That’s the disturbing finding of a new five-year research study, released Friday by the University of Alberta and Alberta Education.
“I was absolutely astounded,” says Susan Lynch, the University of Alberta professor who directed the study. “I knew that a certain percentage of students were experiencing difficulty. But the percentage of children who are developing appropriately across all five areas is below 50 per cent. I was expecting it to be up around the 70-per-cent mark.”
Edmonton kindergarten students rank lower than those in the province as a whole, where 46.4 per cent of kindergarten-aged kids were judged to be developing appropriately across a range of measures of school readiness.
The findings come from the Early Childhood Development Mapping Project, commissioned in 2009 by the Alberta government.
It surveyed kindergarten teachers across the province, asking them to evaluate their students, based on five factors: physical health and well-being, social competence, emotional maturity, language and thinking skills, and communication skills and general knowledge. The test, the Early Development Instrument, was developed by McMaster University.
The study tracked 70,206 Alberta children, including 15,183 from Edmonton. Children with diagnosed “special needs” were not included. Nor were student who attended schools on First Nation reserves.
In some ways, the data isn’t a revelation.
Every kindergarten teacher knows kids arrive at very different levels of preparedness for life in the formal classroom.
There are kids who arrive already reading novels, and kids who can’t yet speak in full sentences. There are kids who arrive able to negotiate the politics of the playground, and kids who just can’t share a toy. There are kids who arrive able to hold pencils and zip up coats, and kids who lack the fine motor skills for basic tasks. Every year, kindergarten teachers are asked to turn such different education rookies into a class of graduates, ready for Grade 1. Sometimes, though, even the best teachers can’t help kids who start the race that far behind to catch up.
Even knowing that, the disparities this study reveals are stark.
Two Hills County, for example, in central Alberta, had one of the most troubling scores, with only 16.4 per cent of its kindergarten-entering children at the appropriate levels of maturity, development, and general knowledge. The neighbouring Vermilion area showed the best scores in Alberta, with 61.4 per cent of children reaching appropriate developmental milestones. With small sample sizes, those might be statistical anomalies. Lynch says her team needs more research to understand the tremendous degree of difference.
In general, the data shows a correlation between a community’s socio-economic status and the social and intellectual capacity of its kindergarten-aged children. As one might expect, for example, kids in Edmonton’s affluent southwest suburbs generally scored higher than kids in central Edmonton or in the city’s northeast quadrant.
But Lynch cautions against drawing easy conclusions.
“The bottom line is, you cannot use social-economic status alone to predict outcome.”
She points to some higher-income neighbourhoods in west and southwest Edmonton, where children were less ready for kindergarten than expected, and other, lower-income neighbourhoods, where children were hitting their benchmarks. She points, particularly, to central neighbourhoods such as Oliver, Queen Mary Park and Central McDougall, where kindergarten readiness was higher than anticipated. That, she says, may be because of local community support programs or social cohesion in a cultural community. But she needs more study to see what can be learned from communities that don’t match expectations.
But that’s the catch. This study is just a baseline overview. It doesn’t explain why some communities do better than others. Nor does it offer any specific ideas for improvement. The problem, of course, is that no one level of government or government department has responsibility for addressing such problems.
“The problem is that politically, no one ‘owns’ the early years,” says Gloria Chalmers, co-chair of the Community-University Partnership for the Study of Children, Youth and Families. “They’re not part of Education’s mandate. Children’s Services only gets involved when a family is in crisis. Health sends a nurse on one home visit, and that’s the end. No one is in charge of ‘zero to five’ — so when you get to the who is advocating for the children? They fall between the cracks.”
But without addressing the needs of preschoolers, says Chalmers, Alberta’s education system can’t truly achieve excellence.
“We’re not going to change high school completion rates, until we change the early years.
Original Article
Source: edmontonjournal.com/
Author: PAULA SIMONS
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