Pulling preK 1 into a K-12 orbit: the evolution of preK in the age of standards

Abstract

We might call this decade the era of early childhood. In the US, federal and state governments invest in the creation of public pre-kindergarten (preK) programs and create standards that articulate goals for practice and benchmarks that can be used to evaluate success. How have these trends provided a context for the evolution of preK curriculum? In this paper, we analyze the enactment of preK policy in New Jersey, a highly regulated preK program and Wisconsin, a local control state. We argue that standards-based practice is evolving into accountability in public preK programs, where outcomes set parameters for planning and teachers and children are increasingly regulated. As preK is more closely affiliated with the K-12 sector (elementary and secondary), preK programs are subject to the logic of alignment, benchmarks and assessments. Even when early learning standards support child-centered approaches to curriculum they are overruled by accountability discourse.

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Early Years
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Pulling preK into a K-12 orbit: the evolution of preK
in the age of standards
M. Elizabeth Graue, Sharon Ryan, Amato Nocera, Kaitlin Northey & Bethany
Wilinski
To cite this article: M. Elizabeth Graue, Sharon Ryan, Amato Nocera, Kaitlin Northey & Bethany
Wilinski (2016): Pulling preK into a K-12 orbit: the evolution of preK in the age of standards,
Early Years, DOI: 10.1080/09575146.2016.1220925
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EARLY YEARS, 2016
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09575146.2016.1220925
Pulling preK1 into a K-12 orbit: the evolution of preK in the
age of standards
M. Elizabeth Grauea, Sharon Ryanb, Amato Nocerac, Kaitlin Northeyb and
Bethany Wilinskid
aCurriculum and Instruction, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA; bDepartment of Learning & Teaching,
Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA; cEducational Policy Studies, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI,
USA; dDepartment of Teacher Education, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA
ABSTRACT
We might call this decade the era of early childhood. In the US,
federal and state governments invest in the creation of public pre-
kindergarten (preK) programs and create standards that articulate
goals for practice and benchmarks that can be used to evaluate
success. How have these trends provided a context for the evolution
of preK curriculum? In this paper, we analyze the enactment of preK
policy in New Jersey, a highly regulated preK program and Wisconsin, a
local control state. We argue that standards-based practice is evolving
into accountability in public preK programs, where outcomes set
parameters for planning and teachers and children are increasingly
regulated. As preK is more closely aliated with the K-12 sector
(elementary and secondary), preK programs are subject to the logic
of alignment, benchmarks and assessments. Even when early learning
standards support child-centered approaches to curriculum they are
overruled by accountability discourse.
Introduction
Early childhood education in the United States is undergoing a momentous shift. Policy-
makers are investing in high-quality public pre-kindergarten (preK) systems to reduce the
opportunity gap in early education while also developing early learning standards to clarify
what young children should know and do as they enter formal schooling. However, there is
concern among the early childhood community that the use of standards and the invest-
ments in public preK will lead to a narrowing of the early childhood curriculum (Brown,
Weber, and Yoon 2015; Hatch 2002).
For many, a standards-based approach is in conict with traditional early childhood teaching,
which has been informed by a professional model called developmentally appropriate practice
(DAP) (Copple and Bredekamp 2009). DAP anchors practice to age-referenced norms for growth,
a child’s individual development and cultural practices that shape learning. These three elements
are used by teachers to triangulate instructional decision-making. Developmentally appropriate
© 2016 TACTYC
KEYWORDS
Early childhood; public preK;
standards; developmentally
appropriate practice
ARTICLE HISTORY
Received 1 March 2016
Accepted 2 August 2016
CONTACT M. Elizabeth Graue beth.graue@wisc.edu
1We use the term preK to denote public funded programs for four and in some cases three year olds.

