Georgia will start gauging kindergartners’ readiness for school

A new statewide kindergarten assessment program starting in the fall of 2017 is intended to help teachers identify students’ readiness to learn.

Georgia will join a majority of states that use kindergarten entry assessments, in response to concerns about student achievement gaps in schools, though there are concerns about more testing and how the program will be administered.

Teachers find the Kindergarten Entry Profile promising but want more information, according to Tim Callahan, spokesman for the 86,000-member Professional Association of Georgia Educators (PAGE).

“Right now there are more questions than answers, although a statewide standardized ‘screener’ as one of our members termed it, would be good as long as districts have some flexibility to account for any unique circumstances they have,” Callahan wrote in an email.

Using the KEP, teachers will be trained to observe and assess kindergartners completing structured tasks in their first six weeks, and to identify students who may need additional attention.

Results from the KEP will also provide additional feedback to the pre-kindergarten system, help teachers become better instructors and close the readiness gap for school, according to board documents. Students will not be promoted or retained on the results of the KEP alone.

In a Nov. 24 meeting, the state board of education hired NCS Pearson, an educational assessment company, to implement the KEP for $2.89 million over four years. That money comes from a federal grant from the Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge.

KEP will be a component of the Georgia Kindergarten Inventory of Developing Skills (GKIDS), a year-long formative assessment that focuses on standard academics as well as social development. Melissa Fincher, Deputy Superintendent of Assessment & Accountability, said the KEP is more updated.

“We wanted to provide information about supports early, but we also wanted to provide feedback to the pre-K program so they know what to look out for,” Fincher said.

Deborah Rowe, an associate professor at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College of Education and Human Development, said KEP looks encouraging and may help personalize teaching to kindergartners.

“Kindergartners are coming into school with wide variety of experiences, and we need to expect diversity,” Rowe said. “It’s not that we should target out some subgroup for special intervention, but rather we should understand the variation to better individualize instruction.”

Because Sunitha Freeman’s daughter, a kindergartner at Burnette Elementary School, could already read when she entered kindergarten, Freeman asked her teacher to assess her daughter so she wouldn’t get bored in class.