School Age, Schoole Daze

School Age, Schoole Daze

When to start kindergarten is an increasingly complicated question

For many parents, there is no clear-cut answer to the question of when to start a child in school. Instead, the issue of whether a child is “ready” or not becomes tangled with questions about the merits of preschools, kindergarten transition programs, and the meaning of the battery of tests that children are typically expected to take today.

Many parents are “redshirting” their children by delaying their entry into kindergarten or first grade on the theory that their offspring are not yet ready for the classroom. More the 20 percent of six-, seven-, and eight-year-old children are estimated to be behind other children their age in school, according to a study by Edith McArthur of the National Center for Education Statistics and Suzanne Bianchi of the Bureau of the Census.

Such trends, mostly the result of readiness decisions by parents and educational institutions, have led many states to raise the age by which they require a child to begin school, so that on the whole children start their kindergarten and first grade experience at later ages today. In the vast majority of states, children must be five years old before they enter kindergarten; when Dwight D. Eisenhower was president, that age was four years, nine months – a significant difference at that stage in life.

The cut-off dates for determining enrolment eligibility have also been pushed back to the beginning of the school year, forcing younger children who would turn that age during the school year to delay enrolling for another year.

Very often in tracked schools, if you ask too many questions, you risk getting knocked down to the next level (Anne Wheelock, educational analyst and author of Crossing the Tracks). Photo by Elena

Thirty years ago, kindergarten children who would turn the appropriate age by February of thet school year were allowed to enroll for the full school year; even as recently as 1979 only nine states required the age for kindergarten and first grade to be met before the beginning of October. Today, most states have moved the cut-off date back to September.

”While 15 years ago it was considered appropriate to send a child to school at as early an age as possible, now the philosophy recommends waiting until a child is mature enough for academic work,” according to researchers McArthur and Bianchi. But such a decision can often be quixotic, for many kindergarten and pre-school programs have responded to the trend toward making first grade more academic by becoming more academic themselves.

In conclusion: The Kindergarten Countdown... When your child starts school may differ greatly, depending on the state in which you live. But just because a state allows a child to start kindergarten at age five, this need not mean your child must start then. Most states don't make school compulsory until a child turns six or even seven, and it is increasingly common for children to delay kindergarten until age six.