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More than half of the children in Ohio, Florida, Maryland and Kentucky did not meet their overall kindergarten readiness benchmark, a new federal report found.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) assessed kindergarten readiness in those four states, as well as Connecticut, in a report released Thursday, to examine how publicly funded preschool programs affect children’s readiness for kindergarten.
“Kindergarten is the main entry point to public school, but not all children enter with the foundational skills that enable them to be ready to learn,” the report said.
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Kindergarten readiness refers to “the skills and abilities needed to succeed in school,” including social development, a basic grasp of language, physical well-being and motor skills. Each state has its own method for assessing this readiness. The five states included in the report were selected because of their individual methods and readiness benchmarks are directly comparable.
Newsweek has mapped these states’ results below.
Kindergarten Benchmark Results
Some 63 percent of children in Ohio, 57 percent in Florida and 54 percent in Kentucky did not meet their state’s kindergarten readiness benchmark, in assessments conducted during the 2024–2025 school year.
In Maryland, 56 percent missed the benchmark in assessments in the 2023–2024 school year, the most recent period the state carried out a kindergarten entry assessment.
While Connecticut did not report an overall readiness rate, fewer than half of children met readiness benchmarks in four of six skill areas. In language and literacy, 59 percent of children did not meet readiness benchmarks, while 55 percent fell below the benchmark for numeracy and social skills. Physical and creative skill tests saw better results, with 56 percent meeting the benchmark in each area.
Boys Trail Girls in Kindergarten Readiness Across Five States
In all five states assessed by the GAO, girls had higher readiness rates than boys.
Boys lagged behind girls by 12 percentage points in Maryland, 10 percentage points in Ohio, 6 percentage points in Kentucky and 4 percentage points in Florida.
In Connecticut, girls outperformed boys across all six assessed areas: creative, language, literacy, numeracy, physical and social skills.
This is in line with other gender divides in education. A 2014 report looking at more than 300 studies spanning 30 countries, from 1914 to 2011, found that “girls’ grades have been consistently higher than boys’ across several decades.”
“The fact that females generally perform better than their male counterparts throughout what is essentially mandatory schooling in most countries seems to be a well-kept secret, considering how little attention it has received as a global phenomenon,” said co-author Susan Voyer at the time.
Researchers pegged the gap to “social and cultural factors,” like parents encouraging girls to put more effort into their studies or “gender differences in learning styles.”
Racial And Socio-Economic Divides Revealed In Kindergarten Readiness
Children classed as economically disadvantaged had lower kindergarten readiness rates than their peers in Ohio, Florida, Maryland, Kentucky and Connecticut. Each state uses a different metric to determine economic disadvantage.
Gaps in kindergarten readiness spanned between 18 percentage points in Florida and 31 percentage points in Ohio.
Readiness also differed along racial demographics, with white children performing above Black and Hispanic/Latino children in all five states.
In Maryland, white children’s readiness rate was approximately 15 percentage points above the statewide average, while Hispanic/Latino children were approximately 20 points below it. In Ohio, white children were around eight points above average, compared with 16 points below for Black children and 18 points below for Hispanic/Latino children.
Similarly, in Connecticut, economically disadvantaged children, as well as Black and Hispanic/Latino children, performed below the state’s average in all sex areas assessed.
A study published earlier this year, called “The impact of parental socioeconomic characteristics and engagement on children’s early academic abilities: the role of racial and economic disparities,” argued that these gaps are because of family resources and wider structural inequities.
“These disparities do not stem not from innate ability but from unequal access to high-quality early learning environments, disparate neighborhood conditions, and inequitable economic resources in early childhood,” the authors wrote.
Newsweek’s reporters and editors used Martyn, our AI assistant, to produce this story. Learn more about Martyn here.
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: James Rushton, Gray R. Thomas
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