Kindergarten Readiness

Early childhood education encompasses the quality and accessibility of educational investment for kids under 6 years old. Research suggests that addressing childhood education is a critical factor in improving the future educational attainment and socioeconomic transition of low-income communities. Poverty creates many barriers that impede young children’s development, placing them at a disadvantage even before they enter the classroom. The metric associated with early childhood education is “kindergarten readiness,” in alignment with the Ready for K Alliance.

Kentucky school districts evaluate kindergarten readiness using the BRIGANCE Early Childhood Kindergarten Screen III, which assesses child development across five areas:

  • Academic/Cognitive Development
  • Language Development
  • Physical Development
  • Self-Help Skills
  • Social and Emotional Skills

For a deeper discussion of kindergarten readiness, its importance, and its limitations, please see our 2021 Early Childhood Report.

Trends Over Time

Louisville students have consistently scored near the state average for kindergarten readiness. While scores were relatively stagnant for many years, there was a sharp dropoff in kindergarten readiness over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic (as shown by comparing scores for the 2019-2020 school year with the 2021-2022 school year). This school year, only 43% of kindergarteners entered JCPS ready to learn.

Differences by Race

Since 2014, racial disparities in kindergarten readiness among JCPS students have persisted. Kindergarten readiness fell across all four demographics presented here from 2020 to 2022, with the largest decreases among Black students, followed by Hispanic students.

Differences by Sex

Females students enter kindergarten more prepared than their male counterparts in JCPS and Kentucky public schools. The gap in kindergarten readiness between females and males is slightly smaller in JCPS than it is in the rest of Kentucky.

Differences by Free or Reduced Lunch Status

Breaking data down by Free or Reduced lunch eligibility gives us information o nhow kindergarten readiness relates to income. Students who qualify for free or reduced lunch lag behind their fellow students within JCPS and across the state of Kentucky. JCPS students not eligible for free or reduced lunch are performing significantly below the average for their Kentucky counterparts, while JCPS students eligible for free or reduced lunch outperform their peers in the rest of Kentucky. While both groups saw declines in kindergarten readiness over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, students from higher-income families saw a much larger decline in kindergarten readiness.

How did we get these numbers?

Our data comes from files available through the Kentucky Department of Education and the JCPS School Report Cards. Most numbers come directly from the sources without much calculation required. You can download all of the files we used to create these graphs here, and you can see how we crunched the data here.

Some notes:

  • The years on the graphs represent the end of the school year. (E.g. The 2022 data point represents the 2021-2022 school year.)
  • While some data exist for 2021, at first glance, there were very few students who took the BRIGANCE screener, so we have excluded it entirely.
  • We calculated numbers for students not eligible for free or reduced lunch using data for all students and students eligible for free and reduced lunch.
  • All data on JCPS students come directly from spreadsheets. Due to missing student counts in some Kentucky school districts in some years, we have imputed some student counts for small school districts in some years to create state averages and 25th and 75th percentiles each year. We acknowledge this limitation but feel comfortable including those numbers here since their purpose is just to provide a comparison for our focus on JCPS.

Continue Exploring with Related Data

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Multidimensional Poverty

Cost-Burdened Households

Public School Graduation Rate

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Natural Breaks Algorithm

For each indicator, Greater Louisville Project assigns cities into one of three groups (high-performing, middle-of-the-pack, and low-performing) based on how they compare to other cities. The assignment is based on how cities naturally cluster on that indicator. Sometimes, the differences between cities are very small, and the difference between a city ranked 5th and 6th could simply be a matter of the sampling error that arises from using survey data. Thus, rather than always make a division that declares the top 5 to be the top tier, we use a natural breaks algorithm to look for a cluster of cities that is outperforming the rest, a cluster that is about average, and a cluster that is lagging. This clustering gives us a better indication of where Louisville is thriving and where Louisville has room to learn from cities that are doing better.

Z-Scores

Z-scores (or standardization) is a way to combine data with different units of measurement into a single index. The z-score is a measure of how far away a city (or census tract, etc.) is from the average city. In order to be comparable across different units of measurement, the z-score is the distance from the mean measured in standard deviations (e.g. if Louisville has a z-score of 1 it means Louisville is 1 standard deviation above the mean of its peer cities).

Data from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's County Health Rankings use z-scores and all z-scores are relative to the mean of Louisville's peer cities. (On the County Health Rankings site z-scores are relative to all the counties in each state - thus z-scores reported by GLP will be different, because we are using a different reference group). The Greater Louisville Project also uses z-scores in our multidimensional poverty index, which compares each census tract to the mean of all census tracts in Louisville.