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Plug "kindergarten readiness" into your favorite search engine, and you'll discover a veritable industry of products and programs aimed at testing and preparing children to enter kindergarten. Clearly, parents are anxious about children's ability to succeed in kindergarten. The level of anxiety, however, seems to have increased lately.
In the U.S., most children begin kindergarten at age 5, but as the New York Times Magazine reported in June, the ages of children in a single class may vary by 15 months or more. The push to keep children in kindergarten for longer, the article notes, stems from
"the accountability movement — the high-stakes testing now pervasive in the American educational system. In response to this testing, kindergartens across the country have become more demanding: if kids must be performing on standardized tests in third 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. The testing also means that states, like students, now get report cards, and they want their children to do well, both because they want them to be educated and because they want them to stack up favorably against their peers."
This high-stakes testing movement is inspiring states to raise the age of entry for kindergartners. For example, the article also reports, California may move its birthday cut-off date from December 31 of the year the child is in kindergarten to September 1. Since I have a 23-month-old who was a Labor Day baby--born September 5--this means that even if my child is deemed ready for kindergarten based on his skills, we'll be paying for another year of preschool, which in my area starts at about $700 per month for preschools with large classes. Yes, in the long term my son may benefit, but this potential change in dates--along with the continued financial hardship they may bring me--has made me sit up and take notice of the conversations surrounding kindergarten readiness.
But what is kindergarten readiness? The ABC Home Preschool Blog offers a rundown, including communications and social milestones, as well which motor skills a child should have developed before entering kindergarten. Kate Sanford of The Anachronistic Mom offers her own take on some of the wacky perceived requirements for entry to kindergarten. Go check them out.
Bloggers with preschoolers and kindergartners have continued the discussion of issues raised by the article, particularly that of "redshirting," or holding back your child to improve his or her self-esteem, wait until he or she is physically larger and stronger (a benefit for athletes in older grades), or more intellectually developed. The article reported that this practice is particularly widespread in affluent communities; 6 to 9 percent of kindergartners are held back from entering due to age or repeat kindergarten nationwide, while in wealthy communities the rate is three to four times that rate.
Research is unclear as to whether children who are kindergarten redshirts see any benefit from the practice. Says Elizabeth Weil, the author of the NYT Magazine article,
"For years, education scholars have pointed out that most studies have found that the benefits of being relatively older than one’s classmates disappear after the first few years of school. In a literature review published in 2002, Deborah Stipek, dean of the Stanford school of education, found studies in which children who are older than their classmates not only do not learn more per grade but also tend to have more behavior problems. However, more recent research by labor economists takes advantage of new, very large data sets and has produced different results. A few labor economists do concur with the education scholarship, but most have found that while absolute age (how many days a child has been alive) is not so important, relative age (how old that child is in comparison to his classmates) shapes performance long after those few months of maturity should have ceased to matter."
This doesn't mean, however, that parents don't feel a good deal of anxiety over kindergarten readiness. Susan of Crunchy Granola recently decided to have her daughter repeat kindergarten. Her assessment of her daughter's readiness for kindergarten reflects concerns expressed by parents throughout the blogosphere:
"Curious Girl's pre-K teachers asked us last October if we'd thought about having her repeat pre-K. Not for a second, we hadn't. But they were considering it, for a number of reasons: her complete lack of interest in story-time,
