Parents and Kindergarten: Decisions to Be Made

Kindergarten What is the right age for a child to enter kindergarten? This paper will delve into that topic, point out the benefits of having a child in kindergarten, and approach the issue of whether mandatory attendance is appropriate. Kindergarten and Children There are few issues that are discussed more in early childhood education than the issue of the appropriate age for a child to begin kindergarten.

When parents are surveyed about how ready their children are for kindergarten, they raise many questions about their children's need for schooling at a young age. When teachers are interviewed, they identify age as an important factor "…that figures prominently in definitions and beliefs about readiness for kindergarten"; and teachers cite age as a "post hoc explanation for decisions to retain children in kindergarten" (Early Educational Development). The publication Early Educational Development, a branch of the U.S.

Health and Human Services Department, reported on a survey conducted by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development that looked into the appropriate age in which a child should be in kindergarten. Nine hundred children were part of the Study of Early Child Care. The study measured children's academic achievement and socioemotional development were "measured repeatedly" from the age of 54 months through the third grade (EED).

What was learned from an analysis of the research -- with family background factors and "experience in child care in the first 54 months of life controlled" and "hierarchical linear modeling" (the growth curve) -- is that children beginning kindergarten at younger ages "had higher (estimated) scored in Kindergarten on the Woodcock-Johnson (W-J) Letter-Word Recognition subtest" (EED). However, those children entering kindergarten at younger ages got "lower ratings from kindergarten teachers" on skills relating to mathematical thinking and language and literacy (EED).

Moreover, children who entered kindergarten at older ages were reported to have had greater "increases over time on Woodcock-Johnson subtests" (including letter-word recognition; picture vocabulary; applied problems and sentence memory), according to the research article in Early Education Development. By the time they got to third grade, the children that went to kindergarten a bit later in their young lives out-performed children who started at younger ages in picture vocabulary and applied problems (EED).

The article in Early Educational Development goes on to point out that the age in which a child starts kindergarten is seen as "…an index society uses" in terms of a child's eligibility to use public resources -- public schools -- and hence, that index opens up the door to many potential benefits of intellectual stimulation and social growth (EED).

It has been learned that older children to show "more advanced developmental skills than younger children," and so, changes in the age of entry into kindergarten impacts the percentage of children who "meet certain academic or skill standards" (EED).

And when a sizable percentages of children excel at standardized tests (or other kinds of testing) that "boosts a [school] district's standing on certain metrics." The authors are likely relating to some of the provisions of the legislation, No Child Left Behind, which required schools and teachers to achieve certain levels of academic testing or lose federal funding. What age do other countries set for children entering kindergarten? According to the Early Education Development research, Germany, Japan, Australia, Russia, and Switzerland, the age for entry into kindergarten is six years.

In Sweden children aren't able to enter kindergarten until they are 7 years of age; but in England, a child can begin his or her schooling between the ages of 4 and 5 years. In New Zealand, a child starts kindergarten on his or her 5th birthday. In the United States, most school districts allow children to enter kindergarten at the age of 5, although there are differences from state to state as to exactly when on the calendar a child actually turned five (EED).

And the Early Education Development research reports a recent trend for parents in the U.S. And that is to delay their child's entry into kindergarten "…a year beyond the time the child is eligible"; about 10% of American parents are holding their children back by a year, in particular when the child is a male (EDD). This is called "redshirting," a term that was coined in the sports world and means that a parent holds his or her child back for a year.

Those parents holding children back generally have children whose 5th birthdays are "closest to the cutoff" date; a child would be the youngest in their class, if, for example, the cutoff date was August 1 and his or her birthday was September 30.

Since No Child Left Behind was still mainly in effect at the time this article was written (2007), the authors note that there has been an "…increasing emphasis on school accountability." Hence, greater emphasis was at that time (and still is in many school districts in America) on a student's performance on standardized achievement tests.

So, if a child catches on quicker at an older age, the theory is that "…older children would be better prepared than younger children to get the most" out of school -- and to assure that the district continues to receiving the funding it needs (EED). The justification for the adherence to this theory is that kindergarten is not the laid back fun environment that it was many years ago.

In fact there has been seen an "increasingly academic curriculum" in kindergarten, so getting young children up to speed on academics early makes sense. From some parents' perspectives, in particular those parents whose children are "less advantaged" (i.e., low income) having their child attend kindergarten at a younger age means that a kind of child care is available, and it is publically funded as well.

If a child just turned five and his mother is a single mom, of course she needs to work so it makes sense to have her child in school.

In fact, according to the article in Early Education Development, younger children in many circumstances "actually tend to learn more" even though they started school at a "relative disadvantage." Interestingly, the EED research shows that the age of a child when entering kindergarten -- in terms of the ability to function well and grasp the academic challenges -- is not as important in terms of the child's ultimate school success as his or her ethnicity and socioeconomic status.

In fact, in a survey referenced by the Early Education Development article, the proportion of "risk" attributed to socioeconomic and ethnicity-related status of a child "…was 13 times greater than that attributed to entry age" (EDD). Redshirting and other issues as to appropriate age for kindergarten Elizabeth Weil writes in The New York Times that a major gap in achievement for children is based on age.