2 M. E. GRAUE ET AL.
practice is a child-centered approach to curriculum with an emphasis on the process of learning.
In contrast, standards in early childhood education range in type and focus, from program stand-
ards designed to strengthen quality to performance standards that target academic outcomes.
Regardless of the type of standard, their use in ECE represents a potentially perilous restructuring
of the meaning of preschool, that may result in academic escalation and fewer opportunities for
children to learn based on their own interests and developmental needs.
In this paper, we look at the enactment of standards from the perspectives of public preK
teachers and administrators in two US states. We contrast a highly regulated and resourced
state program in New Jersey, designed around research-based quality criteria, with a program
called 4K in Wisconsin, a local control state, in which districts had much latitude in the design,
implementation and practice of preK. We focus on the following question: Are early learning
standards refocusing the early childhood curriculum toward academic instruction?
In the next section, we explore the literature describing the evolving relationship between
the early childhood community and standards in the US. We then describe the methodology
employed in our study of the New Jersey and Wisconsin preK programs. Finally, we present
our analysis through a thematic contrast of the two states’ preK practice. We argue that while
early childhood standards were once seen as a beacon to guide practice and ensure quality
(Bowman 2006; Bredekamp 2009) standards-based practice is evolving into accountability
in public preK programs, where outcomes set parameters for planning and teachers and
children are increasingly regulated.
The evolving role of early childhood education in the United States
A thread of this story is related to the institutional location of early childhood education in
the United States. Given the global audience of Early Years, we begin by briey describing
this institutional evolution so that we have some shared understanding of the context in
which we conducted our study.
Historically there has been a confusing, but critical line between early childhood educa-
tion and the Kindergarten-Grade 12 sector in the United States. The early childhood period
is typically dened as focused on children 0–8 years and includes infant toddler care, pre-
school (ages 3–4), kindergarten and grades 1–3 (ages 5–8). This developmental span strad-
dles preschool settings that are typically privately funded and elementary programs that
are typically publicly funded. Services for children prior to kindergarten have most frequently
been guided by health and safety agencies; K-12 by state education oces.
In an eort to professionalize the early childhood community, the National Association
for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) developed accreditation guidelines to promote
high-quality contexts for learning in 1986. Based on what they saw as a clear knowledge
base derived from child development, these guidelines were framed as consensus building
and authoritative foundations for practice. Along with these guidelines, they developed a
position statement that articulated what they called Developmentally Appropriate Practice
(DAP). Initially, these guidelines were focused on two types of teacher knowledge: general
knowledge about typical development and specic knowledge about an individual child.
Though not labeled as such, DAP served as the rst set of standards in early childhood
practice.
The original DAP guidelines (Bredekamp 1987) were based on the idea that instructional
activities should be tailored to children’s diverse developmental needs (Copple and

EARLY YEARS 3
Bredekamp 2009). Drawing on the progressive ideal of a child-centered education, DAP
recognized the importance of variation among children’s needs and interests. DAP articulated
a vision of early childhood in which children move through developmental stages in pat-
terned ways but with variation that makes a lockstep curriculum problematic.
DAP was woven into accreditation rules and into the early childhood teacher education
curriculum. It was, however, a focal point for critique by scholars who disputed its utility on
a number of grounds. Ryan and Grieshaber (2005) noted that the developmental science
used to justify DAP was based on the characteristics and experiences of white middle-class
children (Lubeck 1998), overlooked children’s agency (Silin 1995); and used a notion of ‘nor-
mal’ development to regulate children’s learning (Williams 1994). Together these critiques
pointed to the mismatch between the univocality asserted by DAP and the complexity of
postmodern and critical constructivist perspectives, with particular attention to the ways
that DAP potentially marginalize individuals and groups outside its Eurocentric
foundation.
In the mid-1990s, NAEYC revised DAP (Bredekamp and Copple 1997) to reect a growing
understanding about the role that culture plays in students’ development. NAEYC recom-
mended that teachers ‘meet… young children where they are (by stage of development),
both as individuals and as part of a group’ (NAEYC n.d., para. 12). Linking a child’s expression
of development to an interplay of typical development, culture and individual experience
was thought to make teaching more contingent on the children in a class than on the targets
imposed by standards. Ironically, both the newer version of DAP and the movement to
standards-based programming could be seen as doubling down on white middle-class prac-
tices. Culture becomes a checkbox that can be marked as teachers plan instruction and
standards become a tool to combat low expectations. Neither seems to be the case.
Flash forward to 2006 and a keynote address at the NAEYC Conference, when Barbara
Bowman outlined four essential types of standards in the United States’ system of early
childhood education: program standards, content standards, performance standards and
professional development standards. Program standards, Bowman noted, are input stand-
ards and dene the learning environment and conditions for children’s success. Examples
of these standards include requirements about the student-to-teacher ratio and the kinds
of credentials sta need in early childhood settings. Also input oriented, content standards
prescribe the ‘Knowledge, concepts, and skills to be taught at each age or grade level’.
Performance standards focus on student outcomes, dening what students should know
and be able to do at various benchmarks. Finally, according to Bowman, professional devel-
opment standards outline the ‘skills and knowledge teachers should have if they are to be
eective’ (Bowman 2006). This might be seen as the paths of early childhood education and
K-12 schooling converging. Understanding how standards in ECE have developed is clearer
if considered in the K-12 accountability context.
The story of the standards movement, as this recent history has come to be called, started
with publicly funded K-12 programs. In the early 1980s, a slow wave of K-12 standards began
to emerge at the state-level. Inspired by publications like A Nation at Risk, an emerging
political consensus formed that low and ill-dened expectations – particularly in high
school – were the central problem with America’s public schools. Within this political
discourse, the solution was to develop grade-level learning standards that clearly dened
what should be taught and what students should know. Starting in the early 1990s, the
federal government began to play a role, initially incentivizing states to create their own

