Hawaii lags in preparing kids for kindergarten, state DOE report shows

In the Hawaii public schools’ first statewide assessment of children’s kindergarten readiness, less than one-third of children entering kindergarten this fall demonstrated “baseline readiness” for school, according to new state Department of Education data that evaluated basic language, math and social skills, and physical development.

On the Johns Hopkins University Ready for Kindergarten assessment, 29.6% of the kindergartners earned overall scores that classified them as “demonstrating readiness”; 39.5% were in the second tier, “approaching readiness”; and 30.9% were in the third tier, “emerging readiness.”

But results varied widely by school complex and island, often reflecting socioeconomic and demographic differences between neighborhoods — ranging from single-digit percentages of children demonstrating readiness for kindergarten in the Farrington, Waianae, Lanai and Hana complexes, to 58% in the Kaiser complex in East Oahu.

In a Honolulu Star-­Advertiser interview, Lt. Gov. Sylvia Luke said the low numbers for kindergarten readiness in some categories are worrisome, and suggest that despite major strides, Hawaii still must make urgent progress toward improving public awareness of the importance of early-childhood education, and increasing access to free or affordable preschool.

“If only 20-something percent of kids (statewide ) are demonstrating readiness, as a state we need to figure out how can we get parents to understand that getting kids ready for kindergarten could impact their placement or could impact how they’re labeled from kindergarten on, and could potentially have lifelong results and consequences,” said Luke, who is spearheading the state’s Ready Keiki initiative to create universal preschool access in the islands.

“By the time kindergarten happens, a lot of the kids’ cognition and the ability to learn is being stabilized,” Luke continued. “So this is a really important subject.”

Comparisons with other states are difficult, since there is no national mandate to assess incoming kindergartners, and states and school districts that do it use a multitude of tools. According to the Education Commission of the States, over three dozen states require some type of assessment at the time of kindergarten entry.

Maryland, for one, which also uses a kindergarten readiness assessment originating out of Johns Hopkins University, reported last school year that 42% of its kindergartners demonstrated readiness, up from 40% the year before.

Comparing data with other states might not be valid since this was the first year Hawaii public school educators had to learn to administer the kindergarten assessment, state officials said.

While in an ideal world 100% of children entering kindergarten would demonstrate readiness, every state and school district has different social and economic conditions, and varied systems of delivering early learning, said Yuuko Arikawa-Cross, director of the state’s Executive Office on Early Learning.

She and state DOE officials said it’s too early to say what goals for improvement might be set for coming years, as they have only just begun to study the data. “I’m just actually happy that for the first time we have some kind of unified database,” she said.

Teachers’ observations

The Kindergarten Entry Assessment is not a paper test. “Instead, it includes a variety of items, including teachers’ observations of daily activities and age-appropriate performance tasks in which the teacher asks a child to respond to a question or complete an activity,” says a DOE document on the assessment. Examples include counting, carrying a conversation, holding a pencil and taking turns.

The assessment covers four “critical early-childhood developmental domains”: language and literacy, mathematics, social foundations and physical development, DOE Deputy Superintendent Heidi Armstrong said in a Dec. 7 memo to the board’s Student Achievement Committee.

The 10,260 Hawaii keiki who were assessed this fall accounted for 85% of the DOE’s total kindergarten enrollment. A score of 270-298 indicated a student was “demonstrating readiness” for kindergarten; 258-269 indicated “approaching readiness”; and 202-257 indicated a student was “emerging” toward readiness.

Students of the Lahaina complex were excluded due to the August fires; only about 10% of eligible kindergartners there were tested.

The Kaiser school complex was the only one where average scores were in the “demonstrating readiness ” range in all four domains tested.

Only two school complexes — Mililani and Kalaheo — along with the charter schools as a group posted average scores that indicated that kindergartners demonstrated readiness in three areas tested.

But the language and literacy domain was a common stumbling block nearly statewide. Other than Kaiser, not one school complex had an average score classified as “demonstrating readiness” in that area.

The high levels of Hawaii children who speak languages other than English could be a factor, Arikawa-­Cross said. “It might not show up as good on a test score, but I don’t think of multilingualism as a deficit,” she said.

“I would really want children to hold on to their first language actually. That is something that’s really unique about Hawaii.”

A Hawaiian-language version of the assessment is in development for kaiapuni students — those enrolled in Hawaiian language immersion programs.

The DOE this school year conducted the Kindergarten Entry Assessment to meet the requirements of Act 210 of the 2021 state Legislature. Such an assessment is also called for in the 2023-2029 strategic plan for Hawaii’s public schools, in which one of the 27 “desired outcomes” reads, “All entering kindergarten students are assessed for social, emotional and academic readiness, and provided necessary and timely support to develop foundational skills for learning.”

Various studies suggest 80% to 90% of brain development occurs before age 5.

Armstrong said in her memo to the BOE that early learning is crucial because the first five years of children’s lives are “times of profound linguistic, social, emotional, physical and cognitive development. Particularly significant is students’ development of language, with early oral (or signed ) vocabulary levels predicting reading achievement, mathematics achievement, behavior, and emotional identification, and social relationships.”

“At kindergarten entry, students’ prior development across these skills, especially oral language, is highly predictive of later academic and social functioning,” the memo added.

Poverty is “one of the most widely recognized risk factors for school readiness,” according to a 2019 analysis on school readiness in Pediatrics, the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics. “Fewer than half (48%) of poor children are ready for school at 5 years of age as compared with 75% of children from moderate-or high-income households.”

Unhealthy pregnancies, disabilities, lack of access to food, trauma, abuse and lack of strong socialization also are among the multitude of factors that can hamper a prekindergarten child’s development, Arikawa-Cross said. “There are so many things that can impact kindergarten readiness. It’s nice to think and assume that everybody is coming from a well-nurtured, well-supported environment before they land on your doorstep in kindergarten, but it’s not the reality.”

Luke said she has learned from national experts that the COVID-19 pandemic problem worsened kindergarten readiness levels.

The DOE is emphasizing several programs to improve kindergarten readiness, but some are already under threat, including a summer jump-start program for incoming kindergartners that is facing a funding cutoff as COVID-19 federal aid nears its end and does not have state backing.

Luke said the data illustrates why in Hawaii — where high prices for some private preschools can range in the hundreds to over $1, 000 a month — families need more help getting access to free public preschool.

The state’s Ready Keiki initiative aims to build 465 public school preschool classrooms by 2032. Eleven classrooms opened ahead of schedule this fall. Thirty-eight more are in preconstruction and eight are in construction, set to open in fall 2024.

Arikawa-Cross said her office is expanding outreach, and families need to know that the state’s Open Doors preschool subsidies and qualifying criteria were expanded in the past Legislature, and they should apply again, even if they were denied before.

“We know it does make a difference,” Arikawa-Cross said.

“When we can see the detrimental effects of not healthy and nurturing situations, we can also look at the opposite end of the spectrum and look at … how do people carry positive things with them as well? Social skills, taking turns communicating, working together—these are skills you need for your whole life. … Early literacy skills, to be able to think, to read, they carry all the way even into adulthood. And so I think that this is why it matters.”