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Abstract

Globally, policymakers, researchers, and educational advocates continue to promote normative neoliberal policies that frame the issue of school readiness through financial terms. Such an interpretation appears to require quantitative research to participate in policy and research conversations around this issue. In this article, I seek to disrupt this policy logic by examining how critical qualitative policy research can study the issue of school readiness and generate policy knowledge to address this complex issue. I also discuss how critical qualitative policy researchers can continue to produce useful knowledge and tangible policies through their work to change the current neoliberal policy world.

Keywords

critical qualitative policy research neoliberalism school readiness policy knowledge

Introduction

Policymakers, researchers, and educational advocates in in the United States and across the globe (e.g., Christensen et al., 2022) continue to put forward the argument that having students enter schooling ready to learn, which encapsulates their cognitive, social, physical, and emotional skills, will improve their academic achievement in school (e.g., Guhn et al., 2016), success in life (e.g., Jones et al., 2015), and work toward ameliorating differences in levels of student achievement across varying sociocultural groups (e.g., McClelland et al., 2019). Much of the work supporting this argument is quantitative in nature and centers on figuring out what policies to enact so that students enter school ready to learn, which includes studies not only examining the impact of early childhood programs on school readiness but also the impact of familial interactions (e.g., Micalizzi et al., 2019), the role of community (e.g., Christensen et al., 2022), and homelessness (e.g., Manfra, 2019), and even sleep patterns (Turnbull et al., 2022b) on children’s readiness for school.

This normative framing of the policy process (Majone, 1989) constructs and addresses “the policy problem of school readiness” through a range of interventions that claims to improve students’ achievement in and out of school. It also puts forward a theory of action (Argyris & Schon, 1974) in which the early intervention into children’s lives via the teachers’ instruction, a specific intervention program, or specific child rearing practices will lead to later academic and economic success (C. P. Brown, 2018).

Such a framing of this policy issue promotes a neoliberal logic in which living, learning, and schooling are defined through economic principles that define success in financial terms (C. P. Brown et al., 2021b). This economic logic of governance (Foucault, 2003) frames humans as “capital, and all citizens “are self-investors—responsible for our success or failure, condemned for dependency or expectations of entitlements” (W. Brown, 2016, p. 10). Policymakers’ neoliberal reforms not only ignore but also reinforce the historical colonial debt (Ladson-Billings, 2006; Soto & De Moed, 2011) this White, Western framing of this construct creates (Pérez, 2019; Valencia, 1997). At the same time, such an interpretation of schooling appears to require quantitative research rooted in the postpositivist traditions of knowledge and reality to participate in policy and research conversations around this issue.

Purpose

While I have argued elsewhere about disrupting U.S. policymakers’ dominant neoliberal framing of school readiness (e.g., C. P. Brown et al., 2021b), my goal in this piece is to consider how critical qualitative policy research (CQPR) can become an integral part of the policy knowledge being generated and employed to address educational issues (Dumas & Anderson, 2014). I do so because there have been (e.g., Graue et al., 2002) and continue to be a range of critical qualitative studies (e.g., C. P. Brown et al., 2021a) that offer a variety of suggestions for policy change, but, as Cannella (2015) noted, such work does not often lead to “transformation that would increase justice socially” around this issue (p. 22). This is disconcerting because the policy problem of school readiness reflects “a complex set of interconnected interests, phenomena, and challenges” that requires innovative research so that policymakers can create a schooling designed to support and respect children and their families in becoming the human beings they want to be (Dumas & Anderson, 2014, p. 9).

To make this argument, I first frame my ontological and epistemological understanding of CQPR and discuss why this type of work must be an active part of policy discussion surrounding schooling. Next, I discuss how the dominant political and empirical discussions within the United States and abroad (e.g., Ren et al., 2021) frame school readiness. In doing so, my goal is not to dismiss this research, but rather, I highlight its limitations as well as negative consequences that can emerge for children and families if policy problems, such as school readiness, are framed, addressed, and analyzed solely through this lens of knowing. Then, I use my critique to offer insight into how the political issue of school readiness is, and can continue to be, studied through critical qualitative research that produces policy knowledge about “educational inputs, processes and practices, noncognitive phenomena, out-of-school factors, and facilitating meaningful human experiences in schools and in the communities they serve” (Dumas & Anderson, 2014, p. 5). Finally, I end this piece by discussing how critical qualitative policy (CQP) researchers can continue to address this complexity to eliminate the colonization of children into standardized beings (C. P. Brown, 2009) by producing useful knowledge and tangible policies generated through their CQPR studies to change these dynamics.