4 M. E. GRAUE ET AL.
standards, and eventually mandating standards with the passage of the Bush administration
education agenda, No Child Left Behind. As state and federal policy evolved into a full-edged
movement, standards were tied to other reforms aimed at keeping schools accountable,
including state-wide tests for students, teacher evaluation systems and curricular reforms.
In the No Child Left Behind era, failure to demonstrate that students were performing to the
state standards could result in funding losses for schools, sanctions for teachers or failure to
graduate for students. The logic of standards-based accountability is rmly planted in US
education policy, continuing through both federal and state legislation including the
Common Core State Standards, an eort to implement a shared set of standards in all
50 states.
As policy-makers embraced the idea of publicly funded preK programs (typically for 3- or
4-year-olds), early childhood education became a target of the standards movement with
the Bush Administration’s 2002 ‘Good Start, Grow Smart’ initiative (Brown 2007). Touted as
a reform to tackle the low program quality of preK, the legislation pushed states to develop
‘early guidelines’ in literacy and language that aligned with K-12. Within a couple of years of
the passage of Good Start, Grow Start, the number of states that had developed early learning
standards tripled (Scott-Little, Kagan, and Frelow, 2003). By 2009 all 50 states had early
education standards, although there is signicant variability in the kind of ‘concepts, knowl-
edge, [and] skills’ expected of young children from state-to-state (Bracken and Crawford
2009). A number of states have also developed forms of assessment and accountability to
enforce new performance standards in preK. The early childhood community has resisted
these recent developments – concerned that even if a system of standardization and account-
ability is justied for most years of schooling, the early years are dierent. The standardization
and accountability in K-12 schooling is a poor match for a system based on patterned but
unpredictable understanding of development. Children’s development is ‘episodic, uneven,
and highly inuenced by their prior experiences.’ (Bredekamp 2009). Furthermore, cultural
and linguistic dierences also contribute to variation in how children learn and develop
(NAEYC [1990/1995]). These ideas about children’s development are embraced by early child-
hood’s professional model of standards – DAP. DAP and grade-specic goals of the standards
movement are often viewed as two opposing forces in the battle over early childhood
standards.
In the United States, talk of standards in education often evokes the standards movement
and associated ideas about accountability, but the two are not inherently the same thing.
Initially focused on learning process and developmental practice, the early learning standards
are bumping up against a more regulatory version of standards – those developed to engage
K-12 schools in accountability. However, early learning standards may not necessarily be in
opposition to the progressive values of early childhood. This study investigated the standards
enacted by teachers and administrators in two states and whether the intent of the early
learning standards was leading to a focus on academic outcomes.
Methods
This paper comes out of a multisite, comparative case study (Stake 2005) designed to under-
stand how preK policy is enacted, administered and experienced by relevant stakeholders.
We sampled New Jersey and Wisconsin, two states that approach preK quite dierently. New
Jersey has a targeted program, providing services to children in districts with high need;

EARLY YEARS 5
Wisconsin has a universal program oered in 93% of the state’s districts. New Jersey has a
highly regulated program; Wisconsin a model of local control. Both states provide preK in
public schools, childcare centers or Head Start. New Jersey teachers are all paid on a K-12
schedule while Wisconsin teachers are paid according to the local preschool market, which
is almost always signicantly below the K-12 salary schedule.
The broader study mapped preK policy and history through interviews with state actors
about the state’s goals and implementation of preK. State sta helped identify rural, midsize
and urban districts that would illustrate mature program implementation. We interviewed
district leaders about the local model and they helped us identify preK sites that represented
the district’s program. We provide an overview of the sample in Table 1. [All names of par-
ticipants and locations are pseudonyms].
Within each site, we interviewed administrators about program goals, implementation
practices and challenges. These administrators identied potential host classrooms and focal
children in each class. To understand how preK was enacted at the classroom level, we
interviewed the teachers multiple times across the year about program goals and their daily
work. We also examined artifacts like lesson plans for evidence of standards and other
Table 1.Study sample [pseudonyms].
New Jersey Wisconsin
District Robe Norwood Vineland Belford Dickson Pickering
Area Small,
suburban
Large urban Mid -size rural
town
Small town Small urban Rural town
Population 12,000 278,000 61,000 24,000 63,000 3,000
Oversight Public School Mixed Mixed Community Mixed Public School
Number of sites 4 classrooms
in primary
school site, 7
off-site
classrooms
36 public
schools, 77
private preK
providers,
41 Head
Start sites
40 public
schools
classrooms,
62 private
child care
classrooms
6 classrooms
in
community
childcare
sites
5 public
schools, 14
private preK
providers, 1
Head Start
1 classroom in
district’s
single
elementary
school
Site name Robe Mary Street
Head Start
ABC Learning
Center
Early Learning
Academy
Dickson Day
Care
Pickering
Elementary
Site
characteris-
tics
Off-site.
Converted
special
education
classroom
behind large
high school
Public school
classroom in
a Head Start
site
Public school
classroom in
a private
child care
site.
Non-profit
child care
program,
Nonprofit,
NAEYC
accredited,
Young Star 5
star rated,
4K
program-
ming
combined
with wrap
around care
Rural school
site housing
4K-gr12
CLASS rating
Emotional
Support
5.9 6.2 6.6 6.4 5.8 4.6
Classroom
Organization
5.2 5.8 6.0 6.0 3.9 4.6
Instructional
Support
1.7 3.2 3.5 3.0 2.3 2.0

