Trends toward increased focus on academics in U.S. schools have impacted children’s opportunity for play, and children are spending more time in kindergarten classrooms today than decades past. Kindergarten teacher views researched in this study provide insights about the availability of play areas, time spent on child-directed activities relative to teacher directed activities, and teachers’ value of self-regulation readiness skills relative to academic readiness skills. I conducted a secondary analysis of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study—Kindergarten (ECLS-K 2010-2011), a large nationally representative data set, to examine public and private school sectors in the United States, controlling for teacher, school, and classroom characteristics. Additionally, I used an exploratory emergent design for a sub-study to compare the U.S. data with the Institute of Child Developmental Science Research (ICDSR) survey of Japanese early educators data set from 426 Japanese teachers. Kindergarten teachers in U.S. public schools provided less availability to play areas compared to other activity areas, and less time devoted to child-selected activities compared to teacher directed activities than all other U.S. sectors and Japanese classrooms. However, Kindergarten teachers in U.S. public schools placed similar value to other U.S. sectors on kindergarten academic readiness but higher value on self-regulation readiness skills than all other U.S. sectors and Japanese schools.