About the Kindergarten Readiness Playbook
Kindergarten Readiness Playbook: Chapter 4
Overview
A strong start sets children up for future success. Kindergarten readiness is linked to later outcomes, like third-grade reading, high school graduation, college attendance and earnings. Communities can improve early outcomes through high-quality early learning, engaged caregivers, access to health care and safe, inclusive schools.
StriveTogether’s Cradle-to-Career Playbook: Kindergarten Readiness synthesizes leading research, indicators and evidence-based practices to promote equitable outcomes for kindergarten readiness across communities. While the playbook is grounded in existing frameworks that are valuable in their own right, it does not replace them. Instead, it serves as a comprehensive tool that guides you to resources in areas where deeper exploration is needed. Communities can use the 17 essential questions to navigate to topics relevant to their specific needs, interests and goals.
The Education-to-Workforce Framework and supporting research
Mathematica’s Education-to-Workforce Framework is the inspiration behind the playbook’s organization and content. StriveTogether’s Cradle-to-Career Playbook: Kindergarten Readiness includes all of the applicable research, content and aligned essential questions included in the Education-to-Workforce Framework. It is also organized in a similar way. The playbook supplements the Education-to-Workforce Framework by incorporating research on prenatal and neonatal care, child development for ages 0-3 and the need for high-quality, certified, representative educators. Additional practices and policies expand on the Education-to-Workforce Framework to improve accessibility for community-based organizations. Seventy percent of the indicators, practices and policies included in the Kindergarten Readiness Playbook come from the Education-to-Workforce Framework.
The playbook also analyzes nine other frameworks to identify indicators that support kindergarten readiness across multiple sectors.
Indicators: metrics to track
Contributing indicators that help communities see what it looks like when kindergarten readiness improves for historically marginalized learners across a community. Contributing indicators are valuable because research shows they influence outcomes in a positive direction and are measured at the individual learner level (e.g., percentage of 3- and 4-year olds enrolled in high-quality pre-K). They can help communities establish student-centered priorities. They typically provide information earlier than outcome data is available, allowing communities to know if an initiative is working and can support continuous improvement of multiple initiatives.
Systems indicators help communities track the supports that influence outcomes at the system level, such as district, city, county or state efforts. These indicators are crucial because they allow communities to monitor the system, identify inequities and address them proactively. Measured at the family, caregiver or geographic level, systems indicators reflect institutional actions and their impact. For example, the percentage of eligible families receiving assistance to pay for child care is a key systems indicator that reveals how well resources are being distributed.
Practices and policies: actions to take
Practices and Policies describe what can be done at every level of the system. Practices are evidence-based efforts, like teacher professional development, that create strong conditions for results. Policies are laws, regulations, procedures, administrative actions or incentives of governments or other institutions. Communities may see a policy listed that is currently not enacted in their district, city or state, offering an opportunity to align on advocacy efforts. Federal policies are listed to create awareness so communities can leverage or utilize them to support state and local efforts.
Scaling a solution often has a lifecycle that starts with a local practice that is proven effective, scaled locally (e.g., scaled from a classroom to a district, then to another district) then used to inform the creation of a state-level policy that provides access to funding for further scaling. This approach is outlined within the StriveTogether Theory of Action™. This playbook categorizes strategies into a practice or policy. But, a practice can turn into a policy over time or a policy can initiate a practice if it comes first. Lines begin to blur as scale
takes over.
Not every contributing indicator has an identified systems indicator, practice or policy. That may be a result of limited research available or identified to date. Indicators, practices and policies can help answer multiple essential questions, but for the sake of simplicity we’ve grouped each indicator with one essential question. To help communities choose the most relevant indicators for their context, each indicator is presented as it appears in its original source. This allows communities to understand the specific nuances that may be important to them. However, this approach means the language of indicators may vary, some may be duplicated across different sources and language choices may need to change based on
local preferences.
This resource aims to be a library of evidence-based indicators and implementation strategies that can be used with community groups, referenced during annual planning and leveraged to prioritize initiatives as needed. Its purpose is to help you and your community understand possible levers at every level — learner, neighborhood, school, district, city and state — to improve kindergarten readiness.
How to use this playbook
How this playbook is used will be different for each organization or community, depending on their planning process, goals and priorities. The playbook might be shared with a community working group in its entirety, referenced internally as a way to brainstorm potential solutions to discuss with others, or leveraged in various other ways. After reading it, leaders can ask: How do we want to use this with our community?
This resource does not replace the voice and perspective of community members, who often know the solutions that will work best in their communities. Instead, consider this playbook a resource that community members can also access to support the co-designing of solutions and to inform your planning. For support on engaging with your community, visit the StriveTogether’s Results-Based Facilitation 101 course, available for free on the Training Hub.
This playbook offers several practical uses for community organizations. It can be used to onboard new staff or introduce organizations to cradle-to-career (C2C) work. It helps explore aligned practices and policies, guiding the selection of working group topics and potential solutions. Communities can share the entire playbook with working groups or community members to support exploration and implementation. Additionally, it serves as a valuable resource during internal reviews for annual goal-setting and planning. Finally, this playbook can be used alongside other StriveTogether resources for a more comprehensive approach. If you are interested in diving deeper into the research supporting the indicators, visit the citations included throughout the playbook. The appendix also includes an annotated bibliography.
Due to the limited research on place-based partnerships, StriveTogether’s Cradle-to-Career Playbook: Kindergarten Readiness highlights initiatives and examples from StriveTogether Cradle to Career Network members making clear progress on their kindergarten readiness outcomes, illustrating what has worked for them.
Playbook ChaptersKindergarten Readiness Playbook
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