Kindergarten is now the new first grade

Esther J. Cepeda says for some students an advanced, rigorous kindergarten experience can be valuable. But there’s a problem.

CHICAGO — Recently, I spent some time observing two math classes — one kindergarten and one second-grade — comprised of students who were performing on the low end of the spectrum relative to their peers.

The shocking part was not that many of the kindergarteners had difficulties with creating correct number sentences when provided with an addend and a sum (i.e., ? +3 = 3), or that the second-graders struggled with answering a word problem by creating a sequentially organized data table.

It was that the students in both grades were expected to grasp such challenging and abstract problems at all!

When I started teaching in 2004, I was charged with introducing first-graders to pre-algebraic concepts like, “What plus three equals three?” and thought that was super advanced. Now the kindergarteners are expected to do things like fluently add and subtract numbers up to five.

(Please take a moment to recall your own kindergarten days. Did you, like me, spend most of your time there learning how to use paste and sit cross-legged for story time?)

Indeed, an early 2016 research paper wondered, “Is Kindergarten the New First Grade?” The answer was: Yes. “[Lately,] kindergarten teachers ... held far higher academic expectations for children both prior to kindergarten entry and during the kindergarten year. They devoted more time to advanced literacy and math content, teacher-directed instruction and assessment, and substantially less time to art, music, science and child-selected activities.”

This sort of advanced, rigorous kindergarten experience can be valuable for some students. The problem is that while young children from high-income homes are likely to have been exposed to numeracy skills — like learning oneto-one correspondence, number names and counting in sequence — almost from infancy, those from low-income households are likelier to start kindergarten without the benefit of high-quality preschool or math concepts introduced by mom and dad.

So, by the time kindergarten and the primary grades roll around, there are already yawning academic gaps that can be hard to remediate.

According to a new study by Child Trends, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research center, Latino children’s math skills trail those of white children by the equivalent of three months’ learning.

This is not due to an inherent lack of ability.

Child Trends notes that after accounting for poverty, Latino and white children learn math at the same rate during kindergarten. But because, as a group, Latino children start behind their white peers, they remain lagging in math by the spring of the kindergarten year and, if left unremediated, this gap can grow to two years by the time they get to the eighth grade.

These effects — even for highachieving Hispanic students who thrive in math — can stunt them in high school and college.

New research from Danny Martin, an associate professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, on how racial perceptions affect student achievement, has found that these gaps and their high visibility have resulted in “the perpetuation of a widely accepted, and largely uncontested, racial hierarchy of mathematical ability: Students who are identified as Asian and white are placed at the top, and students identified as African-American, Native American and Latino are assigned to the bottom ... [framing these students] as less than ideal learners ... [and] mathematically illiterate in a way that is represented as natural and biologically determined.”

Yet, race is just one piece of the puzzle.

In a recent survey of more than 2,500 parents, 38 percent, including half the fathers, agreed with the statement “Skills in math are mostly useful for those that have careers related to math, so average Americans do not have much need for math skills.”

The remedy to this situation has many components: Targeting lowerincome students for high-quality preschool, aligning elementary grades’ math curriculum with the more stringent common-core standards, ensuring that teachers are highly qualified to teach math even in the early grades, and instilling in parents of infants and toddlers the need for nurturing number skills in addition to reading skills.

The first step, however, is public awareness.

Unless you have a kindergartener in your life, it’s difficult to imagine the level of complexity of the math our nation’s youngest students are expected to learn. This is not cause for fear but does require a light-bulb moment to encourage intervention.

Cepeda’s column is distributed by the Washington Post Writers Group. Her email address is estherjcepeda@ washpost.com.