As the saying goes, you can find statistics to back up almost anything. But in the quest to improve student outcomes, research on early-childhood education is consistent as a heartbeat: The best way to improve academic achievement in older students is by making sure they start kindergarten knowing some basics — how to listen, follow instructions and recognize letters and numbers.
Not all kids walk into school with these things.
Washington didn’t even measure kindergarten-readiness widely until 2018. But enough districts were doing it by 2015 that the state conducted a study of 43,000 children to see if preparation for kindergarten could predict whether kids would be able to read and calculate appropriately by third grade.
It did. Students who cleared their teachers’ assessments of readiness were 1.72 times more likely to meet math standards three years later and 1.62 times more likely to be reading at grade level.
No wonder the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, Department of Early Learning and city of Seattle are all pushing to get as many low-income kids as possible into quality preschools.
Currently, about 85 percent of state-subsidized slots are filled. That’s on top of district-run Transition to Kindergarten programs helping another 5,440 kids.
Progress on kindergarten readiness has been incremental, and it took a dive during the pandemic. But recently, OSPI trumpeted an all-time high. More than 52 percent of kindergartners entered school prepared to learn last fall.
That is something everyone can cheer.
Parsing those numbers dulls some of the sheen. Only 40 percent of low-income children were kindergarten-ready and 39 percent of Latino kids (compared to 58 percent of white kids).
Still, every student group made strides, some of them significant, and that is surely because more children are in quality preschools.
Seattle’s city-funded program, which is open to all kids regardless of family income, enrolled nearly 2,000 youngsters in 2021-22, the most recent period for which data is available. More than 60 percent of them met the kindergarten-readiness standard, which assesses cognitive ability, language, math, literacy and other skills.
That’s a 4-point increase from the first measurement, in 2016. Statewide, increases in kindergarten readiness are up 8 points from 2015, when just 44.2 percent of students met the mark.
“We’re headed in the right direction,” said Nicole Rose, assistant secretary of Early Learning.
This is the kind of progress that results from sustained focus and a lot of people pulling on the same rope, in the same direction. It’s what Washington should be chasing in all areas of student achievement.