6 M. E. GRAUE ET AL.
references to state policy. In each classroom, we rated classroom quality using the Classroom
Assessment Scoring System. Though not part of this paper, we conducted ethnographic
case studies of two focal children in each site, following them, their families and teachers
for the preK year. We also followed the children into kindergarten, interviewing their kinder-
garten teachers to get a sense of each child’s experience. Data collection took place over
18 months from fall 2012 until the end of 2013.
Analysis was a recursive process that began with data collection and continued through
the process of writing (Merriam 2009). This process involved transcribing interview record-
ings, compiling eld notes and documentary data by district and state. All interview, obser-
vation and documentary data were uploaded into Dedoose, a mixed methods analysis
program.
Formal analysis for this paper began with examination of the state level data, working to
construct a framework and history of the program, then tracing it into the practices of dis-
tricts and sites. To examine the policy implementation process at district and classroom
levels, we coded all data by district for references to standards and preK policies. For example,
teacher lesson plans were coded for the absence or presence of state early learning standards
and the goals and objectives that informed the curriculum. In addition to deductive coding,
we paid careful attention to the local context, noting the values and expectations teachers
and administrators said guided their program. At least two researchers coded data in each
state. We then examined the corpus of data coded for a district, looking for themes that cut
across codes and captured the factors informing preK implementation. We used this thematic
analysis to develop case portraits that illustrate the values and goals shaping preK in each
district, the state policies and standards emphasized by local actors as well as how the policy
was enacted in each classroom. Finally, we looked across the district portraits in relation to
each state’s preK policy.
Early childhood standards in Wisconsin and New Jersey
New Jersey
New Jersey and Wisconsin have established preK programs with dierent beginnings, struc-
tures and infrastructure. New Jersey’s program came out of a court case that directed the
state to enhance funding to equalize education in the state’s 31 highest poverty districts. In
these districts, the state provides full-day publicly funded preK to 3- and 4-year-olds. Class
size must not exceed 15 children, and each class must be staed by a preK – 3 certied
teacher and an assistant teacher. Teachers must use one of four state-approved curriculum
models aligned to early learning standards. The preK program is a mixed service delivery
model (public schools partner with Head Start and child care) administered by the local
education authority.
New Jersey published its rst set of early learning standards Early Childhood Program
Expectations: Standards in 2000 in an eort to create consistency across the state’s developing
public preK program. This document has been modied over time; rst in 2009, to align with
the state’s Core Curriculum Content Standards and later, in 2013, to align with the Common
Core Standards (NJDOE 2014). Written as a guide for what constitutes best practices for
teaching young children in public preK programs, the standards specify expectations for
children’s learning in subject matter areas (e.g. social emotional, mathematics, technology

EARLY YEARS 7
and world languages) and developmental domains (e.g. socio emotional learning and phys-
ical education), as well as appropriate teaching practices to support those outcomes (NJDOE
2014). In keeping with developmentally appropriate practice, the standards describe sup-
portive learning environments for children as those which encourage purposeful play and
children’s inquiry, and how teachers might partner with families and communities to support
young children’s learning. There is also a section that provides direction for teachers on how
to document and assess young children’s learning to ensure the standards are met (NJDOE
2014) (Table 2).
Wisconsin
The origins of Wisconsin’s PreK system are in the 1848 constitution, which included four-
years-olds in the age range of children to whom the state was obligated to provide an
education. In reality, the education of four-year-olds ebbed and owed until the 1980s when
funding was reinstituted by the state. In recognition of the role of the childcare community
to the local economy, in 2000 the state developed 4K-CA. 4K is the name chosen by Wisconsin
for its public preK program, which is a community approach that partners districts with local
childcare centers. Currently, over 90% of Wisconsin districts oer a half day 4K program,
serving two-thirds of the state’s 4-year-olds. Approximately one-fourth of the districts partner
with local early education programs, the remaining sites are in schools. 4K teachers must be
early childhood-certied; assistants are not required and there is no maximum class size.
Curricula must be aligned with the Wisconsin Model Early Learning Standards; though, given
their exible framework, most curricula qualify.
At the same time that Wisconsin 4K re-emerged in the 1980s, there was a growing move-
ment to develop standards in the K-12 system. When the early childhood community was
called to develop statewide standards, diverse stakeholders created standards designed to
support the following domains: health and physical, social and emotional, language and
Table 2.PreK Policy Requirements in New Jersey and Wisconsin.
State preK policy NIEER benchmark New Jersey requirements Wisconsin requirements
Early learning standards Comprehensive Comprehensive Comprehensive
Teacher degree BA BA BA
Teacher specialized training Specialized in pre-K P-3, Nursery School
Certificate, P-8 with
2 years preschool
teaching experience
EC certificate (preK-gr 3)
Assistant teacher Degree CDA or equivalent High school diploma High school diploma
Teacher in-service At least 15 h per year 100 clock hours per 5 years 6 credit hours per 5 years
Maximum class size 20 or lower 15 Determined locally
Staff–child ratio 1:10 or better 2:15 Determined locally
Screening/referral Vision, hearing, health; and
at least 1 support service
Vision; hearing; height/
weight/BMI; immuniza-
tions; dental; develop-
mental; & support
services
Immunizations; develop-
mental; full physical
exam, support services
Meals At least 1/day Breakfast, lunch, snack Depends on length of
program day
Monitoring Site visits every five years Site visits & other
monitoring
Site visits & other
monitoring

