Readiness for School:
A Survey of State Policies and Definitions
Gitanjali Saluja
National Center for Early Development and Learning;
Catherine Scott-Little
SERVE
Richard M. Clifford
National Center for Early Development and Learning
Editors' Note:
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Lilian G. Katz & Dianne Rothenberg
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Comments
Date: July 18, 2001Name: Lyn Weiner
Position: President
Affiliation: Syndactics, Inc
Comments:
In anticipation of the coming collision between assessment requirements and high-quality preschool practices, Syndactics developed a plan in the early 1990s to create a developmentally appropriate assessment that would meet stated program and child criteria. Funded by two U.S. Department of Education contracts, the resulting test took nine years to develop. The final version of Pre-K Success combines naturalistic observation, direct requests, and neural network based interpretation to provide maximally friendly and useful procedures and results. Central to the assessment is our definition of "School Readiness"-Those [measurable] skills a child in a responsive environment elects to develop by age 5 AND which schools expect. Components of the model of school readiness include motor skills (fine and gross), nonverbal problem solving (space and seriation), verbal problem solving (classification, number, and time), and language development (receptive, expressive for semantics, syntax, and pragmatics).
We strongly advise that any assessment of young children:
· Include the concept of child election
· Be comprehensive enough to accommodate child variations
· Acknowledge that the ultimate school readiness definition lies in the appropriateness of the kindergarten which the child attends.
The Model of School Readiness with a brief explanation is in a Microsoft Word document, which will be emailed as an attachment to anyone requesting it from syndactics@aol.com.
Date: September 10, 2001
Name: Matt Jaroneski
Position: parent
Comments:
I did not see discussion in this paper regarding those regulations concerning overriding the dates in those states that do not test. For example, Virginia law states that
"...children whose fifth birthday occurs between October 1 and December 31 of the school year may be enrolled in kindergarten after an appropriate readiness evaluation has demonstrated that attendance in these programs will educationally benefit such children." (VA code 22.1-199)
The NC code has similar regulations at NC 115C-364
