KINDERGARTEN CONUNDRUM
Should 5-year-olds start school this year?
Alka Tripathy-Lang’s 5-yearold son is supposed to start kindergarten this fall, but her district in suburban Phoenix has already delayed its start and announced that classes, when they do start, will be online for at least the first couple of weeks.
What those lessons will look like is unclear, as are details about how much parental involvement will be required. Tripathy-Lang’s current plan is to start him in an online-only option, but if it’s not working, she’ll pull him out to be home with her 3-year-old, who she and her husband have already decided not to send to preschool this year.
“I have this low-level anxiety about everything in the background all the time, and a substantial chunk of it is about how I am going to make sure that my kids are getting the experiences they need at this age,” said Tripathy-Lang, a geologist and science writer.
Across the U.S., families are filled with uncertainty about what school will look like in the fall, and those feelings are particularly acute for parents of rising kindergartners. At a moment of transition that can set the stage for the next dozen years, parents who have options are struggling to decide whether it’s worth beginning school if their children might have to wear masks, skip recess or experience kindergarten on a screen.
It’s yet another pandemicrelated conundrum that lacks obvious solutions, said Diane Schanzenbach, Ph.D., an economist at Northwestern University and director of the university’s Institute for Policy Research. Although the current situation is uncharted territory, she and other experts said that prior research on kindergartners can help guide parents in their decision-making.
Now more than ever, they said, the right choice is going to vary based on an individual child’s needs, each family’s circumstances and local variations with the coronavirus.
The redshirt option
Kindergarten is a time when children often get their first taste of real independence as they develop skills such as conflict resolution, group interaction, focus and self-control, said Stephanie Jones, Ph.D., a developmental psychologist at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Major advances happen for most kids in the first few months of kindergarten, said Johanna Garcia Normart, who taught kindergarten for 12 years in Hayward, California, and now teaches transitional kindergarten, a form of pre-K. Between September and January, she said, most kindergartners learn to operate as functional members of a community.
“The primary importance of kindergarten is being able to love to learn,” she added.
But decisions about when to start children in kindergarten can be complicated, even in the best of times. In states where parents have the option to wait, about 6% choose to delay starting their kindergartner every year, especially for kids who will be the youngest in their class.
Parents tend to hold boys back more than girls, perhaps based on the perception that boys are less mature than girls at that age. And parents with higher levels of education are most likely to hold their kids back, Schanzenbach and a colleague found in an analysis of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2010-11, a project run by the U.S. Department of Education. Among boys with summer birthdays in places with a fall cutoff date, those whose parents had college degrees were held back 20% of the time, compared with 5% of boys whose parents had high school degrees.
Waiting can have benefits, particularly for children who have trouble self-regulating, said Thomas Dee, Ph.D., an economist who studies education policy at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education. Some research, including a study he conducted with Hans Henrik Sievertsen at the University of Bristol, suggests that holding off on formal schooling can give those children time to get better at controlling their behavior, handling emotions and pursuing long-term goals — as long as they spend the year in an intellectually engaging, developmentally appropriate, play-based environment, such as a highquality preschool.
But redshirting isn’t necessarily the best choice for every kid, even when it seems like the right thing to do in the months leading up to kindergarten, Schanzenbach said. Because growth is not linear, a child who seems behind in June could be on top of things in October and bored of preschool, she said. And kids often step up and accelerate their learning when exposed to older peers.
“Downsides for everybody, but especially kindergartners”
Of course, the research on kindergarten redshirting was done before the pandemic, which has added a new set of pros and cons to consider.
As a growing number of schools announce plans for the fall that include online-only or a combination of online and inperson, the value of screen-based schooling for kindergartners is one open question. Studies of older students show that online learning is generally inferior to classroom learning. And anecdotal reports from earlier this year suggest that the experience is even worse for young kids and for children with special needs.
Rebecca Polivy’s younger child was supposed to start kindergarten this fall in Pasadena, California. He didn’t tolerate Zoom calls with his preschool class in the spring, and there’s no way he would have the patience to sit in front of a screen and talk to a teacher and classmates he’s never met, said Polivy, the director of an education nonprofit and part-time fitness professional. She’s decided he’s better off staying at the preschool they love for another year.
Educators are also wary of online school for little kids. Michelle Tween taught pre-K and kindergarten for 23 years at the Chapel School, a private school in Bronxville, New York. While teaching the first few cohorts of children born to digital natives, she noticed that the kids had more trouble resolving conflicts, waiting for answers to their questions at school and communicating their needs for help. In the classroom, she watched fine motor skills get neglected when children used index fingers to swipe on iPads instead of using their entire hands to manipulate Play-Doh, scissors or small objects.
Those concerns were amplified when schools shut down in March. “What you saw online was, for many students, scenarios of crying, tantruming, not wanting to go on Zoom, not wanting to see their friends because that wasn’t the way they played with their friends,” said Tween, now director of early childhood education at the Chapel School.
The current situation offers challenges no matter what happens, Tween said. If school buildings open, she worries about how well kindergartners will be able to stay physically distanced and wear masks all day. She also has concerns about how the lack of cooperative play will affect their learning.
But if the school year starts online, she questions how teachers will build trust and rapport with students and how they will manage to recreate the real-time fun typical of kindergarten classrooms.
For parents who are deciding whether to delay kindergarten, it can help to consider what their kids will do instead, Dee said. Among those kids who are still working on self-regulation skills, waiting a year is most beneficial when the alternative is stimulating and engaging — either in a preschool setting or at home. But that might not be possible for many families. And for kids with special needs, opting out of school may deny access to services offered by the school system.
Educators are also concerned about the equity implications of large numbers of people opting out of school systems. Because schools get funding for each student enrolled, low attendance will undermine public schools at a time when they need more funding than ever, Garcia Normart said.
It might also help to recognize that there are no perfect choices right now, said Schanzenbach, who said there were a lot of tears in her house during distance learning with her 8-year old, who had a much tougher time working independently than her 11and 13-year-olds did. “Kindergarten via Zoom is going to make a lot of people cry and probably not teach them that much,” she said. But if the alternative is having a 5-year-old home with two full-time working parents and no school? “I’m not sure which one is worse. They’re both pretty rough, right?”