Rethinking “Kindergarten Readiness”

Blaming 5-year-olds for not being “ready” is how broken systems excuse themselves. What if the real test isn’t whether our children are school-ready—but whether our schools are child-ready?

When my son Elie was four, he used to build cities out of couch cushions. Each structure had rules—soft rules—that governed how his imaginary people would live and love. The tallest towers were for dreamers; the lowest corners were quiet zones, spaces for reflection. One day, after building a sprawling metropolis in our living room, Elie turned to me and said, “Dad, do schools have places like this?” I didn’t know what to say.

A few months later, as we prepared him for his first day of kindergarten, the question came back. Not because he asked it again, but because the forms we were required to complete, the “readiness assessments” and the conversations with other parents all echoed a single theme: Was Elie ready? Not whether the school was ready for him, with his cushion cities and curious mind, but whether he fit their idea of readiness.

The notion of “kindergarten readiness” may sound innocuous—even helpful. But behind this language is a quiet violence, a systemic shift of responsibility away from institutions and toward children, particularly the most vulnerable among them. It’s a framework rooted not in nurturing human potential, but in measuring conformity to culturally and politically constructed standards, and too often disconnected from the lives and realities of the children they aim to assess.

The Problem with “Readiness”: A Deficit Framing

At the core of the kindergarten readiness discourse is a fundamental assumption: that children—our four- and five-year-olds—must be prepared to meet the school’s expectations before they enter its doors. This framing positions children, especially those from vulnerable communities, as deficient if they arrive with different knowledge systems, home languages, or developmental timelines.

In a powerful critique, Lisa Delpit (2006) once wrote, “We do not really see through our eyes or hear through our ears, but through our beliefs.” When schools view children as unready before they even enter into a relationship with schooling, they are often failing to see them at all. Instead, they are measuring them against a dominant gaze that privileges a singular view of literacy, of quiet compliance, of specific modes of problem-solving as normal.

Research from the Urban Child Institute (2016) demonstrates that socioeconomic factors deeply influence so-called readiness assessments, and that disparities in “readiness” outcomes often correlate more with access to early learning opportunities than with inherent ability. But of course, we must also interrogate this research—for what is readiness and why does it point only to the child? There should be a matching indictment of unequal systems, not of the children who emerge from them.

The problem becomes even more acute when we recognize that readiness, as defined by current practices, is far from neutral. It’s political. It defines who belongs and who doesn’t, who is praised and who is pathologized. And for Black, Brown, Indigenous, poor, and multilingual children, it often functions as a gatekeeping device—marking them as already behind before they’ve even begun.

When the Child Must Conform to the World

There’s a deeper philosophical problem here, one that stretches beyond education and into how society views its youngest members. The idea of readiness assumes that children must conform to the world as it is. But what if the world—our schools, our structures—is what must change? What if the world is unready?

When we say a child is not ready for kindergarten, what we are often saying is that the child is not yet able to perform according to the norms we have prioritized. But I’ve been reading more of the philosopher Maxine Greene who reminds us, “The point is not to adapt, but to transform” (Greene, 1988). Education should be a liberatory space, not one that disciplines young bodies and minds into submission.

Too often, the “readiness” discourse mirrors the larger societal narrative that places the burden of adaptation on the most vulnerable—expecting, for example, Black and Brown children to adjust to racist systems, expecting less economically advantaged families to bootstrap their way through unequal access, expecting children with trauma to behave as though the trauma never happened.

As Bryan (2020) notes in her research on early childhood education and equity, “Children are not broken when they don’t fit school molds—schools are broken when they don’t fit children’s realities.” Readiness, then, becomes less about the child’s preparedness and more about society’s unwillingness to prepare itself for the humans it inherits.