8 M. E. GRAUE ET AL.
communication, approaches to learning, cognition and general knowledge. According to
Tammy Gordon, a regional early childhood specialist who served on the committee:
So, I saw those early standards more as protections for young children that they were set up in a
way that we could help children avoid inappropriate expectations and inappropriate programs.
Because the standards should be developmentally based and we don’t have benchmarks in
the standards. It’s a developmental continuum. And you meet where the child is and you move
them forward.
One way that they managed this developmental approach was to dene content elements
developmentally. Rather than creating literacy standards, these skills were framed in terms
of communication; math and science were mapped within cognition. These broad-based
standards were implemented in 4K settings that allowed local districts to develop programs
and curricula that supported all domains of child development.
Both Wisconsin and New Jersey appear to take a developmentally appropriate approach
to standards, using the language of development to situate expectations for children’s learn-
ing. However, when we looked at the enacted curriculum, there was a tension playing out
in classrooms and states between a focus on academic content and developmentally appro-
priate practices.
Standards in curriculum practice
The ocial role of standards in each state is to guide practice and ensure appropriate invest-
ments in early education. The enactment in practice is something dierent. There is a pal-
pable tension between DAP’s progressive approach focused on children’s development and
the expectation of school readiness – a common phrase in the early childhood standards
movement. The twenty-rst century version of school readiness often signies the academic
skills and concepts children need to be successful in kindergarten. While some educators
and center administrators prioritized kindergarten readiness, others tried to counter this
push down by employing developmentally appropriate practices.
In Wisconsin, we often heard that 4K was evolving – from something socially focused to
something more structured around academic skills. Given Wisconsin’s broad boundaries for
the implementation of 4K, we did not expect this kind of uniform evolution. What explained
this perception? We decided that we needed to think about 4K over time and to consider
4K as part of the broader elementary education system.
Renee Jensen, a 4K teacher from Belford described the early days of 4K, ‘When we rst
started 4K, it was, ‘You don’t need to stress letters, you don’t need to stress anything, just a
brief overview.’ They really wanted a lot of social skills.’ This whole child approach t well with
the emergence of 4K-CA – which allowed districts to partner with childcare centers that had
long histories of developmental curriculum. In two of our study districts, 4K-CA was enacted
through collaboration between local caregivers and the school district cooperating on pro-
gram design.
Rather than working with a mandated set of curricula, Belford chose a very open instruc-
tional model, Creative Curriculum, and assumed that each teacher and each center would
make it their own:
Each location has its own dierent spin on what happens. Everyone has the Teaching Strategies
GOLD [the published assessment for Creative Curriculum] but how you present those things to
the kids is dierent at every location. Each location has their own air. Every teacher has their

