Ed Surge – Joe Martin
“By contrast, most kindergarten classrooms today look very different. Across the country, kindergarteners are pressured to meet academic standards that both teachers and experts say many kids are developmentally not ready for. In an era defined by high stakes testing and rigorous state standards, children in kindergarten are held to such high standards that one academic paper called it “the new first grade.” Its findings indicated that both playtime and dedicated spaces for playing had significantly decreased between 1998 and 2010 as federal regulations put more emphasis on high stakes testing. The same analysis found kindergarten teachers were about 15 percent more likely to use math and reading workbooks at the end of the decade. All of these findings were often more pronounced at schools serving low-income and minority communities.” (more)