Making Schools Ready for Our Children

What if the definition of "kindergarten readiness shifted from our children being ready for kindergarten to our kindergartens being ready for our children? Rather than demanding that children arrive ready, we must prepare schools to receive them with care, responsiveness, and love. Here are three ways to begin that work:

1. Reimagine the Learning Environment as a Place of Belonging. Kindergarten should not feel like the beginning of a race but like a homecoming. Creating environments that reflect the cultures, languages, and lives of children helps signal to them: You belong here. Research from the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC, 2020) emphasizes that environments that honor children’s identities contribute to stronger social-emotional development and academic growth. This means rejecting one-size-fits-all curricula in favor of learning spaces that embrace narrative, storytelling, and play as legitimate forms of knowledge. This shift must not be seen as an “add-on” but as a foundational philosophy that affirms students’ experiences as worthy of study and celebration (Ladson-Billings, 1994).

2. Prioritize Relationship Over Readiness. At the heart of all early learning is relationship. Children don’t learn because they are ready; they learn because they are loved. As developmental psychologist Dr. Ross Greene (2016) puts it, “Kids do well if they can.” And they can when the adults around them prioritize connection over compliance. Instead of screening for deficits, schools should invest in practices like looping (keeping the same teacher across multiple years), family engagement programs, and trauma-informed care that center children’s relational needs. Research by Perry and Szalavitz (2017) in The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog underscores that healing and learning both begin in safe, predictable, and loving relationships.

3. Embrace Play as Pedagogy. Too often, school readiness is defined by academic benchmarks—letter recognition, counting to 20, sitting still, and so on. But what prepares children best for life and learning is play. Through play, children make sense of their world, develop critical thinking skills, and cultivate empathy. The Alliance for Childhood (2009) has long warned against the erosion of play in kindergarten, noting that “the growing emphasis on academic instruction in early years has pushed aside developmentally appropriate practices.” High-quality early education must reclaim play as central—not peripheral—to its mission. To be ready for children, schools must make space for wonder, for exploration, for the messy joy of building cushion cities and imagining the world anew.

Reclaiming the Question

When Elie asked if schools have places like the ones he builds—soft spaces for dreaming, rules made by love—I didn’t know what to say. But I do now.

We must create them.

The measure of a just and humane education system is not how well children conform to it, but how well it conforms to them. We must flip the readiness script, no longer asking whether our children are ready for kindergarten but whether kindergarten is ready for our children. And we must take seriously the moral responsibility not just to teach children but to receive them with reverence, curiosity, and an imagination as wild and boundless as their own.

James Baldwin (1963) reminded us of this when he wrote, “The purpose of education . . . is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions . . . to ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions.” If that is the purpose of education, then surely its beginning must be a space where children feel safe enough to ask their questions and free enough to dream their answers.

We owe our children more than their readiness. We owe them our readiness. We owe them a world that dares to be worthy of them.

References

Alliance for Childhood. (2009). Crisis in the kindergarten: Why children need to play in school. College Park, MD: Author.

Baldwin, J. (1963). The Negro child—His self-image. The Saturday Review, 46(39), 45–47.

Bryan, J. (2020). Young, gifted, and Black: Promoting high achievement among African American students. Teachers College Press.

Delpit, L. (2006). Other people's children: Cultural conflict in the classroom (2nd ed.). New York, NY: The New Press.

Greene, M. (1988). The dialectic of freedom. Teachers College Press.

Greene, R. (2016). Raising human beings: Creating a collaborative partnership with your child. Scribner.

Ladson-Billings, G. (1994). The dreamkeepers: Successful teachers of African American children. Jossey-Bass.

National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC). (2020). Developmentally appropriate practice in early childhood programs serving children from birth through age 8 (4th ed.). Washington, DC: Author.

Perry, B. D., & Szalavitz, M. (2017). The boy who was raised as a dog: And other stories from a child psychiatrist's notebook--What traumatized children can teach us about loss, love, and healing (3rd ed.). Basic Books.

Urban Child Institute. (2016). Child development and readiness: Understanding school entry [Brief]. Memphis, TN: Author.

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Suggested citation: Kirkland, D.E. (2025). Rethinking “Kindergarten Readiness.” In forwardED Perspectives, https://www.forward-ed.com/post/rethinking-kindergarten-readiness.

David E. Kirkland, PhD, is the founder and CEO of forwardED. He is a nationally renowned scholar and leading expert on education equity. He can be reached at david@forward-ed.com.