Kindergarten for all 4-years olds
Brown's plan to scrap transitional kindergarten
If not for its rarity, the pushmi-pullyu of Dr. Dolittle stories might best represent the tangled political narrative surrounding California’s Transitional Kindergarten program. Instead of being half gazelle and half unicorn, the two heads of TK are Gov. Brown on one end and the Legislature, parents, and advocacy groups on the opposite end. Try as they might, they just can’t move in the same direction.
This morning, the Assembly budget subcommittee on education will hold a hearing on the latest proposal by Gov. Brown to eliminate TK but keep the new age requirements in place. What’s unusual about this plan is that instead of saving the state $224 million, it could end up costing more than a billion dollars.
Transitional Kindergarten was established by Senate Bill 1381, known as the Kindergarten Readiness Act of 2010. It raised the age when children can start kindergarten by one month a year over the next three years and created TK for the children with late-fall birthdays who were no longer old enough to enroll in regular kindergarten.
The program would be a financial wash for the first 12 years because the children in TK would have been in school anyway, in traditional kindergarten. In his initial budget plan, Gov. Brown called for eliminating TK and using the money saved to help close the state’s budget deficit.
Gov. Brown's 2012-13 Education Trailer Bill regarding kindergarten admission (click to enlarge)
After several incarnations, the governor has introduced trailer bill language that ends TK but allows school districts to admit any child who will turn five at any point during the school year and get ADA funding for that child starting from the first day of school. Taken to its extreme, that means that if the last day of class is June 30, the district could admit a child who will turn five on June 29 and get state funding for that student.
“If all school districts decided to enroll all those kids, that would be an additional cost pressure of $1.4 billion,” estimated Scott Moore, Senior Policy Advisor at Preschool California.
Enrollment wouldn’t be automatic, however; parents would have to apply for early admission and the district would determine on a case-by-case basis if it’s in the best interest of the child. And it’s up to each district whether or not to even offer early admission.
Jeff Bell, with School Services of California, said he spends hours a week talking to districts about TK and each one has its own unique circumstances to consider. “This is the type of program that has many planning decisions surrounding it for a school district,” said Bell. “Do I need to offer it? Do I have a critical mass of students? Do I have the staffing for it?”
Depending on their answers, there are some districts that would choose not to offer a program and some that, as Bell said, would move “full steam ahead.” That means that children in one district could have a robust TK program, while kids the same age in a neighboring district would have to wait another year to start school.
“It’s unfortunate because it adds to the confusion, it adds to this very uncertain confusing proposal that’s constantly changing,” said Scott Moore, Senior Policy Advisor at Preschool California. “And it does this in the middle of kindergarten enrollment.”
The timing was too close to the wire for San Francisco Unified School District. In late January, when registration was beginning for next fall, the district announced that it wouldn’t be offering TK because at that time there was no assurance that the state was going to pay for those students.
Last week, in a partial turnaround, San Francisco Unified said it would provide TK, but only at two schools, and parents would have to provide transportation. For low-income families living in the Tenderloin and other outlying areas, the distance could very likely rule out TK. But even other parents find it a possible insurmountable challenge. For Marija Maldonado, whose middle child misses the new age cutoff by one day, it would be a 15 to 20 minute drive. “No parent is going to drive a four-year-old 20 minutes, especially if you have another kid in school 3 or 4 blocks from your house, in rush hour traffic.”
Maldonado and other parents met with district officials and left feeling that the district wasn’t willing to make any accommodations such as placing children in regular kindergarten programs closer to their homes through the early enrollment process..
“We are so disappointed with their unwillingness to help these kids achieve an education.” she said. “Aren’t all children deserving of an education regardless of race, gender and zip code?”
There is already talk of lawsuits for unequal access to education. Learning Rights Law Center, which represents young children with disabilities, sent Gov. Brown a letter last week warning that the trailer bill violates the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act.
The attorneys wrote that by leaving it up to individual districts to decide whether to accept four year olds, “This proposal creates vastly different educational systems for young children with disabilities. This is not only tragic, but a violation of federal protections for children with disabilities.”
Sending children to preschool makes sense to me. The various flavors of TK have been arbitrary attempts at doing that. We should drop the concept of TK and work on a sensible presechool program.
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Actually transitional kindergarten is a bridge between preschool and kindergarten. Children who enter TK are a different age than those in preschool. TK serves children who typically would have been entering traditional kindergarten but, because they are born in the fall and are younger than their classmates, could benefit from the gift of time that allows them to attain the maturity, confidence and skills they need to excel in kindergarten.
