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Ready schools are schools that seek to meet the unique needs of the students and families they serve. The concept of ready schools is part of the larger school readiness movement, which seeks to better prepare children for school and schools for children.
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The concept was popularized in the 1990s by the United States National Education Goals Panel, a taskforce of educators and politicians. The purpose of this taskforce was to set national educational policy in terms of readiness goals for children and schools. This work was discontinued with the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act. Ready schools work was continued at the state level, particularly in North Carolina, and through initiatives led by the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.
The National Educational Goals Panel (1998) recognized that preschool and family support services may not be sufficient to enable children to learn skills that precede an ability to succeed academically. The Panel stated that schools had a responsibility to be ready to meet the diverse needs of children. The ten key principles that the panel considered essential to achieving “ready” schools are that schools must:
The North Carolina School Goal Team developed a self-assessment instrument for schools. The portion of the instrument described here is very specific in recommending requirements for teachers and administrators and also address types of programs, practices, curricula, and interactions that should occur with children. These expectations go beyond what many states feel they can track and measure. The team specified that:
Recommendations for facilities are not as extensive and tend to be discussed along with issues such as class size. The same North Carolina self-assessment instrument for schools not only expects that the physical environment is welcoming to children and arranged in learning centers to encourage choice, problem solving, and discovery, but also anticipates the availability of some services on-site. Specifically, children would receive on-site health assessments for physical, vision, and dental health annually (Report of the Ready Schools Goals Team, 2000).
The W.K. Kellogg Foundation launched the Supporting Partnerships to Assure Ready Kids (SPARK) Initiative in 2001 to create community partnerships that prepare children for school and schools for children. The W.K. Kellogg Foundation uses nine Pathways to Ready Schools to frame the ready schools work being done through the SPARK initiative. The nine pathways are:
The SPARK Initiative Level Evaluation Team identified four diverse schools throughout the United States that display characteristics of ready schools. These schools are International Community School in Decatur, Georgia; Ka 'Umeke Ka'eo Public Charter School in Hilo, Hawaii; La Mesa Elementary School in Albuquerque, New Mexico; and Nailor Elementary School in Cleveland, Mississippi (Simons & Curtis, 2007).
The first large-scale implementation of a ready schools framework was launched in the Miami-Dade County Public School System (the fourth largest school district in the country). This major, urban school reform effort seeks to raise the quality of both pre-school and elementary schools throughout Miami-Dade County by focusing on school transitions, a quality rating and improvement system for early childhood programs, teacher professional development (Ready Schools University), strong school leadership and effective community partnerships. The initiative incorporates the Pathways to Ready Schools framework that came out of the Kellogg SPARK initiative, and was influenced by the PK3 framework developed by the Foundation for Child Development. Ready Schools Miami is funded by a grant from the W.K. Kellogg foundation to the Early Childhood Initiative Foundation and The Lastinger Center for Learning at the University of Florida.
Unschooling is an informal learning that advocates learner-chosen activities as a primary means for learning. Unschooling students learn through their natural life experiences including play, household responsibilities, personal interests and curiosity, internships and work experience, travel, books, elective classes, family, mentors, and social interaction. Unschooling encourages exploration of activities initiated by the children themselves, believing that the more personal learning is, the more meaningful, well-understood and therefore useful it is to the child. While courses may occasionally be taken, unschooling questions the usefulness of standard curricula, conventional grading methods, and other features of traditional schooling in the education of each unique child.
A preschool, also known as nursery school, pre-primary school, or play school, is an educational establishment or learning space offering early childhood education to children before they begin compulsory education at primary school. It may be publicly or privately operated, and may be subsidised from public funds.
In education, a curriculum is broadly defined as the totality of student experiences that occur in the educational process. The term often refers specifically to a planned sequence of instruction, or to a view of the student's experiences in terms of the educator's or school's instructional goals. In a 2003 study, Reys, Reys, Lapan, Holliday, and Wasman refer to curriculum as a set of learning goals articulated across grades that outline the intended mathematics content and process goals at particular points in time throughout the K–12 school program. Curriculum may incorporate the planned interaction of pupils with instructional content, materials, resources, and processes for evaluating the attainment of educational objectives. Curriculum is split into several categories: the explicit, the implicit, the excluded, and the extracurricular.
Inclusion in education refers to a model wherein students with special needs spend most or all of their time with non-special needs students. It arise in the context of special education with an individualized education program or 504 plan, and is built on the notion that it is more effective for students with special needs to have said mixed experience for them to be more successful in social interactions leading to further success in life. Inclusion rejects but still provides the use of special schools or classrooms to separate students with disabilities from students without disabilities. Schools with inclusive classrooms do not believe in separate classrooms. They do not have their own separate world so they have to learn how to operate with students while being less focused on by teachers due to a higher student to teacher ratio.
The National Educational Goals known as Goals 2000 were set by the U.S. Congress in the 1990s to set goals for standards-based education reform. The intent was for certain criteria to be met by the millennium (2000). Many of these goals were based on the principles of outcomes-based education, and not all of the goals were attained by the year 2000 as intended. Many see this as the predecessor to the No Child Left Behind program, which mandated measurable improvement in student achievement across all groups. Goals 2000 established a framework in which to identify world-class academic standards, to measure student progress, and to provide the support that students may need to help meet the standards.
