Challenging the School Readiness Agenda in Early Childhood Education [Hardcover]

Challenging the normative paradigm that school readiness is a positive and necessary objective for all young children, this book asserts that the concept is a deficit-based practice that fosters the continuation of discriminatory classifications. Tager draws on findings of a qualitative study to reveal how the neoliberal agenda of school reform based on high-stakes testing sorts and labels children as non-ready, affecting their overall schooling careers. Tager reflects critically on the relationship between race and school readiness, showing how the resulting exclusionary measures perpetuate the marginalization of low-income Black children from an early age. Disrupting expected notions of readiness is imperative to ending practices of structural classism and racism in early childhood education.

One  Introducing the Non-school ready child

Two  The Historical Context of the Non-school Ready Child

Three  The Ecology of School Readiness

Four  Higher Demands: Putting Pressure on the Non-school Ready Child

Five  Blaming the Parent

Six  Young Black Lives Matter

Seven  Inequities and Inequalities in Early Childhood Education Programs

Eight  A Call for Action

Miriam B. Tager is Assistant Professor of Early Childhood Education at Westfield State University, USA.