Speakout Columns
‘Individuality’ key to educational readiness
Feb 16, 2006 12:31 PM
Why students fail in our public schools is like the story of two young, ambitious prospectors who spent years mining for gold without success.
Then one day, an old prospector happened on them and announced, “Hey, fellers, you’re a-diggin’ in the wrong place … y’all have gotta move over yonder!”
With all of our best educational interventions and intentions, a large number of our students are still failing to meet both academic and behavioral standards as they progress through the grades. These days, we find ourselves prospecting in 3rd grade! Retaining pupils at this level is nothing more than a gamble, because isolating one particular level and announcing, “We will promote no student before he or she attains academic parity with his peers,” is suggesting that God makes robots!
In case it hasn’t dawned on the experts: Children do not grow or develop at the same level at the same time, and our most ambitious curriculum will not create behavioral equivalence among children at any age or grade level.
Perhaps we, too, have been “a-diggin’ in the wrong place” in our never-ending attempts at school reform. I believe research and current successful classroom practices confirm that the “right place” to dig is with an understanding of developmental readiness.
Consider the following constructs in adopting an educational orientation that would truly credit the individuality of a child.
First, developmental readiness is not synonymous with intelligence. But it can be measured in much the same way — by observation and with evaluation instruments.
As early as the 1940s, Dr. Alfred Gesell, noted M.D. and developmental readiness advocate, designed a simple and compelling screening assessment that has helped school districts nationwide ascertain developmental readiness in its beginning students (4- and 5-year-olds).
Second, an early-childhood education is no guarantee that a student will have the emotional or academic readiness skills necessary for success in kindergarten and 1st grade. We have tens of thousands of kids who attended pre-school programs and, while we thought they had an advantage over children who were not exposed to formal, early childhood education, they still factor heavily into our failing population.
Third, a child’s neurological development must become the gauge by which we declare his or her readiness to enter a formal educational environment. Social and emotional maturity are best measured by achievement or attainment of certain, observable neurological behaviors. Things like developmental milestones, ocular movement, establishment of laterality (handedness) are just a few of the behaviors that give the diagnostician insight as to what is going on inside the growing child. Again, we are not robots and each child who passes through our classroom doors must be viewed as unique and different.
Historically, psycho-educational diagnosis has been the foundation of teacher education and pupil evaluation. Unfortunately, it has limited our view of the etiology of many academic and behavioral problems in our students.
In contrast, developmental screening instruments rely heavily on the neuro-physiological makeup of the individual. In comparison to what we learn through observation of neurological signs, psychometric testing is limited in diagnosing the organicity or root of behavioral and academic deficiencies. It identifies and deals with the external and demonstrative behaviors of a child, while neurological evaluation investigates the internal developmental events and neurological order.
Fourth, chronological age is the most detrimental way to declare a child’s readiness to enter kindergarten or 1st grade — detrimental in that is unfair to “categorize” an individual based on how many years he or she has lived on planet Earth!
Now, that old man who came upon the two prospectors might challenge me on this one and declare, “Thems are powerful words, young man!” And they are!
But ask kindergarten teachers to identify the “high-risk” pupils in their class — those they feel do not have the necessary emotional/social maturity — and you might be surprised that their findings correlate perfectly with “sophisticated” testing and screening instruments (both psychometric and neurologically based). These are the kinds of assessments we need to administer the summer before these same children enter school.
Fifth, without the use of assessment and screening instruments and a policy to support admission to a formal learning environment based on developmental readiness, we will continue see the same trends in student failure throughout the elementary grades.
Trends. Researchers rely heavily on them. Professor James Uphoff of Wright State University has tracked the school careers of tens of thousands of developmentally “unready” students over the past 30 years. You would not only be enlightened by his studies, but frightened for a generation of children we are bombarding with our best academic intentions to make them intelligent, successful and ultimately ready to face an adult world.
Remember the old adage: “Oh, don’t worry, Johnny will catch up”? Guess what? He doesn’t! He drops out!
The truth is, our students are burning out earlier then a generation ago and are leaving school without the very basic education they need and deserve.
The solution is a calculated one: We must screen our beginning students and certify that they are developmentally ready for formal academic instruction. We cannot continue to place students according to their chronological age!
We must listen to early-childhood professionals who have the training and expertise to make judgments about a student’s emotional maturity for entry into kindergarten and 1st grade. We must be certain that our students are ready — not almost ready — to proceed through the grades.
When this kind of “orientation” to learning readiness is in place in our schools, students will reach the primary grades and have success socially, emotionally and academically. The neuro-physiological implications of developmental readiness cannot be argued.
David Mercaldo, Ph.D., teaches at PS 41, Staten Island.
