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Push Is On For Mandatory Kindergarten In California

Push Is On For Mandatory Kindergarten In California

By Kurt Chirbas, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Some kids who skip kindergarten have to play catch-up when they enter first grade: to learn how to hold a pencil, count to 100 and begin tackling spelling.

Educators and state lawmakers who want to close this achievement gap say it’s time to do away with optional kindergarten for California children. They are backing legislation to make it mandatory.

“Kindergarten is what first grade used to be,” said Telma Bayona, administrator for child development and preschool at Compton Unified School District.

Once intended as a soft entry into the school system, filled with finger painting and songs, kindergarten has become increasingly focused on academics, with more activity geared toward reading, writing and math concepts. Students without it can be lost once they reach the classroom, educators say.

Sixteen other states and the District of Columbia require kindergarten, according to data from the Education Commission of the States, a research group that tracks education policy.

State lawmakers have launched multiple versions of a kindergarten mandate over the years. Each was blocked by opponents who said it would cost too much and stifle parental choice.

Last year, Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed a proposal that passed the Legislature, saying he preferred “to let parents determine what is best for their children, rather than mandate an entirely new grade level.”

The California Teachers Association, the powerful union that is co-sponsoring the current bill and has backed previous legislative efforts, said it won’t give up.

“We will be back, year in and year out, until we accomplish this fundamental building block that we feel is critical to students’ success,” Toni Trigueiro, a representative of the California Teachers Association, said at a state Senate committee hearing last month.

The legislation passed the Assembly in June and is pending in the Senate.

The governor has not taken a public position on the bill, and officials have issued conflicting projections of its potential cost.

Brown’s Department of Finance, which issued a position paper against the measure, estimates that 80 percent to 86 percent of age-appropriate children — those who turn 5 by Sept. 1 of a school year — attend public kindergarten and that the cost of educating the remaining share would be $276 million to $620 million.

The state Department of Education, run by independently elected Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson, estimates that about 93 percent of 5-year-olds attend public kindergarten in a given year, and that the cost of educating the remaining share would be some $307 million annually. Torlakson has not taken a public position on the proposal, according to his office.

Supporters of the measure said required kindergarten would lead to better academic outcomes for low-income students, who tend to participate in kindergarten at lower rates, and improve economic growth.

Early education is “essential to transforming a community like Compton, where there are tremendously high levels of poverty and unemployment,” said Micah Ali, president of the Compton Unified School District board.

Backers hope to win over the governor this year with the inclusion of some new flexibility for parents: Children could complete the kindergarten requirement through registered home schooling or at an accredited private or public school.

Like last year’s proposal, the measure also preserves California’s requirement that kids start school at age 6. Kindergarten traditionally starts at 5, but parents could wait and enroll children in kindergarten at 6. But skipping kindergarten — even for a more mature or academically advanced child who might otherwise go straight to first grade — would no longer be an option.

“The governor thinks parents can make good decisions about what their children need,” said Assemblywoman Shirley Weber (D-San Diego), author of the measure, AB 713. “Well, that argument can also be said about first and second grade … Why does the state mandate that you go to school in first and second grade if parents always do what’s best?”

Opponents of her bill said the issue does, in fact, boil down to parental choice.

“Most folks are already making the decision to have their kids in kindergarten,” said Mike Smith, president of the Home School Legal Defense Association, a Virginia-based group that provides legal assistance to parents who home-school their children.
“I don’t see any need to impose this on the rest of the people,” Smith said.

He said his faith in the governor was shaken slightly this summer when Brown signed a law ending religious and other personal-belief exemptions from vaccines for schoolchildren. The kindergarten mandate would be more government overreach, Smith said.

Ashley Novelozo said kindergarten helped her daughter, Olivia Novelozo, who just started first grade. An only child, Olivia learned in kindergarten to socialize with peers and get used to be away from home, then happily reunited with her kindergarten friends this year, her mother said.

“I can’t even imagine a 6-year-old coming straight into first grade,” she said.

Barbara Rico’s daughter Hailey, 5, will start kindergarten this month — largely to ensure that she’ll be able to interact with others her age. But Rico would keep Hailey home if she were unhappy.

“It’s important … so she could socialize with other kids,” Rico said. “I just want her to get a little more independent.”

Beth Graue, professor of curriculum and instruction at the University of Wisconsin, is a leading expert on kindergarten curricula. She worries that kindergarten, which she says should be developmentally appropriate and encourage children’s curiosity, is instead being used to help prop up student test scores as the state and federal governments put more emphasis on them.

“Children don’t get very much choice anymore in kindergarten,” Graue said. “Everything they do is directed by the teacher and the schedule.”

Wisconsin adopted a kindergarten requirement, but allowed for exemptions set by local school boards, in 2009.

Requiring kindergarten would not necessarily resolve the poor attendance issue, some experts said. But there are other ways to do that.