Unlike preschool, TK is part of the public school system and is free for all families. Under current law, it is mandatory for school districts to offer TK, but voluntary for parents to enroll their children. Credentialed teachers from the K-12 system will teach TK.
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What a mess!
I’m not a fan of the TK plan, giving 1/4 of our kids an extra year of free schooling, making all sorts of weird problems of critical mass when you have one class that is 1/4 the size of your other classes, etc. Rather, I’d like to see all kids have the option of free preschool the year before they are eligible for kindergarten. Or hey, two years of kindergarten works for me, too.
@Deborah: our school has exactly one child eligible for TK next year. My experience watching kids step through the years is that the correlation between performance and age is weak in our particular environment, where the differences between individuals swamp the statistics of large populations.
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At this point, wouldn’t it be simpler (and legally safer) to delay the implementation of SB1381 i.e. status quo on enrollment age ?
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SB, Hopefully someone who can speak to the “legally safer” issue will respond. One thing to keep in mind, however, is that Transitional Kindergarten is currently the law in California under SB 1381. It is already in the state ed code. So delaying it would require legislative action. It’s hard to say if that would be simpler.
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I understand the financial constraints under which the governor must function— I support pre-K and “TK” programs but when we are giving pink slips to thousands of K-12 teachers….. A bigger issue for me is changing the kinder entry age. I have now supervised three graduate studies that have statistically proven that students who turn 5 between October and December have higher achievement in 3rd grade than those who were already 5 in September. Moving the age up will not only cost us millions– it is not in the academic interests of the students.
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Dr. Hunt, There is a strong likelihood that without TK several thousand more teachers would lose their jobs because of declining enrollment. Using the estimate of 125,000 fewer kindergarten students next year, at a high-end class size of 30 students to a teacher, that would mean more than 4,000 fewer kindergarten teachers would be needed in 2012-13. The following year lower enrollment would impact first grade teachers, and on.
Also, would you post links to your studies? That would be very helpful. Thank you.
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Dr. Hunt: A few questions about your studies and findings.
1. What approximate size of difference in achievement in the 3rd grade are we talking about? 10% of SD? 2% of SD? At what sig. level?
2. How did you account for the fact that not all 5-year olds born between October and December were actually enrolled in Kindergarten, and that some fraction — the late bloomers, presumably — were delayed in their enrollment by a year?
Thanks.
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Dr. Hunt - that is surprising and interesting. What do you suspect as the mechanism? How could we compare different quarter groups for birthdays with school entry dates?
My daughter is in this age group and it would not have made any sense for her to delay kindergarten an extra year.
If some people feel their kids benefit from delaying a year, that’s not a problem for me, either. And I have no issue with sending kids through kindergarten a second year if that’s what the parents and teachers feel is best… regardless of the child’s birthday.
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I have read the law a few times and there is something confusing me. Basically the intent is two-fold:
- move up the dates for Kinder entry a month per year
- provide TK for the kids that fall off the cliff of those moving up dates
But the law does something else as well, it changes the (or imposes an?) age requirement for entering 1st grade as well. The dates are the same as for Kinder, but the age mark is 6 instead of 5. To me this has two consequences:
It means two years of TK/K for anyone in that deadline window. (that child will now count for 14 years instead of 13 years in ADA–assuming the parents choose TK).
There will be a group of kids who have a birthday in year X that qualifies them for Kinder entry, but which would disqualify them for 1st grade entry in year X+1. For example, a child who turns 5 on December 2nd 2011, could be in allowed in Kindergarten this year (not TK). But next year the cutoff date for 1st grade will be November 1st, which they will miss, and thus they’d need to take Kinder again. So in reality, the Kinder cutoff date is misleading.
Did the legislators get their math wrong or make a typo in the law? Or was the intent to force those kids to have two years of Kinder (and no TK). 2 years total (ie one each of TK and K seems to make a lot more sense pedagogically, than two years of strictly K based on nothing but age), but maybe thats just me.
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Oh, good catch navigio.
One thing I think is really important is to preserve flexibility where all players agree that the non-standard path is in the best interest of the child. If after the TK year the child is obviously ready for first grade, it should be straightforward to place her there. If a child is clearly not mature enough for K, it should be straightforward to place her in TK or to delay entry a year regardless of her birthday. And if a child isn’t ready for first grade at the end of a K year, it should be easy to get her another. If you want procedures for the examples where there’s a conflict between the school and parent opinion differ, fine, but don’t make it onerous when there’s agreement.
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