Who’s to Say Who’s ‘Ready’ for Kindergarten?

The file I am looking at is fat.

Fatter than the one in which I collected college application information, fatter than the one in which I collected graduate school application information, fatter, in fact, than the entire maternity-related medical file I compiled during nine months of pregnancy.

The file I am looking at is the kindergarten file.

The big fat kindergarten file.

Within its bulging manila arms repose the options, the guidelines and the caveats of early childhood education. And of course, the academic fate of my child.

Stacked one upon the other are the various tracts--on charter schools, magnet schools, neighborhood schools, progressive private schools, academically oriented private schools. Etc.

Our daughter turned 4 in September. Kindergarten is a year away. But if we are to earn a place on the Good Parents List, we have to immerse ourselves now in the subject of kindergarten A) because it’s the opposite of what our parents did, motivation enough, and B) because if we opt for private school, the application deadlines are imminent.

This is dizzying enough. Compounding the confusion is perhaps the most controversial aspect of kindergarten and, to my inexperienced brain, the strangest: the readiness issue.

I have labored my whole life under the misimpression that all a child had to do to enter kindergarten in September was to turn 5 years old by Dec. 2.

Forget it.

Whole theoretical structures have been built, torn down, and rebuilt around the idea of readiness, which is of special interest to parents of children like mine--”summer children”--whose birthdays fall between June and September. These children are not considered “fully 5” if they enter kindergarten on schedule.

I know several little summer boys whose parents are considering holding them out of kindergarten until they turn 6. The children are perfectly normal, but the parents worry that their boys are less emotionally mature than same-aged girls and slightly older boys and thus will start school life at a disadvantage that may prove indelible.

Ten years ago, education experts talked of children being “pushed” into the school system too soon by “well-meaning, but ill-informed parents.” They tracked summer children who started school on time and summer children who were held out until the following year, and concluded after a number of studies that the summer children who were held back fared better in school.

Nowadays, however, some education specialists are suggesting a different way of looking at readiness. Schools, they say, should be ready for all children, not the other way around.

“Every child, except in the most severe instances of abuse, neglect, or disability, enters school ready to learn school content,” according to a 1995 position statement on readiness adopted by the National Assn. for the Education of Young Children. “The traditional construct of readiness unduly places the burden of proof on the child.”

Holding a child out of school for a year, says NAEYC, “assumes that children should fit a set of rigid expectations rather than that programs need to adapt for children’s individual variation.”

Laurel Schmidt, principal of Santa Monica’s Franklin Elementary School, echoes the NAEYC position: “Part of the problem is how narrowly we define school. Children come to school very, very able to do things we never ask them to do. There are children who have real artistic ability or fine motor skills, but those things would not necessarily qualify them as ‘ready.’ You know, some kids walk at 9 months, some at 15 months. But nobody sends their kids to a remedial walking class. Physiologically, we allow kids to grow at different rates. Why can’t we look at reading and writing that way?”

I was greatly relieved to hear this, since I had been worrying about my child’s mental block with the number 5. She can count pretty high, pretty fast, you see, but that’s because she skips many integers she deems nonessential.

In my endless quest for things to worry about, I find myself tortured by another aspect of readiness. My own. The idea of arranging life so as to get my child up, fed and dressed in time for school five days a week is more than I can handle.

I will never be ready for that.

* Robin Abcarian’s column appears on Sundays and Wednesdays. Readers may write to her at the Los Angeles Times, Life & Style, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053.