The standard school-ready child: the social organization of ‘school-readiness’

Abstract

This article offers new insights into our understanding of the formation, textual mediation, and reproduction of perceptions of children’s ‘school readiness’ in kindergarten and its consequences for teachers’ assessment of minority-language children’s ‘readiness’. Building on Danish Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) teachers’ accounts of assessing minority-language children’s ‘lingual readiness’, this current research identify key characteristics of ‘the standard school-ready child’, which functions as an ideological code and shapes replicable understandings of what constitutes ‘school readiness’ in institutional discourse and assessment materials. This code departs from Danish majority-class culture in its structuring of normalcy and deviance embedded in the language assessment materials issued by the Danish government. By departing from the standard school-ready child in their assessments of minority-language children’s school readiness, ECEC teachers unintentionally reproduce and legitimise stratified educational outcomes for native-majority children and children from disadvantaged and low-income immigrant backgrounds.