EARLY YEARS 9
own way of teaching things – they all have the same course standards that they have to get
accomplished, but how they present it is dierent. (Renee, Belford)
A developmental 4K curriculum that was initially socially focused allowed kindergarten
teachers to have a quick start with their students. Former Belford Superintendent Keith
Deitsch saw 4K as a transition that bridged the gap between the child almost reading and
the child without knowledge of letters, numbers or colors:
I remember hearing denite comments that our kids are better prepared. That to me was the
idea, to have that transition to have that foundation, so they are ready when they come to
kindergarten that they do some of things that we expected. Unfortunately, kindergarten used
to be a place of play. It used to be a place that kids would come to play. And you didn’t start to
read until rst grade … That’s not the situation any longer. And maybe we will have 3K someday
… I hope not.
This narrative of a play-based curriculum providing a launching pad for success in kin-
dergarten was initially posed as evidence of the value of 4K. In more recent years however,
discussions took a sharp turn, largely as a result of the escalation of kindergarten curriculum.
Dr. Deitsch joked that this could mean we’ll have 3K – a place to prepare children for 4K.
In each district, administrators pointed to new kindergarten expectations that were driv-
ing practices in 4K. Pickering Superintendent Stacy Cliord was frustrated by traditional
views of kindergarten:
We can’t aord for kindergarten to be colors and counting to ten and memorizing ABCs –it
can’t be. It really has to be reading readiness. It has to be math-concept ready – they need to be
ready to go. The social piece of sitting and crying in the corner for the rst week of school – we
haven’t got a week to lose!
At another site, Pickering, a 4K teacher named Diane Lanham had recently learned that
next year she would be charged with the kindergarten math curriculum because the district
had low math scores on district assessments. The solution was to move each curriculum
down to a lower level. Ms. Lanham could not gure out how to implement what was formerly
the math curriculum for 5- and 6-year-olds. The kindergarten curriculum was not a good t
for 4-year-olds and she was particularly concerned about expectations that the children
should be writing numerals:
We’re not ready to write ‘9’ yet. Let’s gure out what 9 is. It’s just not developmentally appropriate
yet. Like writing. A lotta kids cannot write yet. And there was talk at our last sta meeting how
developmentally appropriate isn’t necessarily what’s done any more, as the Common Core is
brought in. Everything’s been amped up a little bit…but as far as what they physical ability is,
it’s still the same.
Curiously, using the Wisconsin early learning standards as a tool to guarantee that 4K was
developmentally oriented was not working out so well in Pickering. Ms. Lanham told us that
One of the hardest things for us, especially in sta meetings, there’s so much talk about the
Common Core standards and curriculum and how you need to know all of this stu. And it
doesn’t always apply to us. I really feel like we should follow the Wisconsin Early Learning
Standards, but we are told that we need to follow the Common Core. In 4K we follow kinder-
garten’s [standards].
What is particularly interesting about these statements is that Ms. Lanham’s classroom was
the least developmentally oriented of the three Wisconsin sites. While her classroom had all
the trappings of 4K, her activities were dominated by one-size-ts-all coloring sheets and a
strong focus on following instructions rather than exploring at your own pace.

10 M. E. GRAUE ET AL.
While not all three of our sites were as driven by kindergarten and the standards move-
ment as Pickering, it’s worth mentioning that in our two other sites – Belford and Dickson –
the district administrators spoke the standards-escalation language, often referencing the
need to use preK eciently to prepare 4-year-olds for school. We anticipate that the 4K
programs in those districts will experience the same kind of evolution we heard about in
Pickering. The idea of 4K as a soft developmental transition, a bridge to K-12, was being
eclipsed and now 4K was conceptualized as the place to ensure that the raw materials were
standardized for Kindergarten entry. It embodied Lilian Katz’ notion of education as prepa-
ration for the next life.
Often [teachers] say that that what they’re doing, say in kindergarten, is done because the rst
grade teacher who will receive her pupils, expects her to ‘cover it.’ This is a type of education for
the afterlife – always rationalizing today’s pedagogy in terms of the next life. (Katz 1973, 396)
This statement from more than 40 years ago preceded the standards movement in a time
before kindergarten was fully integrated into the K-12 system. Now the 4K teachers had
more than just kindergarten teachers to contend with – building principals, superintendents
and curriculum specialists looked to 4K to boost the skills of children as they entered school.
We saw a similar pattern in New Jersey. Although districts were required to implement a
developmentally appropriate curriculum model and use the State’s early learning standards
to identify age-appropriate learning outcomes, some administrators and teachers altered
the curriculum to achieve outcomes they saw as integral to children’s success in
kindergarten.
In two districts, either the administrators or the teachers were not convinced that the
state-required developmental curriculum provided enough of an academic focus. Laura, the
early childhood administrator of Norwood, a large urban district, required her teachers to
supplement the Creative Curriculum with direct literacy instruction and science content. As
she explained, ‘As a teacher who used Creative Curriculum, it has gaps. It has no scope and
sequence. It takes some things for granted. We supplement heavily. I’m a lover of model
writing. I expect it in every classroom’. In addition to the model writing (where the teacher
modeled writing that children could copy or expand on), she expected teachers to include
what she called the three pillars of literacy. She noted:
The rst pillar is the teaching of phonological awareness. Let’s sing, let’s chant, let’s read nursery
rhymes. The second thing is the development of oral language. Let’s stop with the damn teacher
talk already, I want to hear children marinating on their own thoughts….The third pillar is the
reading of both ction and non-ction texts, throughout the day by either the teacher or the TA.
And beyond the reading, there’s a bullet right underneath that says the asking of text dependent
questions. That last pillar bridges us into kindergarten expectations with the Common Core.
In Celia’s classroom, we saw this attention to academic learning every day beginning with
a whole class lesson for 20–30 min where children were expected to identify letters and sight
words as Celia demonstrated how to write them. There was always a second large group
instructional time focused on mathematical concepts (e.g. counting and patterns) and the
reading of a story in which children’s print awareness was emphasized. For Celia, ensuring
her children were ready for kindergarten was essential and necessitated altering the open-
ness of the Creative Curriculum to address academic concepts. She told us, ‘ If they don’t
have the literacy and the mathematics, they’re going to fall behind because they [kinder-
garten teachers] expect so much now of the preschool children’.

