I just devoured
this article from today's New York Times on the starting age of kindergarteners. I think I mentioned previously it's something I have agonized over a bit. Either I start her in August as planned (and save myself $650 a month), or wait, and try to give her a developmental advantage over her classmates that she may not need. The part that I found particularly thought-provoking is this:
But perhaps those kids with the pencils in their ears — at least the less-affluent ones — don’t need “the gift of time” but rather to be brought into the schools. Forty-two years after Lyndon Johnson inaugurated Head Start, access to quality early education still highly correlates with class; and one serious side effect of pushing back the cutoffs is that while well-off kids with delayed enrollment will spend another year in preschool, probably doing what kindergartners did a generation ago, less-well-off children may, as the literacy specialist Katie Eller put it, spend “another year watching TV in the basement with Grandma.” What’s more, given the socioeconomics of redshirting — and the luxury involved in delaying for a year the free day care that is public school — the oldest child in any given class is more likely to be well off and the youngest child is more likely to be poor. “You almost have a double advantage coming to the well-off kids,” says Samuel J. Meisels, president of Erikson Institute, a graduate school in child development in Chicago. “From a public-policy point of view I find this very distressing.”The article went on to point out that the youngest kids in the class, regardless of any arbitrary cutoff date, will always be the hardest to teach. We are vitims of the vagaries of the school calendar. So as states race to give their own kids an edge by pushing back the cutoffs to September 1st and earlier (as in Oregon where we almost had planned to start Kindergarten), it has a hugely disporportionate effect on the most disadvantaged of kids (what else is new, I guess).
Regardless, it did point out that the fact that we, as parents, are even strssing about this issue bodes pretty well for Amelie's future academic success. I hope that will be true. We'll see how it goes this year. If it's NOT going well, then, Greg can take a contract job in Europe or something and we'll just skip that year later on. :)
