Challenging the School Readiness Agenda in Early Childhood Education

Challenging the normative paradigm that school readiness is a positive and necessary objective for all young children, this book asserts that the concept is a deficit-based practice that fosters the continuation of discriminatory classifications. Tager draws on findings of a qualitative study to reveal how the neoliberal agenda of school reform based on high-stakes testing labels children as non-ready resulting in exclusionary measures that marginalize low-income Black children, affecting their overall schooling careers. Disrupting expected notions of readiness is imperative to ending practices of structural classism and racism in early childhood education.