Conceptualizing Critical Qualitative Policy Research

CQP researchers are seeking “to understand how power and ideology operate through and across [political] systems of discourse, cultural commodities, and cultural texts” (Denzin, 2017, p. 12). They do so to challenge, and ultimately, transform the structures, be it social, political, cultural, economic, and so on, “that constrain and exploit humankind” so that “restitution and emancipation” can occur (Guba & Lincoln, 1998, p. 209). Such work disrupts the normative framing of policy research that centers on such issues as identifying a policy problem, studying how a policy is formulated and implemented, or evaluating the effectiveness of a policy/program (Majone, 1989). For CQP researchers, “Policy is viewed as something to be critiqued or troubled rather than accepted at face value” (Young & Diem, 2018, p. 79). For instance, Cheryl Harris (1993), a scholar of critical race theory, illuminates how Whiteness is “simultaneously an aspect of identity and a property interest” which is “the subject of the law’s regard and protection” (p. 1734), and in doing so, her work highlights the difficulty of challenging the current framing of school readiness policies and research, which reflect a White middle-class understanding of the construct (Brown & Lan, 2015).

Within this empirical process, CQP researchers understand that the knowledge of those in power, the dominant culture, is promoted through political institutions, such as schools, and that the knowledge of marginalized others is often obscured, devalued, and/or ignored all together. Thus, CQP researchers seek “to understand the complex connections between” the issue they are investigating “and the relations of dominance and subordination in the larger society—and the movements that are trying to interrupt these relations” (Apple, 2019, p. 276). CQP researchers do this because, as Batiste notes (2008), “All peoples have knowledge, the transformation of knowledge into a political power base has been built on controlling the meanings and diffusion of knowledge” (p. 500).

Defining Power

In my work, I, like so many other CQP researchers (e.g., Ball, 2012; Fenech & Sumsion, 2007), turn to the work of Michel Foucault and his conceptions of this construct. For Foucault (1995), power, which he defines through his construct of governmentality, is productive; it “produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth,” such as the ritual of what it means to be a ready student in kindergarten (p. 194). Power can be directly exerted over others but is more often done so through modern governing structures, such as neoliberalism, disciplining its citizens to internalize a given set of actions and values that they employ to govern their own actions (Foucault, 1995).

Still, within this definition of power as well as in relation to research that investigates issues of power, as Cannella and Viruru (2004) point out, researchers must interrogate their beliefs, which have more than likely been framed through a “Western, reasoned, privileged context” so that they are aware “of their imperialist influence or the ways they perpetuate or create new forms of colonialist oppression” (p. 116). Moreover, researchers must be aware of how their work and knowledge itself is being commodified and used to empower and/or exploit others (Batiste, 2008). As Freire (2004) noted, “Attempting to liberate the oppressed without their reflective participation in the act of liberation is to treat them as objects which must be saved,” and in turn, this can “transform them into masses which can be manipulated (p. 65). Freire’s work illuminates Cannella and Manuelito’s (2008) point that, “The Eurocentric error that assumes that scientists have the “right” (and ability) to intellectually know, interpret, and represent others should, however, be eliminated” (p. 49). Cannella and Manuelito (2008) suggest researchers read over Smith’s (2000) critical moral questions before embarking on any form of research.

Methodological Processes

CQP researchers make methodological decisions that recognize “the value of methodological rigor, the contextuality of policy and the positionality of the policy analyst [emphasis in original]” (Molla, 2021, p. 4). They employ qualitative research methodologies because such work “never hides behind aggregated numbers, directing itself instead to portray in-depth pictures of actual individuals who operate under various veils of oppression (Lincoln, 2015, p. 198). CQPR also necessitates that scholars employ practices that engage with and communicate “directly with communities, families, teachers and young people—and not simply, or perhaps even primarily, with policymakers” (Dumas & Anderson, 2014, p. 6).

