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Tommy, 5, and Matty, 3, learn about volcanoes with parents Alka Tripathy-Lang and Tom Lang in
Chandler, Ariz. Credit...Ash Ponders for The New York Times
The New York Times
Should 5-Year-Olds Start School This Year?
Faced with remote learning or socially distanced classroom options,
some parents of rising kindergartners are considering holding their
kids back.
By Emily Sohn
July 29, 2020
Alka Tripathy-Lang’s 5-year-old son is supposed to start kindergarten
this fall, but her district in suburban Phoenix has already delayed its
start and announced that classes, when they do start, will be online
for at least the first couple of weeks.
What those lessons will look like is unclear, as are details about how
much parental involvement will be required, and how or when the school
is going to implement the dual immersion Mandarin program her son is
supposed to begin. Tripathy-Lang’s current plan is to start him in an
online-only option, but if it’s not working, she’ll pull him out to be
home with her 3-year-old, who she and her husband have already decided
not to send to preschool this year.
“I have this low-level anxiety about everything in the background all
the time, and a substantial chunk of it is about how I am going to make
sure that my kids are getting the experiences they need at this age,”
said Tripathy-Lang, a geologist and science writer.
Across the U.S., families are filled with uncertainty about what school
will look like in the fall, and those feelings are particularly acute
for parents of rising kindergartners. At a moment of transition that
can set the stage for the next dozen years, parents who have options
are struggling to decide whether it’s worth beginning school if their
children might have to wear masks, skip recess or experience
kindergarten on a screen.
It’s yet another pandemic-related conundrum that lacks obvious
solutions, said Diane Schanzenbach, Ph.D., an economist at Northwestern
University and director of the university’s Institute for Policy
Research. Although the current situation is uncharted territory, she
and other experts said that prior research on kindergartners can help
guide parents in their decision-making.
Now more than ever, they said, the right choice is going to vary based
on an individual child’s needs, each family’s circumstances and local
variations with the coronavirus.
The redshirt option
Kindergarten is a time when children often get their first taste of
real independence as they develop skills such as conflict resolution,
group interaction, focus and self-control, said Stephanie Jones, Ph.D.,
a developmental psychologist at the Harvard Graduate School of
Education.
Major advances happen for most kids in the first few months of
kindergarten, said Johanna Garcia Normart, who taught kindergarten for
12 years in Hayward, Calif., and now teaches transitional kindergarten,
a form of pre-K. Between September and January, she said, most
kindergartners learn to operate as functional members of a community.
“The primary importance of kindergarten is being able to love to learn,” she added.
But decisions about when to start children in kindergarten can be
complicated, even in the best of times. In states where parents have
the option to wait, about six percent choose to delay starting their
kindergartner every year, especially for kids who will be the youngest
in their class.
Parents tend to hold boys back more than girls, perhaps based on the
perception that boys are less mature than girls at that age. And
parents with higher levels of education are most likely to hold their
kids back, Schanzenbach and a colleague found in an analysis of the
Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2010–11, a
project run by the U.S. Department of Education. Among boys with summer
birthdays in places with a fall cutoff date, those whose parents had
college degrees were held back 20 percent of the time, compared with
five percent of boys whose parents had high-school degrees.
Waiting can have benefits, particularly for children who have trouble
self-regulating, said Thomas Dee, Ph.D., an economist who studies
education policy at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education.
Some research, including a study he conducted with Hans Henrik
Sievertsen at the University of Bristol, suggests that holding off on
formal schooling can give those children time to get better at
controlling their behavior, handling emotions and pursuing long-term
goals — as long as they spend the year in an intellectually engaging,
developmentally appropriate, play-based environment, such as a
high-quality preschool.
In one analysis of data on more than 407,000 children around the U.S.,
researchers from multiple institutions, including Harvard, reported in
2018 that the kindergartners whose birthdays fall just before the
school cutoff date are 34 percent more likely to get an A.D.H.D.
diagnosis than are their oldest classmates.
But redshirting isn’t necessarily the best choice for every kid, even
when it seems like the right thing to do in the months leading up to
kindergarten, Schanzenbach said. Because growth is not linear, a child
who seems behind in June could be on top of things in October and bored
of preschool, she said. And kids often step up and accelerate their
learning when exposed to older peers.
“Downsides for everybody, but especially kindergartners”
Of course, the research on kindergarten redshirting was done before the
pandemic, which has added a new set of pros and cons to consider.
As a growing number of schools announce plans for the fall that include
online-only or a combination of online and in-person, the value of
screen-based schooling for kindergartners is one open question. Studies
of older students show that online learning is generally inferior to
classroom learning. And anecdotal reports from earlier this year
suggest that the experience is even worse for young kids and for
children with special needs.
