What Happened to Kindergarten?
Until recently, this first year of elementary school was supposed to prepare them for the grades ahead. In kindergarten, children learned to interact with other children and practiced some basic skills, such as letter and number recognition, so they would be ready for an academic first-grade curriculum. Then in 1983, a federal panel released a study entitled A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, which concluded that schools in the United States were not succeeding in teaching our children. “School districts around the country responded by instituting more rigorous curricula,” says Lorrie Shepard, Ph.D., professor of education at the University of Colorado at Boulder, who has studied the issue of kindergarten readiness. To make sure that children were keeping pace with the new expectations, schools also began administering standardized tests to their students, even first-graders. “The consensus was that youngsters needed to be better prepared for the first-grade tests