Because CPQ researchers do not view inquiry as a static process, they seek out methodologies that are multivocal, fluid, and/or hybrid approaches (Cannella & Manuelito, 2008). To do this, they know they must draw from onto-epistemological theories that recognize, honor, and empower the socially constructed realities and knowledge(s) of the communities in which they work (Molla, 2021), such as critical race theory (Bell, 1993), poststructuralism (e.g., Deleuze & Guattari, 1988), postcolonial theory (e.g., Gandhi, 2011), feminism (Butler, 1999), Black feminism (e.g., Collins, 2002), and so on (e.g., Nxumalo, 2021).

As Fregoso Bailón and De Lissovoy (2019) noted, this does not simply mean “including indigenous ways of being and knowledge in a manner that simply reinforces global north perspectives” (p. 366). Rather, it requires CQP researchers to employ these ways of being and knowledge as the center of their work. For example, L. Brown (2019) engaged in a CQPR study to examine the “dismissal” of Indigenous knowledge, stories and perspectives within high school classrooms, and how it “is reflective of the broader absence in education policy of a critical engagement with the past and how it impacts both the present and the future” across New South Wales, Australia (p. 54). Through interviewing high school students, L. Brown contends that “Indigenous educational disadvantage has emerged” within the Australian context, and “the preconditions for its existence are not acknowledged” within current educational policy and governing structures (p. 67). L. Brown’s findings reflect Nxumalo’s (2016) argument that it is important to recognize how “colonialisms do much of their work through erasures, displacements and exclusions that become normalized in everyday encounters” (p. 643), which are conceptual as well as practical. As such, it is important to create a space within the research process that identifies and acknowledges this erasure. Moreover, it is important to recognize and dignify those who refuse to participate in CQPR studies because they, their cultures, and histories have been appropriated or eliminated from within the current framings of schooling (Cisneros, 2018; Sólorzano & Delgado Bernal, 2001).

Engaging in CQPR

Many CPQ researchers, particularly within the field of early childhood education (e.g., Urban, 2022), are employing post- and decolonial onto-epistemologies to seek out and enact multiple knowledges that reconstruct humanity, citizenry, and even education, for all peoples (de Sousa Santos, 2018), including creation of constructs like school readiness (Huber et al., 2018). They do so to question and rethink “the central dichotomies and contradictions of settler-capitalist society,” such as the ready/unready student (Grande, 2018, p. 173). In putting forward new and often historical ways of knowing, post/decolonial scholars do not seek to replace one form of epistemological colonization with another. Rather, they are seeking to create epistemological “equity between different ways of knowing and different kinds of knowledge” (de Sousa Santos, 2014, p. 237), centering practices and beliefs with the marginalized, focusing on difference and justice, often with communities of color, and based on the multiplicities of funds of knowledge (Moll et al., 1992). They do so to refuse policymakers’ continued inscription of neoliberal policies in education advantage the dominant White, Western, monied culture (e.g., C. P. Brown et al., 2022; Hernández & Castillo, 2022). Such policy solutions that promote what Altamirano-Jiménez’s (2004) termed “market citizenship,” which reflects Foucault’s (2008) construct of biopolitics; market citizenship is the belief that those who suffer under the colonial project, including “indigenous peoples” and many “others” within the society, is the idea that they simply need “to throw away the yoke of internal colonialism by becoming successful entrepreneurs in the global economy” to solve their policy issues (p. 354).

Still, CQPR is, as Molla (2021) notes, not simply about “objecting.” Rather, it is about “problematizing assumptions and beliefs underpinning the objective appearance of reality and subjective meaning systems associated with the external representation,” and in doing so, such work “unmask[s] hegemonic discourses (Gramsci, 1971) that keep the disadvantaged in conformity with their conditions—to expose how the dominant class installs its own values as the common sense of society as a whole” (p. 9). This process of problematization (Freire, 2004) seeks to put forward new visions of policy as well as policy knowledge that not only provides “information and ideas useful in framing, deepening our understanding of, and/or enriching our conceptualization of policy problems” (Dumas & Anderson, 2014, p. 8). It also creates new spaces for reimagined social systems, such as education, that foster, support, and empower all citizens as members of a democratic community. As Nxumalo (2016) pointed out, critical research requires the political recognition and naming of settler colonial practices, places, and discourses that inhabit school and are encountered by children, teachers, and families through such constructs as school readiness. CQP researchers who are seeking to generate policy knowledge for change must also be aware that there may be “differential impact and asymmetries of violence and harm on these populations” because of their work, and such harm persists “as the normative order of the settler state” (Grande, 2018, p. 169). Thus, as CQP researchers seek to produce knowledge to challenge and redress the current power dynamics within society, they must illuminate both the challenges and possible outcomes of any moves forward “that are trying to interrupt these relations” created by policymakers’ neoliberal reforms (Apple, 2019, p. 276).

