Each year during the Georgia legislative session it seems there are one or two education-related bills proposed that attract lots of attention and controversy. This year, HB 100 is one of those bills. HB 100 is a proposed amendment to current state law which would move the date by which students would need to reach age 5 in order to be eligible to attend a Georgia public school for kindergarten up from September 1st to eventually as early as June 30th. The primary rationale given for the proposed change is a sense that some students start kindergarten at too young of an age, not quite ready for what kindergarten holds for them. The bill has stirred up quite a bit of discussion on both sides.
I don’t know when the “right” age to start kindergarten is—if there even is one. But I do know that there have been some significant changes over the past few years in terms of the expectations about what should happen in kindergarten, as I wrote about in a blog post just about this time a year ago. I tend to agree with a writer on another blog who argues that, regardless of when exactly students start kindergarten, the trend in many schools (though not at ANCS) away from structured play and choice activities towards more worksheets and intensive “academics” doesn’t seem to serve students well in the long-run, no matter their background coming into kindergarten.
What do you think?
Comments
One response to “How do we determine when students are “ready” for kindergarten? And is kindergarten these days ready for the needs of students, no matter the age?”
I think that “the trend in many schools…away from structured play and choice activities towards more worksheets and intensive ‘academics’ doesn’t seem to serve students well in the long-run….” and that age has so little to do with knowing. Standards, as imagined by – say – the common core – don’t (overtly) care about “age” either; they represent grade levels. And grade levels are grade levels. We would all be well served – our children especially – if we could imagine “grade levels” as a matter of actual learning, rather than periods of time marked by children “getting older,” where students would advance along a continuum then, even (dare I say, advance subject by subject) according to mastery of subject standards, not just because they’re, well….”done” with (our rather arbitrary) nine months of learning….and had a birthday….
H. Goodwin