‘Graying’ of Kindergartners: Parents Fear Failure, Hold Children Back

Concern about the academic fate of children who stumble in the early grades is driving up the entrance age for kindergarten at schools across the United States.

In some states, education policy-makers are taking the step on their own, but often it is the parents who decide to hold their children back and enroll them when they are closer to 6 than 5.

Whether by legislative fiat or parental predilection, it is producing what some experts call “the graying of kindergarten.”

‘Academic Redshirting’

Ralph Frick, an Atlanta University education professor who favors the trend, has another term for it: “academic redshirting.”

Traditionally, most states have allowed 4-year-olds into kindergarten if they turned 5 by December.

Since 1975, 23 states have pushed their entrance age back, usually from November or December to September, according to James K. Uphoff, a professor of education at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. A number of other states already required children to turn 5 by September to start kindergarten, he said.

Virginia is pushing back its cutoff date from Dec. 31 to Sept. 30, starting in the fall of 1988.

Indiana will move its cutoff date back from Oct. 1 to June 1 by 1992.

Changing Cutoff to Sept. 1

Illinois, which used to admit children to kindergarten if they were 5 by Dec. 1, is switching to a cutoff of Oct. 1 this year and Sept. 1 next year.

And youngsters who want to start kindergarten in Missouri this fall had to celebrate their fifth birthday by July 1.

Whatever the cutoff date, it has never been an easy decision to make for parents who realized that a 4-year-old with a fall birthday would be competing against youngsters up to a year older.

There is evidence to justify those fears.

Uphoff examined records in 1982 at an elementary school in Hebron, Neb., where the state cutoff date for kindergarten was age 5 by mid-October.

Looking at the files of all pupils from kindergarten to grade 6, Uphoff found that the “summer children”--those with birthdays from June through mid-October--accounted for 23% of the enrollment, but 75% of those who had failed one or more years.

No Failures After Delay

On the other hand, there were no failures among “summer children” whose parents delayed their entrance into school by a year.

Uphoff, author of the book “Summer Children: Ready or Not for School?” believes children should be at least 5 1/2 years old before they set foot in kindergarten. That means turning 5 by March 1.

Ironically, this growing concern about the proper age to start kindergarten comes at a time when half of American children are in preschool by age 4. Many are in day care or child cooperatives even earlier than that, for 54% of married women with children under 6 are also out working.

In most instances, preschool is still preschool, a place where play and social interaction with other children prevail, along with nap and snack time--notwithstanding the efforts of some adults to incubate “superbabies.”

But kindergarten in many places has become more like what first grade used to be, with youngsters spending part of the day hunkered down over workbooks learning to read or at least to exhibit “pre-reading skills.”

Recapture for 5-Year-Olds

Harriet A. Egertson, president of the National Assn. of Early Childhood Specialists in State Departments of Education, believes it is time to recapture kindergarten for 5-year-olds.

“So many children are staying away for a year that many kindergartens are now full of 6-year-olds,” Egertson, a consultant in school management for the Nebraska Department of Education, wrote in Education Week. “Curricular expectations keep accelerating, and fewer and fewer 5-year-olds are welcome.”

“In many instances, kindergarten has become a harmful experience for the children for whom it was originally conceived,” she said. “When kindergarten was for 5-year-olds, no one worried whether children could sit still for long periods of time--the classroom was organized so that children could move around and select useful pursuits from a wide variety of materials and activities.”

Another child development expert, Lillian G. Katz, a professor at the University of Illinois, said: “Just because children can do something when they are young does not mean they should do it.”

“You can see in day-care centers and kindergartens young children working on work sheets or reading from flash cards. You can make children engage in rote counting of large numbers and do exercises reading the calendar. But that doesn’t mean you should do it,” said Katz, who directs a clearinghouse on elementary and early childhood education.

Open Doors to 4-Year-Olds

These caution flags about too much, too soon are being waved at a time when some states are opening the doors of public schools to children at age 4.

Many educators feel that disadvantaged children, in particular, need preschool programs such as Head Start to hold their own later in elementary school.

And whatever the pedagogic rationale, preschool is a fact of life for most children.

Figures from the Bureau of the Census and the U.S. Department of Education show that 5.9 million of the nation’s 10.7 million 3- to 5-year-olds were enrolled in kindergarten or nursery school in 1985. That was almost 55%, or double the rate in 1965.

In 1985, more than 1 in 4 of the 3-year-olds were in some form of school, about half the 4-year-olds and 5 out of 6 of the 5-year-olds.