The Dominant Political and Empirical Framing of School Readiness

The current neoliberal focus on solving the policy problem of school readiness, which is often tied to children’s short and long-term achievement in and out of school, has led to a range of quantitative (e.g., Jackson et al., 2021) and qualitative (e.g., Peterson et al., 2021) studies that seek to gauge how different aspects of children and their lives impact their performance on a range of academic, social, emotional, and physical measures. While school readiness continues to be defined in numerous ways (see C. P. Brown, 2018 for a discussion about the history of this construct in the United States), in policy terms, this construct is typically framed as the “basic skills,” which can include cognitive/academic, social, emotional, and/or physical skills, “that children need to possess at school entry to adapt successfully to the school environment and to learn and achieve at a satisfying level” (Boivin & Bierman, 2014, p. 5). These skills are then tied primarily to children’s academic achievement or behavioral traits as they enter and/or complete kindergarten. Then, researchers tie scores on these measures of readiness to children’s academic performance in later grades (e.g., Burchinal et al., 2020) and in later life (e.g., Chetty et al., 2011). Such examples represent what Meisels terms an empiricist framing of school readiness,¹ which views “readiness [as] something that lies outside the child” (Meisels, 1999, p. 52). Therefore, early learning programs, such as Pre-Kindergarten and/or families are to provide children with the skills, knowledge, and experiences they need to be “successful in a school context” (Carlton & Winsler, 1999, p. 338).

Such an understanding of this construct and how to measure it has led to a range of studies that seek to identify which “basic skill,” intervention program, parenting act, and/or some other measure or variable can be manipulated to improve students’ academic and behavioral achievement. Recent examples of such studies include estimating children’s readiness for school based on national surveys (e.g., Ghandour et al., 2021), examining the impact of attending Pre-Kindergarten (Pre-K) on school readiness (e.g., Ansari et al., 2021), or investigating the impact of an intervention programs on children’s school readiness (e.g., Duncan et al.’s (2018), self-regulation intervention, or Watts et al.’s (2018) evaluation of the Chicago School Readiness Project). Alongside this work are studies that seek to determine the accuracy of school readiness measures (e.g., Atkinson et al., 2022), how to support teachers in improving children’s school readiness (e.g., Pianta et al., 2021), or how to improve children’s transitions into formal schooling (e.g., Vitiello et al., 2022).

Each of these researchers appears to be concerned with this policy issue to improve children’s readiness for school so that they can succeed in it and in their lives. Moreover, they often take an ecological perspective toward child development, “in which more distal ecological influences shape proximal microsystem processes that support development” (Pianta et al., 2021, p. 2510). Yet, in doing so, their emphasis tends to examine the interactions at the micro or meso levels and avoids questioning or challenging those in charge at the macro level of policy (e.g., Ansari et al., 2021). Much of this literature offers a powerful argument for advocates to share with policymakers in making the case for the expansion of early education services (e.g., Erkan et al., 2021), which is an odd patchwork system across the United States. However, such work does not question why those in power fail to provide such services, or how the patchwork itself creates the crises needed for private capital to create new markets for wealth accumulation (C. P. Brown et al., 2021b).