An open-source curriculum (OSC) is an online instructional resource that can be freely used, distributed and modified. OSC is based on the open-source practice of creating products or software that opens up access to source materials or codes. Applied to education, this process invites feedback and participation from developers, educators, government officials, students and parents and empowers them to exchange ideas, improve best practices and create world-class curricula. These "development" communities can form ad-hoc, within the same subject area or around a common student need, and allow for a variety of editing and workflow structures.
Learning standards are elements of declarative, procedural, schematic, and strategic knowledge that, as a body, define the specific content of an educational program. Standards are usually composed of statements that express what a student knows.
Boston University Wheelock College of Education & Human Development is the school of education within Boston University. It is located on the University's Charles River Campus in Boston, Massachusetts in the former Lahey Clinic building. BU Wheelock has more than 31,000 alumni, 65 full-time faculty and both undergraduate and graduate students. Boston University School of Education was ranked 34th in the nation in 2018 by U.S. News & World Report in their rankings of graduate schools of education. The School of Education is a member institution of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE).
Primary education is typically the first stage of formal education, coming after preschool and before secondary school. Primary education takes place in primary school, the elementary school or first and middle school depending on the location.
Career Pathways is a workforce development strategy used in the United States to support workers’ transitions from education into and through the workforce. This strategy has been adopted at the federal, state and local levels in order to increase education, training and learning opportunities for America’s current and emerging workforce.
Susan Neuman is an educator, researcher, and education policy-maker in early childhood and literacy development. In 2013, she became Professor of Early Childhood and Literacy Education, and Chair of the Department of Teaching and Learning at NYU's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.
The Rhode Island Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (RIDE) is a state agency in Rhode Island that oversees the elementary and secondary education system from pre-Kindergarten through high school. It is headquartered in Providence. RIDE works closely with the Rhode Island Office of the Postsecondary Commissioner (RIOPC), the agency charged with overseeing higher education. Together, RIDE and RIOPC aim to provide an aligned, cohesive, and comprehensive education for all students.
The Knowledge and Human Development Authority (KHDA) is the educational quality assurance and regulatory authority of the Government of Dubai, United Arab Emirates. It oversees the private education sector in Dubai, including early childhood education centres, schools, higher education providers, and training institutes. KHDA is responsible for the growth and quality of private education in Dubai.
The National Math and Science Initiative (NMSI) is a non-profit organization based in Dallas, Texas, that launched in 2007. Its mission is to improve student performance in the subjects of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) in the United States. It attempts to do this by scaling up local academic programs to a national level.
Differentiated instruction and assessment, also known as differentiated learning or, in education, simply, differentiation, is a framework or philosophy for effective teaching that involves providing all students within their diverse classroom community of learners a range of different avenues for understanding new information in terms of: acquiring content; processing, constructing, or making sense of ideas; and developing teaching materials and assessment measures so that all students within a classroom can learn effectively, regardless of differences in ability. Students vary in culture, socioeconomic status, language, gender, motivation, ability/disability, personal interests and more, and teachers must be aware of these varieties as they plan curricula. By considering varied learning needs, teachers can develop personalized instruction so that all children in the classroom can learn effectively. Differentiated classrooms have also been described as ones that respond to student variety in readiness levels, interests and learning profiles. It is a classroom that includes all students and can be successful. To do this, a teacher sets different expectations for task completion for students based upon their individual needs.
Samuel J. Meisels, an expert on early childhood assessment and child development is the founding executive director of the Buffett Early Childhood Institute at the University of Nebraska, president emeritus of Erikson Institute, and a professor and research scientist emeritus at the University of Michigan. Meisels is one of the nation's leading scholars of early childhood assessment, as well as an outspoken commentator on educational practices that support the developmental needs of young children. In 2010 he was granted an honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters from Roosevelt University and in 2019 the Simms/Mann Institute awarded Dr. Meisels its Visionary Leadership Award in Development and Education.
Kid's Community College, also referred to as KCC, is a public charter school and private preschool based in Riverview, Florida. Established in 2003 by Timothy B. Kilpatrick, Sr., Kid's Community College provides educational services and care for children six weeks of age through grade 12.
First 5 Los Angeles is a nonprofit child-advocacy organization that is part of the First 5 California Children and Families Act.
ConnectEd is a United States Federal Government Initiative that aims to increase internet connectivity and technology in all public schools to enhance learning. The ConnectEd initiative is funded through Title IV Part A of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which designates specific monies for the effective use of technology in schools. The 2016 National Education Technology Plan aligns with ConnectEd as a published action plan to meet these goals of technology integration and connectivity.
Curricula in early childhood care and education (ECCE) address the role and importance of curricula in the education of young children, and is the driving force behind any ECCE programme. It is ‘an integral part of the engine that, together with the energy and motivation of staff, provides the momentum that makes programmes live’. It follows therefore that the quality of a programme is greatly influenced by the quality of its curriculum. In early childhood, these may be programmes for children or parents, including health and nutrition interventions and prenatal programmes, as well as centre-based programmes for children.
