Appraising the Human Developmental Sciences: Essays in Honor of Merrill-Palmer Quarterly

21. Early Learning and School Readiness: Can Early Intervention Make a Difference?

21 Early Learning and School Readiness Can Early Intervention Make a Difference? Craig T. Ramey and Sharon L. Ramey 329 The United States continues to evolve into a society that requires all its adult members to be literate, proficient in basic math, and facile with means of acquiring and using new knowledge. As automation of routine jobs increases and as globalization of business results in the transfer of manufacturing and service jobs to less expensive foreign labor markets, the pressures increase to become an even more academically accomplished society. Thus the educational bar in K–12 and college education is constantly being raised. As the educational expectations and the bar for minimal competence are raised, a basic problem becomes more and more apparent . The experiences of children from different social classes lead to marked differences in skills and knowledge as measured by standardized tests administered when children enter kindergarten. These social-class discrepancies are of no small magnitude and are strongly related to subsequent school performance, as indexed by standardized measures of academic achievement, as well as to disproportionate rates of grade retention and special education placement (Donovan & Cross, 2002). Although the issue of social class is frequently construed as a practical educational issue, it is also directly germane to more fundamental issues of human development, including the extent of human cognitive malleability and the relative importance of various causal factors that regulate that malleability . An ominous omen for American society is that since the mid1980s approximately one-third of children entering kindergarten are consistently judged by their kindergarten teachers as not ready for typical kindergarten-level work (Carnegie Task Force, 1994). Since the 1960s we have been involved, along with a large number of colleagues from many life-science disciplines, in trying various early intervention strategies to understand better the causes of develop- Craig T. Ramey and Sharon L. Ramey 330 mental discrepancies related to social class, with the ultimate aim of improving the intellectual performance and basic social competence of young children from high-risk family backgrounds. This chapter is a brief summary of that work and its historical and scientific contexts . School Readiness and School Achievement School readiness and school achievement are at the forefront of our country’s domestic social policy concerns. How can we help all America’s children to truly succeed in school and in life? A well-educated citizenry is vital to our country’s future as a democracy and as a productive and economically strong nation. Unprecedented numbers of children start public kindergarten with major delays in language and basic academic skills. Children with these significant delays attend schools in every state; they are not concentrated in only a few large urban school districts or in desperately poor rural districts. Waiting until these children fail in school and then providing remedial, pull-out, or compensatory programs or requiring them to repeat grades typically does not help these children to catch up and then achieve at grade level. Instead, the scientific evidence affirms that children who do not have positive early transitions to school— that is, those children who have early failure experiences in school— are those most likely to become inattentive, disruptive, or withdrawn . Later, these same students are the most likely to drop out of school early; to engage in irresponsible, dangerous, and illegal behaviors ; to become teen parents; and to depend on welfare and numerous public assistance programs for survival (Shonkoff & Phillips, 2000). What can be done to end this predictable decline? We have compelling scientific evidence that this negative developmental cascade can be prevented, but preventing it and promoting children’s cognitive and linguistic development cannot wait until kindergarten or until children show signs of developmental delay. Rather, the commitment to improving K–12 academic achievement must begin by providing children in the prekindergarten years with a rich array of effective learning opportunities. Recent scientific advances in the fields of child development science, neurobiology, and early childhood education affirm that the early years are a time of rapid growth and development. Scientists are mapping, in increasingly greater detail, this remarkable period of life. Collectively, these scientific findings indicate that learning Early Learning and School Readiness 331 and brain development are truly interdependent and that what happens early in development has lasting and important consequences. Essential Experiences in the Early Learning Years What are the crucial experiences needed in the early years of life? Does early caretaking or experience...