The Limitations of This Work

These studies around the issue of school readiness that reflect Guba and Lincoln’s (1998) “received view” of research often reduce children, their families, and/or their communities to a particular set of skills, traits, practices, or norms that researchers then use to “validly” predict whether those skills, traits, or practices can be manipulated to improve the school readiness of children (C. P. Brown, 2008). This “received view” of school readiness is stripped of context, fails to capture the meaning and purpose of the practices of the family, which includes the child, school, and/or community (Guba & Lincoln, 1998), and in turn, put forwards a standardized vision of school readiness that all children are assumed to attain and teachers are to teach to—no matter the priorities of the child and/or their family or the classroom teacher (e.g., C. P. Brown, 2009). Such an understanding of school readiness inherently believes there is some sort of “finish line” to be attained, be it practically speaking and/or in terms of an onto-epistemological understanding of that construct (Fregoso Bailón & De Lissovoy, 2019, p. 358). Rather, as de Sousa Santos (2014) points out, we, as citizens and researchers, must understand and advocate for “equity between different ways of knowing and different kinds of knowledge,” be it in how school readiness is conceptualized or what it means to be educated (p. 237).

In stating these critiques and posing these onto-epistemological challenges, I am not simply dismissing the findings of this work. I have used many quantitative studies in my own work (e.g., C. P. Brown, 2021) to demonstrate the need to address such policy issues regarding the changing kindergarten (e.g., Bassok et al., 2016). Moreover, there is the important emerging field of critical quantitative research in policy analysis that demonstrates the inherent biases that exist within current policy structures. For example, Babbs Hollett and Frankenberg (2022) revealed how providers of early childhood services to Black and Latinx children in Pennsylvania received substantially less tiered funding than the average early childhood providers who served White children. Rather, I, and many others (e.g., Nxumalo & Adair, 2019; Swadener & Lubeck, 1995) continue to have multiple concerns with these quantitative studies. In addition, qualitative research often includes numbers, as examples financials and frequencies; however, statistical significance and universalist impositions of probability are not usually considered appropriate.

Rooting the Problem of Readiness in the Child, Family, and/or Community

Practically speaking, the neoliberal framing of school readiness, whether quantitative or qualitative, frames the problem with readiness being in the child, family, and/or community (Cannella, 1997; Graue, 2006). As Ritchie (2016) points out, this “deficit theorizing” around the construct of school readiness “has damaged relationships and trust, and contributed to many generations of exclusion of [not only] Indigenous peoples” and other non-White communities “by the ‘white stream’ education system” (p. 87). Furthermore, Ritchie contends that those in power, be it policymakers or those who engage in deficit-based research, “are the ones in deficit.” They are so because they “have been instrumental or complicit in creating or maintaining policies and practices which have not only discriminated against, but inflicted generations of pain and trauma on, Indigenous peoples” and many other non-White communities (p. 87). Because actual children can be and are often “hurt by mere policy prescription” (Dumas & Anderson, 2014, p. 11), “we need to disabuse ourselves of the fiction that the most important indicator of effective policy is related to quantifiable academic outcomes” (p. 5).

Thus, I want to challenge these ideas and discuss how engaging in CQPR can support and respect children and their families in becoming the human beings they want to be—honoring the promise of the system being ready for them and their hopes, dreams, and desires within the schooling process (Swadener & Niles, 1991). In doing so, I am not rejecting the importance and/or potential impact of early education services for children and their families (Sousa & Moss, 2022). Instead, building off the work of Dumas and Anderson (2014), I want to demonstrate how qualitative research can “make meaning of, and craft creative, effective responses to human suffering, desires and aspirations” (p. 11) by creating critical policy research that is “responsive to policy deliberation and policy priorities, but . . . also offer[s] critique (even when none has been solicited) and a vision of policy as it could be” (p. 12). In moving forward and rethinking the issue of school readiness or any other policy issue through CQPR, it is important to recognize that, we, as researchers and advocates, do not “allow ourselves to be discouraged by self-proclaimed realists who continue to present yesterday’s solutions to today’s problems” (Arndt et al., 2021, p. 418).

Studying School Readiness Through CQPR

To engage in CQPR, first requires a recognition that the goal of inquiry is not simply to evaluate the clarity of identifying a policy problem or proposing the correct policy solution. Instead, as Dumas and Anderson (2014) contend, the goal is to produce policy knowledge that is “useful in framing, deepening our understanding of, and/or enriching our conceptualization of policy problems” (p. 8) as well as to highlight “what we do not yet know,” which helps move all of us “a step closer toward illumination of the problem itself” (p. 11). To build such policy knowledge, necessitates CQP researchers to be clear about how they conceptualize their issue(s) because their theoretical orientation will influence the questions they ask, the methodology they will employ, the data they collect, how they will interpret that data, and how and who they share their findings within and outside the worlds of policy (Stake, 1995).