EARLY YEARS 11
Kimberly, a preK teacher in Robe held similar views to Celia about school readiness. The
Robe superintendent, Dr. Nydia Figueroa, had instituted the use of the Tools of the Mind
curriculum in both preK and kindergarten to ensure ‘articulation between the preK and K
teachers’. However, Kimberly was concerned that the majority of her students who were
English learners and from homes in poverty were not getting the literacy preparation they
needed. Therefore, she took it upon herself to adjust the curriculum.
I do a lot of stu in the [preK] classroom in terms of reading and sight words based o of what
they do in kindergarten because they actually will do tests for sight words at the end of pre-
school to see test their language skills and where they are. So throughout the year I focus on
dierent tactics and content areas that I know are integral parts of what they’re going to be
doing, curriculum-wise, in kindergarten.
In contrast, to what we saw in Norwood and Robe, the teachers and administrators of the
preK program in Vale Park advocated for developmentally appropriate learning expectations.
However, they received a lot of pushback from the district’s kindergarten teachers. One
kindergarten teacher described the district’s preK program:
It’s totally dierent than what we do here in kindergarten. I just know that the kids have more of
the power to do what they want to do. I think the program’s about solv[ing] everyday problems
through play. I would like them to be ready a lot more than what they are. At least maybe to
follow a routine, to hold a pencil, to verbally know their rst and last name, to write their name
and some letters and sounds.
Suzanne, a preK teacher in the Vale Park district, felt this academic push down from the kinder-
garten teachers as she told us, ‘the kindergarten teachers said they were prepared social-emo-
tionally, but they were not prepared academically. They were saying that the children were just
playing all day [and] they were given too many choices in preschool’. However, Suzanne remained
committed to implementing the High Scope curriculum with delity, allowing children to fre-
quently engage in play while she built on their conceptual learning through small group activities.
From her perspective, ‘the curriculum denitely helps them [the children] with language and
literacy, writing skills, things like that and math skills, as well’. While Suzanne worried about her
students moving into kindergarten she was committed to enacting a curriculum that started
with where children were developmentally.
The administrators of Vale Park also stayed committed to the use of developmentally
appropriate curricula in preK. However, they were not sure how long they might be able to
hold out. As Nora Jones, Vale Park’s early childhood principal commented, ‘You know what?
It’s going to be an uphill battle because these kindergarten principals don’t believe in what
we do’. While Vale Park remained the only district to interpret early learning standards in
developmental ways, there was increasing pressure to teach specic academic concepts
and skills.
Discussion
Our research was designed to explore the enactment of preK policy in practice. What we
saw through our analysis was that preK policy enactment in New Jersey and Wisconsin
intersected with the standards movement in multiple ways, and not always as we expected.
In this section, we explicitly compare the programs in each state, with reference to two sets
of standards that shaped practice: developmentally appropriate practices and the K-12
accountability movement.

