the standards (nobody with experience in early childhood education), we should find out if kids are capable of attaining them. That’s completely backwards. In fact, the “backmapping” of skills from college down to kindergarten is one of the cardinal sins of the Common Core authors.
By refusing to consider the research and experience of professionals who actually work with children and study their learning and development, and by linking the “standards” to hours and hours of standardized testing, they created a huge mess. It could take decades to clean this up.
Bill Honig:
If you want to learn more about why the whole Common Core enterprise is a bad idea and an invalid answer to our supposed education deficits, read this post by Stephen Krashen, another person who has actually studied how kids learn to read.
http://skrashen.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-common-core-disaster-for-libraries.html
Hint . . . Access to books and opportunities for self-selected free reading are a lot more helpful than “rigorous” early reading instruction. Furthermore, “The common core movement will be a disaster for school libraries and will have a negative impact on nearly every aspect of our educational system.”
Young children simply do not have the white brain matter connecting the different parts of their brain to deal with abstract thought and reading. There is a reason why traditionally people waited until they were over six, and sometimes seven to teach them. Young children need to develop social and self-care skills and bodily coordination of large muscles. These are the tasks appropriate to their ages.
LIKE a million times.
Individual children vary in their development, even across domains.
Most early learning standards (such as Connecticut’s Early Learning Development Standards) include multiple domains as part of a child’s “curriculum framework,” including social-emotional, psychomotor, creative, and others. Math, science and writing are included as the parts of the cognitive domain. Early learning standards typically follow a developmental range from approximately age 2 to age 6, which would include most kindergartners and even some first graders, developmentally.
So if most state’s early learning standards are developmental, not grade- or age-based, and they also include multiple domains, why, once kids enter a public kindergarten, do some feel that only the cognitive domains (and, really, only reading) matter, and that students no longer follow a developmental pattern, but are magically locked in, based on their date of birth?
Two of my four children had very late birthdays, and were also readers before entering kindergarten. They started school at age 4, and were four for a long while. Could you pick them out in the class? Absolutely. Both by their rolling around on the floor and acting “immature” (read, like a preschooler), AND by their ability to read. Today, they would be considered not ready, age-wise, although, ironically, they would likely blown the doors off the CCSS.
It is sad to me to see kindergartens barren, no easels or sensory tables, no dramatic play. Then we wonder why they can’t retell or solve math problems with manipulatives, or why 3rd graders don’t know how to use a measuring cup or eyedropper in science class. Because all that “play” isn’t really play, is it?
When we issued our report Reading Instruction in Kindergarten, we had a concern that our main message might be misunderstood. That message is that research does not support the Common Core requirement that all children must read with purpose and understanding by the end of the kindergarten year. But we did not want this message to be interpreted to mean that children should just play in kindergarten and that maturity would take care of skill development. We want to make clear that we do support providing children with an excellent, intentional early literacy curriculum. For this reason, we included two sections in our report that specifically describe what such a curriculum should look like. However, it seems, based on the blog comments by Bill Honig, that the full message of our report has been misunderstood, despite our efforts.
First and most important, Mr. Honig states that we should teach foundation skills for reading in kindergarten and we entirely agree. But building foundation skills and expecting children to read with purpose and understanding are not the same thing.
Children build a strong base for learning to read and write in kindergarten through the many activities good teachers present. In addition to oral language experiences such as story telling and story acting, and opportunities for using symbols with a variety of materials, teachers provide myriad opportunities for specifically engaging children with print. Teachers read big books, poems and charts using pointers and props that isolate letters. Children are encouraged every day to draw and write with invented and conventional spellings. Teachers take dictation from children and help them write their own stories. In organic and meaningful ways, teachers use print throughout the day to label block structures, cubbies, and interest areas, write recipes, and transcribe the children’s stories. They make charts for attendance and classroom jobs and review these daily with children. Teachers understand the developmental progressions in early reading and writing and encourage skill development based on each child’s level of mastery. This ensures that the skills children learn develop a solid and meaningful foundation for making sense of print.
The Common Core standard requiring children to read in kindergarten has resulted in an erosion of excellent early literacy experiences such as those just described. Many kindergarten teachers are now resorting to inappropriate didactic methods of instruction in order to meet the requirement of this Common Core standard. Every contributor to the discussion on this blog shares the same goal: to ensure that every young child learn to read and achieve success in school. Our grave concern is that the Common Core standards for kindergarten are harming and not helping us reach this goal.
Fortunately for my now grown children, the kindergarten you describe is the one my children attended. Sadly, that kindergarten is rapidly disappearing.
Putting a girl on pointe (in ballet) before her feet are properly developed can cripple her.
Allowing boys to throw curveballs before their arms are properly developed can cause joint issues.
Is it possible that by forcing children who are not developmentally ready to read and write is causing learning disabilities?
Many little boys do not have well-developed fine motor skills. What do we gain by forcing them to form letters correctly when they are 4 or 5 years old?
Nancy Carlsson-Paige is an expert in early childhood education. Her organization Defending the Early Years and Alliance for Education, is a model for all.
As a teacher I can tell you absolutely, that pushing children to read or try to read is a huge mistake. If your brain is not ready it is just not ready. Scientific studies have already proven that —Why would anyone push a child to read when they simply cannot do it? Why would anyone want to punish and frustrate an innocent little child?
This creates frustration and disdain for learning and not a love for learning.
What should you learn about life in kindergarten? —-that you actually have to share, that sometimes kids are mean and you have to learn to survive and you learn to ‘play well with others’. You learn about playing house and how to get along with others.
Maybe you learn how to really hold a paint brush and experience creativity. You should start learning a love of music.
Not every child has a home filled with art and music, and school is the only place to learn anything at all culturally or creatively stimulating.
So that when you get a real job after graduation you have a foundation for life.
Why would anyone advocate to take away these learning opportunities in their early years?
Common Core is causing tremendous pain to children and teachers.