With these theories and processes in mind, CQP researchers then engage in such acts as interrogating “the roots and development of educational policy,” examining “the difference between policy rhetoric and practiced reality, investigating “the distribution of power, resources, and knowledge and the creation of “winners” and “losers,”” scrutinizing “the complex systems and environments in which policy is made and implemented,” identifying and studying “social stratification and the impact of policy on relationships of privilege and inequality,” and making sense of the “the nature of resistance to or engagement in policy by members of historically underrepresented groups” (Young & Diem, 2018, p. 82). In short, there is no singular focus when examining a policy or policy issue.

When turning to the issue of school readiness, the outcome of policy is to ensure all children have a successful school experience. How that is defined, who is defining it, what “that” entails, including who is participating in that process, what is being taught, how it is being taught, and so on, all depends on the questions being asked, who is asking the question, how the questions are being asked, and so on. Questions related to privilege and harm, inclusion and exclusion are always necessary related to stakeholder involvement, views of knowledge, and actions are always critically necessary. The process of CQPR is complicated and partial, and power within that process plays a significant role.

As already mentioned, power within the process of schooling in the United States is framed through a neoliberal governance structure; where under the guise of “neutrality,” specific sociocultural groups, forms of knowledge, enactments of schooling, and means of capital are privileged over others (Apple, 2004, p. 106). For instance, Bloch and Kim (2015) engaged in a cultural historical analysis of school readiness; this approach views “history as contingent upon particular events in a context at a moment” (p. 6). Their CQPR analysis unpacks the historical post-positivistic discourses that are embedded in how school readiness is thought about today; such as, how the discourses of scientific empiricism and developmentalism create a knowledge base for how children are assessed, regulated, and disciplined. In this case, CQPR illuminates how these discourses create dichotomies about what is and is not “normal” for children, families, and schools, which lead to discourses of risk rather than of the competent child. It also demonstrates why CQP researchers must interrogate present and past reasoning and question taken-for-granted truths that work against those who are intentionally disempowered through policy. In this example, Bloch and Kim (2015) want those interested in school readiness to challenge and disrupt this logic that requires children “to thrive in competition” while learning “capitalist ways that disregard their own humanity” (Soto & De Moed, 2011, p. 237) and devalues the belief that children have the right to be cared for and educated in and of itself (Qvortrup, 2009). Furthermore, CQPR has examined neoliberal logics embedded in conceptualizations of school readiness. In my own CQPR around this issue in which I seek to understand how policymakers’ neoliberal conceptualizations of school readiness limit students’ experience in schools (e.g., C. P. Brown, 2013), I have found, as others have documented (e.g., Graue, 2006), the current neoliberal framing of schooling views children as winners, a ready child, or losers, an unready child (e.g., C. P. Brown, 2008). Doing so ignores the institutional structures and systemic deficits that are “baked” into the neoliberal system of education, and as a result, those children who fall outside the monied, male, White image of the ready child are deemed in deficit (Baldridge, 2014; Pérez, 2019; Valencia, 1997). Such neoliberal policies tend to lead stakeholders to ignoring the immediate needs and hopes of the children, and instead, they center their gaze on the future—whether it be the ability of children to read by first grade or ensuring they are prepared for the academic achievement tests that begin in third grade (C. P. Brown et al., 2021a). By engaging in CQPR, it becomes apparent (e.g., C. P. Brown & Barry, 2021) that this neoliberal mono-logical framing of school readiness, in which “each successive stage of the system is . . . to make clear to those in the stage below them what they expect and need from children when passed up to them” (Moss, 2012, p. 14), leads to an understanding of schooling in which children are always becoming and never being (Qvortrup, 2009). Such policies disregard how children “are shaped by the kinds of childhoods they are experiencing today” (Uprichard, 2008, p. 311) and directs stakeholders to either ignore children’s experiences in the here and now or to justify the neoliberal deficit-oriented practices as necessary in preparing children for the never-ending and increasing academic achievement expectations that define elementary school (C. P. Brown, 2015). Furthermore, policymakers’ neoliberal framing of school readiness often leads to teachers taking on practices that do not reflect how children learn and develop (C. P. Brown, 2021).

