According to the apple-or-coin test, used in the Middle Ages, children should start school when they are mature enough for the delayed gratification and abstract reasoning involved in choosing money over fruit. In 15th- and 16th-century Germany, parents were told to send their children to school when the children started to act “rational.” And in contemporary America, children are deemed eligible to enter kindergarten according to an arbitrary date on the calendar known as the birthday cutoff — that is, when the state, or in some instances the school district, determines they are old enough. The birthday cutoffs span six months, from Indiana, where a child must turn 5 by July 1 of the year he enters kindergarten, to Connecticut, where he must turn 5 by Jan. 1 of his kindergarten year. Children can start school a year late, but in general they cannot start a year early. As a result, when the 22 kindergartners entered Jane Andersen’s class at the Glen Arden Elementary School near Asheville, N.C., one warm April morning, each brought with her or him a snack and a unique set of gifts and challenges, which included for some what’s referred to in education circles as “the gift of time.”
2 thoughts on “When Should a Kid Start Kindergarten?”
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Give me a break! Purposefully and, in the case of most U.S. states, forcibily holding your child back so that they can have a social (bullying) and academic (remedial) advantage is white, elitist nonsense. There is absoulutely no data available that demonstrate childern born later in the school year underperform those born earilier in the school year. This is pure bullshit! What is the best indicator for success in public schools? . . . and the answer isn’t even close. It is RACE!!! If I thought for one moment that holding children back (repeat without an attempt) had a smudge of validity, I would be a strong advocate for holding black children back until the ages of 8 or 9 for kindergarten. Because I would prefer to see a black 19 or 20 year old high school graduate prepared to compete instead of a sixteen or seventeen year drop-out roaming the urban jungle with a fourth grade reading level.
Our daughter with a November birthday was not allowed to start Kindergarten “early”. She was born in Michigan, where starting the fall she would turn 5 would not have been “early”. We moved here before she started Kindergarten, so MMSD “tested” her and claimed she couldn’t do it. They tested the “early admission” kids for skills they would have learned by the END of (an academic model!) Kindergarten, in the April before they would have started. Of course, not many passed. We struggled and moved around debt on credit cards to get her through that year of preschool again, and then she ended up skipping first grade because she was so ridiculously far ahead when she even started Kindergarten, much less finished. She is 10 1/2 and will be starting sixth grade. We saved MMSD the costs of educating her for 13 years, because she skipped! She is still ahead of her grade peers in most academic areas, and she holds her own socially.
For her, starting her at four would have been the best thing possible. For others, that would be disastrous. If it had been our son, we would not have started him “early” even though he was academically capable. (They could both read before they started kindergarten.) He is small for his age, and has social developmental delays no one official would even recognize until he was almost through first grade (at the “right age”). We need to consider the individual at all times, and not just whether or not the school district feels like they have the “space” to allow them to start or not.
Another point. Even in Michigan, where the cut off was December 1st, and our son had a June 9th birthday – acquaintances suggested we might want to hold him back for a year because he wasn’t very big and “what if he wants to play football in middle school and he’s too small?” Now THAT is major “redshirting” and in my opinion, for all the wrong reasons. He hates football and woudl never play it. He doesn’t even enjoy any sport much at all. If we had held him back a year, he still would not have outgrown his developmental delays, and he would probably think he was just stupid because he was older than his classmates.
I appreciated how clearly this article laid out the advantages of “redshirting” for many children (and as they said, the teachers will ALWAYS complain about the youngest children and their lack of readiness – no matter when the cut off is). And I also loved how – after laying out those advantages – they led you into the racial and class-based undertones of the whole “debate”. If you can’t afford good day care, you just can’t. Having the kids “watching TV in the basement with Grandma” another year is not going to help them! Nothing against Grandmas who babysit either!! My parents went into debt to send me to Montessori school for preschool, because they knew how important it would be for me (an October birthday in a September cutoff state). They were still paying off that second mortgage when I was in middle school! If we had not owned our home, there would have been no way to send me. My dad had a great job, my mom was educated, but we just couldn’t have afforded it. There’s a perfect example of a working to middle class family who would be left out in the cold by only allowing Head Start to cover kids whose families struggle to even pay rent. That’s not “universal” early childhood/pre-K. (This is not to say that I have no appreciation of how key Head Start is for the lucky few who qualify who even get to enroll!) I had social struggles in elementary and middle school, but I would have if I had been one of the oldest in my class too. I never had academic struggles (except being bored!) even though my parents fought to have me admitted early to Kindergarten.
My daughter who was reading easy chapter books in Kindergarten had others in her class who could not tell if a book was upside-down! Those are huge differences to deal with even among kids who started “on-time”, and the less capable kids were not the youngest ones. I have utmost respect for Kindergarten teachers who struggle with that learning spectrum every single year and do their best to bring the least prepared kids up every year. I don’t think I could do it. Now, imagine doing that with NO ability grouping allowed at all. Talk about wasting potential and turning smart kids off to school! The youngest and lowest achieving students are still behind, and the high-achieving ones are left to wait for everyone else to “catch up”, even though the majority probably never can. I can’t think of a more miserable learning environment than one where the teachers are not ALLOWED to ability group in any fashion. That would even preclude the “differentiation” that MMSD admnistrators seem to think everyone can do in this district, while the people who work in the schools know how spotty that ability is among classroom teachers. Even that is ability grouping in some sense of the word!