Kindergarten Cope: Does Starting Later Help Children? : Schools: Wilson officials say the cost-cutting idea is educationally sound. But few specialists find value in the plan that would knock out 110,000 youngsters.

To the surprise of many, a real issue has emerged from the partisan rhetoric prompted by the state fiscal crisis over this year’s education budget.

At what age should children start kindergarten?

Reviving an issue that has divided parents and educators for some time, Gov. Pete Wilson proposed last week that children not be allowed to enter kindergarten unless they reach age 5 by Sept. 1, instead of Dec. 1.

He said not only would the state save $335 million this fiscal year by knocking an estimated 110,000 kindergarten youngsters off the public school rolls, but that the idea is educationally sound.

State Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig responded by calling the proposal “one of the dumbest educational ideas I’ve ever heard” and “a symbol of how anti-child this governor has become.”

Assemblywoman Delaine Eastin (D-Union City), chairwoman of the Assembly Education Committee, sarcastically referred to the plan as “late start” or “false start,” referring to the federal Head Start preschool program.

Maureen DiMarco, Wilson’s secretary of child development and education, who spent much of the week defending the idea, said she is “getting beaten up for proposing this. But kindergarten teachers are for it and so are a lot of parents.”

DiMarco also said “research shows that a much higher percentage of younger children aren’t ready” for kindergarten.

She pointed to the work of James K. Uphoff, professor of education at Wright State University in Ohio, who wrote in a 1985 educational journal: “Many well-meaning but ill-informed parents and educators are pushing young children into our school systems too soon.

“Being bright and being ready for schooling are two very separate issues,” Uphoff wrote. “When children enter school before they are developmentally ready to cope with it, their chances for failure increase dramatically.”

But in a series of interviews with prominent researchers in the field of early childhood education, The Times found little support for Uphoff’s point of view or for the Wilson proposal.

“The claim that the youngest kids aren’t ready for school is strongly disputed by researchers,” said Lorrie A. Shepard, professor of education at the University of Colorado, who recently wrote a paper summarizing work in the field.

The oldest kindergarten children do slightly better than the youngest, as measured by achievement tests, Shepard said, “but that difference tends to disappear on average by the third grade.”

Doris Smith, director of early childhood education at Fresno State University, said: “Usually what needs to be changed is an inappropriate curriculum, not the age at which children enter kindergarten.”

Edward Zigler, professor of psychology at Yale University and a co-founder of the federal Head Start preschool program in 1965, said: “There’s no reason younger children can’t do well in kindergarten, provided the stuff they’re learning is developmentally appropriate.”

Zigler noted that 80% of French children start school by age 2, 96% by the time they are 3.

“We’ve learned from Head Start that we want to get in there earlier, not later, especially with poor kids,” he said.

Zigler added that efforts to delay the kindergarten starting date are “part of the right-wing agenda in this country. They don’t want women to work but to stay home with their kids.”

By a “developmentally appropriate” curriculum, researchers mean encouraging 4- and 5-year-olds to learn through things such as art, music, games, poetry and stories, not by sitting at a desk and performing rote tasks.

“More active learning, less time sitting in seats,” Shepard said. “That doesn’t mean turning them loose to play, but it does mean recognizing what they can learn from play. Filling in work sheets is a classic example of what you shouldn’t do.”

Donna Foglia, a kindergarten teacher in the Evergreen School District, near San Jose, said she teaches her students the alphabet by having them make letters from blocks of sand or clay, not by having them study the letters on a piece of paper.

“At this age level, children are active,” said Foglia, who has taught primary grade children for 30 years. “What they’re learning has to be meaningful to them, it has to relate to their experience. Then they’ll learn it.”

Mary Lembke, who has just completed her first year of teaching kindergarten in the San Juan school district, near Sacramento, had some children who were 4 and others who were almost 6.

She said some 4-year-olds whose parents have read stories to them and encouraged their learning in other ways are further along than children of 5 or 6 who have not had those opportunities.

“You look at the individual child,” Lembke said. “You tailor your teaching to their internal development, to whether or not they can take advantage of a particular opportunity.”

Teachers and researchers expressed concern about what they called the “push-down curriculum”--the tendency to require kindergartners to learn things that are more suitable for first-graders.

“It’s a legacy of the back-to-basics, make-things-more-rigorous approach of the ‘80s,” said June Million of the National Assn. of Elementary School Principals. “That’s fine for some kids but not for others. Some kids who have too rigorous a program burn out by the time they get to the third grade.”

Some parents are so concerned about placing too much pressure on their children that they hold them out of kindergarten until they are almost 6.

This is sometimes called “red-shirting,” after the practice in college athletics of holding out promising players for a year to let them develop physically.

Yolanda Bellissimo of the Beryl Buck Institute, a nonprofit center for early childhood education research in Novato, studied almost 1,700 Marin County children who were held out of kindergarten for a year. She came up with surprising findings.

“We went into the study thinking that parents who did this were trying to give their children a jump over their peers,” Bellissimo said, “but instead we found that parents were doing it to protect their kids from expectations they thought were too high.

“Parents would tell us: ‘My child isn’t ready to sit and listen for four hours a day,’ or ‘There’s no way my child is going to be able to read yet.’ One father said: ‘I don’t want my kid to start out life a failure.’ ”

But Bellissimo agreed with other researchers that the solution to the “push-down curriculum” problem is to improve the educational approach, not to change the kindergarten entrance date.

“The idea is not to get away from academics but to find new and meaningful ways to present the information,” she said.

Fresno State’s Smith said: “The practice of ‘red-shirting’ is elitist” because families who can afford to send their children to preschool, holding them out of kindergarten until they are almost 6, have an advantage over poorer parents who cannot afford preschool unless their children are fortunate enough to be accepted into a Head Start program.

If California changes its eligibility date to Sept. 1, it will have plenty of company.

A survey by the Education Commission of the States found that 20 states use the Sept. 1 cutoff date, another 11 use Oct. 1 and the rest range from June 30 to Jan. 1.

An abrupt change in the starting date could present serious logistic problems, said Beverly Foster, assistant superintendent of schools in the San Diego Unified School District, where many children at year-round schools start kindergarten this week.

“What do we do, send some of these children home?” she asked. “That would cause quite a bit of stress, since starting kindergarten is a big thing in a child’s life.”

Others said the state would not realize the hoped-for budget savings because many kindergarten teachers have been hired for this summer or next fall. Some teachers could be assigned to other grades or other duties, however.

Barbara Willard of the National Assn. for the Education of Young Children said the California proposal “seems somewhat strange, given the broad national consensus about the value of early childhood learning, especially for children who are at risk.”

Million, of the National Assn. of Elementary School Principals, said: “It’s another example of trying to make education fit the budget, not the child.”