Readiness and Other Indicators of Students Not Meeting Standards

The tables below present by race and gender the percentages of children not sufficiently ready for school or not meeting standards. The data shows at least three important things:

1. the significant percentage of children not meeting readiness and academic expectations
2. the degree of stability of these percentages from preschool through secondary school
3. the troubling disparities by race and gender.

Thus for each county, the data can explain:

1. how many children are not ready for school or not achieving academic standards
2. the tendency over decades for these rates to continue from early childhood through adolescence
3. the much higher rates of males and minorities not meeting standards.

The data can be used as a simple first response to the questions:

1. how many children are not ready for school?
2. how much does not being ready for school predict academic failure or not graduating later in life?
3. who is most likely to have serious problems with readiness and succeeding in school?

Obviously there is much additional data that is needed to answer these questions thoroughly. Better descriptions of readiness problems are needed, and readiness problems must be traced over time to unsatisfactory outcomes. Despite these and other important limitations, the data tables below are a good place to start the dialogue. When the Nobel prize economist James Heckman, Craig Ramey (lead researcher for the Abecedarian study), Harvard researcher and noted pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton, and Judge Cooper all agree with what your mother and grandmother emphasized about getting off to a good start in life, we must be appropriately concerned about what this data reveals.

Table 1: Students Not Meeting Standards (Readiness, PACT ELA, Dropouts).

Table 2: Students Not Meeting Standards (Readiness, PACT Math, Dropouts).

Table 3: Kindergarten Assessment of Readiness for First Grade