Examining policymakers’ neoliberal reforms through CQPR, be it about school readiness or any other policy issue, makes it apparent that this understanding of the policy process is rooted in logic in which there are no alternatives (De Lissovoy, 2018). Yet, to move forward, De Lissovoy (2015) notes that we, as CQP researchers, must become aware of the “contradiction . . . within neoliberalism.” This contradiction results in the question: “how can a doctrine that argues for equal access to competition and the stripping away of artificial and unfair protections within the marketplace be compatible with the systems privileging of some groups over others” (p. 54).

To illuminate these contradictions and bring forward change in how readiness or any policy issue is conceptualized and implemented requires CQP researchers to examine how these issues unfold within local communities that serve constituents from a range of sociocultural, economic, and linguistic backgrounds (e.g., C. P. Brown, 2010). For instance, Graue’s (1993) interpretivist qualitative multiple case study examined how stakeholders across three neighboring communities in the United States each made sense of, and addressed issues of, school readiness differently. The work of juxtaposition literally revealed difference, a major purpose of critical inquiry.

In another CQPR study, Roberts-Holmes (2021) use of qualitative focus-group interviews documented how the practices of primary school teachers outside London were “colonized into preparing children for primary school so that ‘ability’ grouping, which is more normally associated with much older primary school children, is used to maximize the production of required attainment data” (p. 251).

Finally, Leafgren’s (2015) CQPR case study, which is part of Iorio and Parnell’s (2015) collection of qualitative studies that examine the issue of school readiness from a range of perspectives, provides insight into how an African-centered school took on a ready-school approach that values, respects, honors, and works from “what” the children and families bring to school. She employs the example of Gavin, who walks with a member of the community’s Council of Elders, all of whom are volunteers, after a transgression he initiated in the school. Such a socio-cultural centric act avoids framing him as a “problem,” and instead, provides Gavin with the space to be heard as well as nurtured by a caring elder within his immediate community.

Combined, this CQPR demonstrates the complexity that exists within the policy contexts of school communities and/or individual classrooms. Furthermore, this work demonstrates how policies that seek to improve school readiness can be received in a multitude of ways—the colonization that Roberts-Holmes (2021) or the counter-narratives/stories (Delgado, 1989) that Leafgren’s (2015) documents. Furthermore, policymakers’ neoliberal reforms, such as kindergarten readiness tests that now primarily “focus on literacy” skills (Weisenfeld et al., 2020, p. 17), continue to colonize children into particular forms of being through “espousing a standardized, narrow, universalist conception of school readiness and academic achievement” (C. P. Brown et al., 2021b, p. 109). Thus, there is a continued need for CQPR studies that are “committed to creating new ways of making” sense of such policy issues as school readiness and produce findings that generate knowledge to help develop and sustain a “free democratic society” for all (Denzin, 2017, p. 12).

Employing CQPR Research to Move Forward

To move forward and address this complexity around such policy issues as school readiness and to eliminate the colonization of children into standardized beings requires researchers to provide policymakers with useful knowledge and tangible policies generated through their CQPR studies to change these dynamics (Dumas & Anderson, 2014). In moving forward to address such issues as school readiness, schooling in general, or any policy “problem,” the future is unpredictable, and while such unpredictability allows for those with power and wealth to accumulate more (Slater, 2015), it also illuminates the need for policy change. For example, the COVID-19 pandemic brought to light the importance and need for early education services in general (Urban, 2022), but it also raised many questions about the impact of missed schooling opportunities on all students.

Such challenges, changes, and uncertainties create an opportunity (C. P. Brown, 2005) for scholars in and outside the realm of policy to think anew about their work and CQPR around issues like school readiness. This work might incorporate such practices as providing stories from ancestors within particular communities (Grande, 2018) or applying varying theoretical orientations toward policy issues, such as queer theory (Matthews & Poyner, 2020) or DisCrit, disability studies/critical race theory (Fisher et al., 2021). Such research endeavors might also lead to publications that include counterstories (Delgado, 1989), poetry (Fregoso Bailón & De Lissovoy, 2019), testimonios (Abril-Gonzalez & Shannon, 2021), or a refiguring of presences within the data, which according to Nxumalo (2016), means intentionally interrupting everyday moments “to make visible the colonial resonances and flows of power that circulate through everyday life” (p. 650).