Cindy Marten, superintendent of the San Diego Unified School District, said some parents think kindergarten is not “real” school and keep children home for vacations, minor stomach aches and bad weather. In her district, teachers might call parents when a child is absent, and school-based health centers have been established, in an effort to keep kids coming.

About 180 students were missing school whenever it rained — compared to 15 or 20 on average — so staff members started handing out umbrellas.

Photo: Kindergarten students line up for lunch at Metro Charter Elementary in downtown Los Angeles on June 2, 2015. State lawmakers are considering making kindergarten mandatory for all students. (Katie Falkenberg/Los Angeles Times/TNS)

Early Learning Is Key For Poor Children, Experts Say

Early Learning Is Key For Poor Children, Experts Say

By Kate Santich, Orlando Sentinel

ORLANDO, Fla. — For Florida’s 1 million children growing up in poverty, kindergarten — and even pre-K — is too late to start giving them the help many will need to grow into capable, productive adults.

That’s the warning of a growing statewide effort to help parents and policymakers pay attention to the critical development years from birth through age 3.

“What’s most shocking to me is how soon the deficits show up,” says Vance Aloupis, statewide director of the Children’s Movement of Florida — a nonpartisan, grass-roots coalition pushing for increased investment in the first five years of a child’s life.

For children born into homes with few books and to parents whose own education may be limited, Aloupis says, “you can already begin to see deficits at 9 months old.” By that point, kids should make speechlike babbling sounds.

Researchers have known for decades that children’s brains begin to form about three weeks after conception. From that point to age three, brain growth is intense and unparalleled: 85 percent of the brain’s architecture is developed by age three, 90 percent by age five.

But the message has been slow to reach parents and caregivers — those who can take greatest advantage of that precious and short window. In Florida, where one in four children lives below the federal poverty line and one in nine lives in extreme poverty, child-welfare advocates say few options are available to low-income parents who need quality child care or help in knowing what to do on their own.

More than 35,000 Florida parents are on wait lists for state-subsidized child-care programs that emphasize social and academic development.

Meanwhile, the state’s universal pre-kindergarten program — overwhelmingly passed by voters and open to every four-year-old, regardless of family income — fails to meet seven of ten nationally recommended quality standards, such as child-to-teacher ratio and class size.

The situation is no better for the federal Early Head Start program, aimed at low-income infants and toddlers. It reaches about 4 percent of the children eligible, largely because of limited funds.

Karen Willis, CEO of Orange County’s Early Learning Coalition, said lawmakers have sent a mixed message.

“We have said there’s a substantial public interest in making sure all children in the state have access to voluntary pre-kindergarten,” she notes. “So why don’t we do that for birth to age three, particularly for very low-income children, when we know that the vast majority of brain development takes place in that time?”

On the other hand, Florida has one of the highest pre-kindergarten-enrollment rates in the nation: nearly 80 percent of four-year-olds participate. And in June, Governor Rick Scott signed into law a $54-per-student boost for the program — its first in six years.

There has been other progress, too. At Orlando’s BETA Center — a nonprofit that helps pregnant teens and young, at-risk families — moms and moms-to-be learn about nurturing their children’s development even before birth.

“I learned the earlier you start, the better,” says 20-year-old Danielle Brooks, who moved to the center ten months ago with her newborn daughter in hopes of bettering both their futures. She is already trying to make up for not reading aloud to her baby when she was pregnant by reading aloud nightly now — and asking her toddler questions on the subject matter.

“Even though she doesn’t seem like she pays attention sometimes, I know she’s listening and picking things up,” says Brooks, who takes a bus at dawn each weekday to Valencia College, where she’s studying to be a physician assistant. “I can see it in how she responds to me and how fast she is developing. It’s amazing.”

BETA’s president and CEO, Ruth Patrick, says the parenting classes not only aim to strengthen parent-child bonds, building emotional development, but to stimulate the child’s intellect.

“We know that waiting until pre-K is too late,” she says. “If children aren’t exposed to language and colors and sounds and patterns, if they don’t learn to play with others, they’re missing out in ways that make it very difficult to catch up later.”

Pastor Scott Billue, who runs the Matthew’s Hope homeless ministry in west Orange County, sees the consequences of that deprivation daily. And it’s why he’s working to open the Firm Foundation preschool this fall.

“We are seeing these children lacking physically, mentally, spiritually and socially,” Billue says. “We even see a lack of motor-skills development. When you eat everything from a bag while living in a car, you don’t even learn to hold a fork.”

In a matter of a few months, he has raised three-quarters of the $100,000 cost of the preschool’s first year, in part because of a $25,000 grant from Universal Orlando Foundation. The school will employ the Montessori education model, two teachers with psychology degrees and one with a master’s. It will not, Billue vows, be merely a baby-sitting service.

“As an education system and as a nation, if we are not careful, we will be raising the next generation of homeless people,” he says. “And I don’t want to be any part of that.”

Photo: Mastcharter via Flickr