Familienpolitik

Photo by Georgios Karamanis under Creative Commons license.

In this Slate article author Emily Bazelon asks a few questions about changes in American kindergartens that many upper-middle-class families don’t want to ask.  Is the increasingly academic nature of kindergarten good for my children?  Why are schools and states pushing up the cutoff date for kids starting kindergarten?  What’s the impact on the other kids in the class if I start my son or daughter in kindergarten at age six?

The answers are not good.

Individually speaking, no harm done, perhaps, though the presumed benefit is an open question. But collectively, delaying kindergarten is a bad idea—especially for poor kids, for whom it often means one more year of no school.

Based on research presented in a new paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Bazelon makes these worrisome points:

• Delaying some kids another year creates an age span in the classroom that disadvantages younger students, even if they are developing at the normal pace.
• Lifetime earnings are depressed for late starters because they also enter the workforce a year later than they would have.
• Delaying kindergarten means less public school for those kids who are risk for dropping out.  They turn 18 earlier in their educational career and are thus able to drop out after receiving less education

“All of this should make us leery of governmental policies that delay kindergarten,” writes Bazelon.  But when it comes to your own kid are you really going to worry about the effect on some general group of low-income kids somewhere in the country?  The authors of the study are now looking at whether there’s an advantage to late-starters at the other end.  Do 6-year-old kindergartners later have a better chance of getting into the top colleges?

Bazelon doesn’t mention it specifically, but my gut feeling is that accountability policies such as No Child Left Behind, which link school funding with student performance, may be driving schools to encourage parents to keep their kids home a year long in the hope that older children will do better on tests.  Based on Bazelon’s reporting, this might be short-sighted.

Tags: school