12 M. E. GRAUE ET AL.
Each state’s preK policy reected a notion of quality and NAEYC’s developmentally appro
-
priate practice, designed to support systems of education ‘informed by what we know from
theory and literature about how children develop and learn’ (Copple and Bredekamp 2009,
10). Both developed and used early learning standards to mark preK o as a distinct educa-
tional space, requiring dierent practices and resources than the K-12 sector. Using an early
childhood quality metric established by the National Institute for Early Education Research’s
Benchmarks for PreK Quality (Barnett et al. 2016), New Jersey meets 9 benchmarks and
Wisconsin 5.
New Jersey’s system was a highly regulated preK program, using a model of preK quality
coming out of adherence to research-based practices. These benchmarks articulated teacher
preparation, class size and ratio, curriculum, and put in place administrative infrastructure
to ensure appropriate implementation. Enactment of this program required a strong regu-
latory infrastructure that included administrative stang statewide to monitor, support and
evaluate local programs. The systemic approach used in New Jersey would be seen by many
as a model of high aspirations, strong investment and thoughtful implementation.
The Wisconsin program paired early learning standards designed to protect early child-
hood programs from inappropriate expectations with a strong commitment to local control.
Wisconsin stakeholders and the policy they created favored a notion of quality that reected
community values and decision-making rather than top-down versions that were empirically
validated. A wariness of mandates combined with a condence in the power of the local to
produce a preK program whose qualities (note, the plural) represented a market approach
to early childhood education. Good programs would attract families, bad programs would
not.
While early learning standards were structuring forces that represented the state’s con-
ception of quality early education, there were opposing inuences in each state that evolved
the programs in new ways. Despite their use of authorized developmentally appropriate
curriculum, administrative personnel in both states yielded to the call of K-12 curriculum
reform, ‘supplementing’ well-developed EC curriculum like Creative Curriculum or Tools of
the Mind with more specic academic skill activities thought to increase readiness.
The NJ program structure competed with the demands of other programs introducing
variation that was not anticipated in the policy. The considerable resources expended to
ensure quality intersected with the strong commitments of early childhood professionals
who valued DAP. Despite an emphasis on local variation, the relatively open structure of
Wisconsin 4K was slowly being pulled into the K-12 accountability system as district leaders
generalized the alignment and benchmarks that are hallmarks in K-12 education practice
to their preK programs.
Despite coming from very dierent places the processes in each state are an eerily exact
instantiation of Amos Hatch’s prediction that we were on track to see accountability shove-
down (2002).
The best early childhood programs are those that give children opportunities to explore mean-
ingful content in meaningful ways . . .Substituting a narrow, skills-based approach for a dynamic,
child-responsive curriculum will rob young children of the joy of discovering how much they
can learn and just how fullling school experiences can be. (Hatch, 259)
The reduction in play time, the shifting down of the math curriculum and the feeling that
there is no time to waste on the aective elements of schooling are all examples of a ‘narrow,
skills-based approach’.

EARLY YEARS 13
We have come to realize that the standards that were initially viewed as the end of early
childhood education as we know it are now used as a touchstone of a kinder, gentler time
in early childhood. In both New Jersey and Wisconsin, the states had developed early learning
standards that reected a notion of high-quality programming for young children. They are
a logical extension of DAP, which asserts what teachers should do in practice. Early learning
standards completed the circle articulating what children should know and be able to do
as a result of their experiences in developmentally appropriate learning contexts. In spite
of this eort to promote a particular vision of early education, in each district we studied,
early learning standards were on track to being eclipsed by K-12 accountability logic.
Whether they were highly specied and regulated or open and more discretionary, preK
was increasingly seen to be in the service of the broader K-12 system. This discourse was not
always present in the day-to-day instruction in preK, but programs attempted to create a
preK-12 hybrid that included both more traditional early childhood curricula and academic
content. We see no indication that this evolution of preK being drawn into the K-12 orbit is
likely to abate.
When early learning standards were initially introduced to the early childhood community,
they provoked a raging debate about their use and purpose. Concern about them was so
strong that when Barbara Bowman gave her NAEYC keynote address – referenced at the
beginning of this paper – many early childhood educators boycotted the speech (Bredekamp,
2009). There was a feeling that standards could be the death knell of a progressive and
developmental approach to teaching young children. And they were not altogether wrong
in their concern. It is worth noting that DAP, the rst generation of professional guidelines,
also provoked critique.
The preK standards have not been the primary mechanism for pushing preschool away
from its progress roots. Instead, it has been the downward pressure that Hatch predicted
and that we have described. Even in Wisconsin’s open regulatory framework, public preK is
losing its local avor and becoming a mechanism to provide standardized academic content.
While many teachers resent and even resist these changes, the pressure to conform is only
increasing. Our ndings suggest that it is neither preK standards nor the other regulatory
requirements that states impose on early childhood education to make it ‘high quality’ that
is at the heart of the problem. Instead, the subtle decisions made by district ocials, admin-
istrators and teachers to make sure that 4-year-olds have the skills to immediately join the
K-12 education race is the catalyst. The careful staging of standards into the early childhood
community, described as beacons to guide our way (Bredekamp and Rosegrant 1995), did
not take into account that they would be competing with the more powerful discursive
spotlight of accountability. Situated at the intersection of K-12 models of schooling and
years of tradition in early childhood education, preK programs are subject to myriad demands.
The investments in ECE, sought by the EC community for years, have come with strings.
Despite the eorts to infuse EC thinking and practice into the new world of preK, the eld’s
justications for the investment in early childhood rest on improved outcomes for children.
In a political system infused with accountability logic, the early childhood community nds
itself caught. What means can be used to deliver ‘ready children’? The answer to that question
rests on the recognition that the momentum that propels K-12 accountability is currently
stronger than developmental logic. The evolution of public preK continues as it is increasingly
subsumed into K-12.

14 M. E. GRAUE ET AL.
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to the participating teachers, administrators and families who shared their experiences us.
Disclosure statement
No potential conict of interest was reported by the authors.
Funding
This work was nancially supported by The Spencer Foundation.
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