Nearly all kindergarten classrooms have children whose birthdays can span a difference of a dozen months, but because of redshirting, "the oldest student [in a teacher's class] is not just 12 but 154 months older than the youngest, a difference in age of 25%" (Weil, 2007).

In a classroom that Weil observed in Ashville, North Carolina, children had "rug time" (nap time) and they walked single file to physical education class, where they sat on a curb until their turn came to run laps for the "Presidential Fitness Test." The fastest running in this standardized physical fitness test was a girl "…who had been redshirted…she strode confidently, with great form," but many of the smaller / younger children "could barely run straight" (Weil, p. 2).

Another student that had been redshirted was pointed out as the best artist in that classroom, who had "beautiful penmanship," had been redshirted too, Weil continued. So if redshirting results in higher test scores, that is a good thing for districts, Weil explains. For kids to do well at standardized tests in 3rd grade, then they "…must be prepping for those tests in second and first grades, and even at the end of kindergarten, or so the thinking goes" (Weil, p. 2).

Telling it like it is, Weil asserts that by increasing the average age of kids who are entering kindergarten the district can come up with "…a cheap and easy way to get a small bump in test scores" because as is pointed out, older children do perform better (Weil, p. 2). The writer notes that redshirting is "not a new phenomenon" albeit the percentage of parents who decide to redshirt their children has "held relatively steady" since the practice began in the 1980s.

The percentage across the board of all children that are held back a year has been between 6 and 9%. That said, Weil explains that there is a somewhat disturbing trend among "certain affluent communities" to hold children back, to redshirt children, at a rate "three of four times the national average" (p. 3). This is disturbing in the sense that wealthier communities that already have a socioeconomic advantage can (by redshirting their children) mold their children to be academically well ahead of the curve of all children in their community.

In an upscale community in California, Los Altos, where the average home price was $1 million, about "…one quarter of the kids had been electively held back" (Weil, p. 3). In an upper middle class community in Winston-Salem North Carolina, the U.S. Representative (Dale Folwell, Republican) claimed that 26% of parents in his district hold their children back a year before entering kindergarten. There can be a downside, though, to allowing children to enter public school a year after they are eligible, Weil explained.

The benefits of being a little older than one's classmates "…disappear after the first few years in school," Weil continued. She references a study by Deborah Stipek, the dean of the Stanford University School of Education. Stipek reported through her research that "children who are older than their classmates not only do not learn more per grade but also tend to have more behavior problems" (Weil, p. 3).

A case that is referenced by Weil on page 4 of the Times' article is of parents who did not redshirt their oldest daughter, and in fact the child made the cutoff date "by a few days… [and] now she is a struggling fourth grader; only by the skin of her teeth has she been able to pas each year," the mother explained to Weil. "I kick myself every year now," the mother said. Meanwhile, Kelly Bedard is a labor economist at the University of California in Santa Barbara.

Weil references Bedard's study (called "The Persistence of Early Childhood Maturity: International Evidence of Long-Run Age Effects") that was published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics (in November, 2006). In that research, Bedard found, "after crunching the math and science test scores for nearly a quarter-million students" in 19 different countries, some startling data. Bedard's research revealed that younger students "…perform 4 to 12 percentiles less well in third and fourth grade and 2 to 9 percentiles worse in seventh and eighth" (Weil, p. 5).

By the eighth grade, Bedard wrote, "…it's fairly safe to say we're looking at long-term effects" -- and moreover, in British Columbia the "relatively oldest students" were found to be roughly ten percent "more likely" to go to university than the younger children who were not held back from entering kindergarten (Weil, p. 5).

The data that Bedard gathered from children in the United States showed that the "relatively oldest students are 7.7% more likely to take the SAT or ACT," and those older students are also 11.6% "more likely" to ultimately enroll in higher education (four-year universities and colleges) (Weil, p. 5). One of the problems that exacerbate the issue of younger vs. older students entering public schools is that teachers tend to assign younger students to a grade level behind older students.

And older students are more likely to be assigned reading and math assignments "ahead" of the younger students, according to Bedard's findings. In addition, younger children are more likely to "receive diagnoses of attention-deficit disorder," according to Bedard.

On page 7 of The New York Times article Weil points out that those who plan curriculum no longer ask, "What does a 5-year-old need?" Instead the focus is on this: "If a student is to pass reading and math tests in third grade, what does that student need to be doing in the prior grades?" Clearly, achievement and test scores have dominated the issue of age for children entering kindergarten, rather than a realistic, objective look at what in fact does a 5-year-old boy or girl really need to get a good start in academics and socialization.

What are the reasonable solutions for the age-issue conundrum? Should American schools change the age for kindergarten entrance to 6, or even 7 years (as Finland does)? There are no good answers to that question, but there are generalizations like "Early failure begets later failure," which is a way of saying schools and parents need to make sure their children are old enough to be successful even in kindergarten. This would seem to be an argument for redshirting.

An older child might well be more ready to develop a solid vocabulary, and that person may learn more words by listening to a story; also, that older child, in the process of learning words and being able to use new words, "feels great about himself" and this can.