Rebecca Polivy’s younger child was supposed to start kindergarten this
fall in Pasadena, Calif. He didn’t tolerate Zoom calls with his
preschool class in the spring, and there’s no way he would have the
patience to sit in front of a screen and talk to a teacher and
classmates he’s never met, said Polivy, the director of an education
nonprofit and part-time fitness professional. She’s decided he’s better
off staying at the preschool they love for another year.
Educators are also wary of online school for little kids. Michelle
Tween taught pre-K and kindergarten for 23 years at the Chapel School,
a private school in Bronxville, New York. While teaching the first few
cohorts of children born to digital natives, she noticed that the kids
had more trouble resolving conflicts, waiting for answers to their
questions at school and communicating their needs for help. In the
classroom, she watched fine motor skills get neglected when children
used index fingers to swipe on iPads instead of using their entire
hands to manipulate Play-Doh, scissors or small objects. Referrals to
occupational therapy went up, and kids became more fatigued while
writing with crayons and pencils.
What is school going to look like in September?
It is unlikely that many schools will return to a normal schedule this
fall, requiring the grind of online learning, makeshift child care and
stunted workdays to continue. California’s two largest public school
districts — Los Angeles and San Diego — said on July 13, that
instruction will be remote-only in the fall, citing concerns that
surging coronavirus infections in their areas pose too dire a risk for
students and teachers. Together, the two districts enroll some 825,000
students. They are the largest in the country so far to abandon plans
for even a partial physical return to classrooms when they reopen in
August. For other districts, the solution won’t be an all-or-nothing
approach.
Many systems, including the nation’s largest, New York City, are
devising hybrid plans that involve spending some days in classrooms and
other days online. There’s no national policy on this yet, so check
with your municipal school system regularly to see what is happening in
your community.
Those concerns were amplified when schools shut down in March. “What
you saw online was, for many students, scenarios of crying, tantruming,
not wanting to go on Zoom, not wanting to see their friends because
that wasn’t the way they played with their friends,” said Tween, now
director of early childhood education at the Chapel School.
The current situation offers challenges no matter what happens, Tween
said. If school buildings open, she worries about how well
kindergartners will be able to stay physically distanced and wear masks
all day. She also has concerns about how the lack of cooperative play
will affect their learning.
But if the school year starts online, she questions how teachers will
build trust and rapport with students and how they will manage to
recreate the real-time fun typical of kindergarten classrooms.
For parents who are deciding whether to delay kindergarten, it can help
to consider what their kids will do instead, Dee said. Among those kids
who are still working on self-regulation skills, waiting a year is most
beneficial when the alternative is stimulating and engaging — either in
a preschool setting or at home. But that might not be possible for many
families. And for kids with special needs, opting out of school may
deny access to services offered by the school system.
Educators are also concerned about the equity implications of large
numbers of people opting out of school systems. Because schools get
funding for each student enrolled, low attendance will undermine public
schools at a time when they need more funding than ever, Garcia Normart
said. And because students aren’t already connected to a particular
school, parents may be more likely to keep their kindergartners home as
opposed to, say, their second-graders. At Eden Gardens school, the
public school in Hayward where Garcia Normart works, this year
kindergarten enrollment is currently half of what it normally is, she
said.
Based on the demographic differences that already exist, disparities
may grow even wider if redshirting surges primarily among families who
have the resources to keep kids home or pay for nannies or private
schools. “People who have the economic wherewithal to be with their
kids and the resources to create safe and developmentally richer
environments are going to be hugely advantaged to the parents who
aren’t able to do that for their kids or who may have to go back into
the labor force in some capacity,” Dee said.
Even if parents do have a choice, Garcia Norman hopes that people will
enroll their kindergartners to support school systems. Making the best
of a bad situation can help children become resilient problem solvers
during a challenging time when no one can control or predict what will
happen next.
“Failure and success define our lives,” she said. Garcia Norman thinks
of what her mother told her before she died when Garcia Norman was 16:
Life is like a rubber ball and you have to bounce back. “That’s what I
try to teach my kids and my students, as well.”
It might also help to recognize that there are no perfect choices right
now, said Schanzenbach, who said there were a lot of tears in her house
during distance learning with her 8-year old, who had a much tougher
time working independently than her 11- and 13-year-olds did.
“Kindergarten via Zoom is going to make a lot of people cry and
probably not teach them that much,” she said. But if the alternative is
having a 5-year-old home with two full-time working parents and no
school? “I’m not sure which one is worse. They’re both pretty rough,
right?”
Given that there’s no right decision, there may also not be a wrong one, she said.
Kids tend to be resilient, Jones added. She suggested that parents with
kindergarten-age children make sure to discuss feelings with them as a
way to help them develop the skills that will set them up for success
when they get to resume in-person school. Playing school can be another
fun way to practice routines and learning habits until school buildings
can operate normally again. “Children can learn these skills all the
time,” she said. “The window doesn’t shut.”
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