Challenging the School Readiness Agenda in Early Childhood Education

Download or read book Challenging the School Readiness Agenda in Early Childhood Education written by Miriam B. Tager and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-03-27 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.