Trending
One thing even today's senior citizens still can recall from their early days in a school classroom was their teacher telling them to put on their "thinking caps."
They might chuckle about that recollection now, but those two words made an impression that they still might pass on to their grandchildren when the opportunity is appropriate.
But let's deviate from those recipients of that message and apply the message elsewhere -- to teachers, principals and other school leaders and officials. There is a good reason for that recommendation -- the reason being that kindergartners are arriving less ready for school now than before the pandemic.
That shift in preparedness must be reversed. Going forward, the challenge will revolve around determining how best that can be accomplished.
Of course, parents, guardians and other caregivers must be part of the solution, but how to get them involved to the right degree in this fast-paced world where mothers, as well as fathers, are in the workplace and in many households, working two jobs to make ends meet, remains a 2024 fact of life.
Still, consider the situation at hand. According to new data compiled by the testing company Curriculum Associates, kindergartners tested in 2023 were about 2 percentage points less likely to begin school at grade level in both math and reading than 2019.
Meanwhile, scores remained below pre-pandemic levels in the first and second grades also.
Emily Oster, a Brown University researcher who has studied pandemic-era learning, told the Wall Street Journal that "we are still seeing sizable gaps in school readiness, in school performance for kids who weren't even in school at the time of the pandemic."
The troubling findings emerged from a test called i-Ready that was administered to more than a million students across the country last fall. The test involved completing tasks such as matching a sound to a letter or identifying which picture of a shape -- a triangle, circle or square -- has four sides.
According to a Jan. 13-14 Wall Street Journal report, scores were lower almost across the board, but second-graders in 2021 and 2022 showed the worst declines.
Perhaps progress is in the making, though, due to some hopeful steps made in identifying specifics related to the decline in early educational skills.
The Jan. 13-14 Journal article indicated one potential cause that emerged from an analysis by the National Institute for Early Education Research was lower participation in early-childhood education during the pandemic -- a situation that had recovered by fall 2022.
Another cause identified in the Journal article was that the pandemic had destabilized young children's lives. It is known that some children lost parents or caregivers and that family routines such as reading to children or playing outside were disrupted.
Meanwhile, it is suspected that shifts in student enrollment or exam participation might have lowered scores artificially if more advantaged students were less likely to participate in the testing.
With federal pandemic-relief funding running out and other budget constraints making it tougher to balance incoming revenue with spending, education's thinkers are more hard-pressed to put into play new steps to deal with both old problems and those newly identified.
But such findings as those on which this editorial has focused remain important to attack sooner rather than later, with or without a "thinking cap."