Furthermore, in moving forward, Cannella and Manuelito (2008) contend that this process of CQPR should seek to:

(a) Reveal and actively challenge social systems, discourses, and institutions that are oppressive and that perpetuate injustice. . . and explore ways of making those systems obviously visible in society;

(b) Support knowledges that have been discredited by dominant power orientations in ways that are transformative (rather than simply revealing); and,

(c) Construct activist conceptualizations of research that are critical and multiple in ways that are transparent, reflexive, and collaborative (p. 56).

To do so requires CQP researchers to align as well as create qualitative research methodologies to address the issues that matter to the communities with whom they work, which may be something very different than the issue of school readiness (Cannella & Manuelito, 2008). For instance, many communities may be more focused on developing policies that adequately fund the “social, personal, economic, and educational resources” required for all communities to flourish (Graue, 2006, p. 51). Such change would first require “naming of the specific power-oriented practices, places, and discourses that inhabit schools and the construct of school readiness,” like kindergarten readiness assessments, and offering viable alternatives that honor, respect, and support the communities being serviced (C. P. Brown et al., 2021b).

Also, as Nagasawa and Swadener (2015) noted, CQP researchers need to recognize that their work “does not stop once the findings are written” (p. 15); it requires CQP scholars to work together to organize and align their work to increase their reach as well as amplify the significance of this work. Arndt et al. (2021) add that formulating such a collective approach requires CQP researchers to work together to develop “a coherent voice to ensure systemic and equitable policy development” for issues such as school readiness (p. 415). Nagasawa and Swadener (2015) also suggest researchers step outside the academy and find avenues and allies to support them in promoting their work as viable policy solutions to pressing issues inside and outside education. To do so requires CQP researchers to ensure that their work is accessible and connects “to educational settings, providing multiple entry points so that readers from a variety of academic backgrounds might enter into the text and create new assemblages to generate new possibilities for different [policy] futures” (Strom, 2018, p. 1325).

In working toward systemic change, which can become overwhelming, CQP researchers should remember that evolutionary changes (Majone, 1989) around constructs, like school readiness, are occurring (e.g., California Assembly Bill-413²), and as Cannella (2015) noted, the field of CQPR is full of “people who are committed to more just ways of conceptualizing, performing, living in, and changing the world” (p. 25). Still, the work of such scholars as Yosso (2002) has noted that whatever policy changes might emerge through the development of policy knowledge via CQPR can be easily used to reinforce policymakers’ current neoliberal agenda. Nevertheless, as De Lissovoy (2016) reminds us, “resistance means a belief in the possibility” where the field of education or the construct of school readiness “might be governed by different meanings and purposes (p. 359). It is this interest in necessary change and the belief in possibility for such change that push CQP researchers to move forward with their work to challenge and restructure the politics and policies of their field of interest so that all can actively live, learn, and participate in a democratic society.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Christopher P. Brown

Notes

Author Biography

Christopher P. Brown (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison) is a professor in the Education Policy and Planning Program with the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr Brown’s work includes books Resisting the kinder-race: Restorying joy to early learning, RIGOROUS DAP in the early years: From theory to practice, and Ready for kindergarten? Freeing yourself from the readiness trap so that you and your child will succeed in kindergarten and has appeared in a range of journals like Journal of Early Childhood Teacher Education, Teachers College Record, Journal of Teacher Education, The Elementary School Journal, Journal of Early Childhood Research, and American Educational Research Journal. Through this work, his goal is to understand and advocate for early learning environments that foster, sustain, and extend the complex educational, cultural, and individual goals and aspirations of teachers, children, and their families.

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Policy Justice Through Critical Qualitative Inquiry: Examining the Issue of School Readiness

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Purpose

Conceptualizing Critical Qualitative Policy Research

Defining Power

Methodological Processes

Engaging in CQPR

The Dominant Political and Empirical Framing of School Readiness

The Limitations of This Work

Rooting the Problem of Readiness in the Child, Family, and/or Community

Studying School Readiness Through CQPR

Employing CQPR Research to Move Forward

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

Author Biography

References