California bill would keep children under 5 out of school

SAN FRANCISCO - Last fall, 24 kindergarten students walked into teacher Keiko Nobusada's classroom at Oakland, Calif.'s Thornhill Elementary School, their ages ranging from 4 to 6 -- with a 19-month gap separating the oldest and youngest.

Some knew their letters and numbers. Others struggled to hold a pencil or cut with scissors.

"The developmental levels between a 4-year-old and a 6-year-old are so great," Nobusada said. "It's very difficult for that child who turns 5 in November to compete with a child born a year earlier."

And that's the crux of a bill in Sacramento that, if approved, would ensure virtually no one begins school before age 5. It would require that a child whose fifth birthday is on or after Sept. 1 wait a year to enter kindergarten.

"Do you really want kids to start school before they're ready?" asked the bill's author, state Sen. Joe Simitian, D-Palo Alto. "The answer to that question is obviously no."

Currently, in California, any child who turns 5 before Dec. 1 can enter kindergarten. So when school begins in September, there will be plenty of 4-year-olds in kindergarten classrooms all over the state expected to keep up with 5- and 6-year-olds in the same classrooms.

In decades past, the age difference didn't matter much. Kindergarten was three hours per day, filled with singing, socializing, coloring and pre-literacy skills such as counting to 10 or recognizing some letters.

Not so anymore, as the state has required more complex academics for public education's earliest learners.

Kindergarten students, under the most recent state standards, are now required to be able to "use letters and phonetically spelled words to write about experiences, stories, people, objects or events."

While some 4-year-olds are up to the task, others struggle developmentally, Nobusada said.

"They're already behind that first day of school," she said. "What does that do to a child's self-esteem?"

Almost every other state in the country requires a September birthday cutoff. Simitian's bill would put California in line with those states eventually. It would phase in over three years, moving the eligibility date up a month each fall starting in 2012, until it becomes Sept. 1.

Many parents already voluntarily keep their children with summer or fall birthdays out of kindergarten for a year. It's more often a choice made by families with the financial resources to cover child care or preschool for the extra year.

On the other hand, low-income families -- those whose children are more likely to struggle in school and on standardized tests -- often can't afford the extra year of child care and aren't allowed to stay in public preschool programs.

The federal Head Start program, for example, pushes students into kindergarten when they are old enough, whether they are academically or developmentally ready to go.

Still, for more than a decade, politicians on both sides of the aisle in Sacramento have agreed that keeping 4-year-olds out of kindergarten would be a good idea, but they haven't agreed on how to make it happen.

By moving up the eligibility date to Sept. 1, estimates show the state probably would save about $700 million annually for 13 years, about $7,000 for each of the 100,000 students who have to wait to start school.

Educators argue that the wait would increase the odds that children are ready for the increasing academic rigor of kindergarten.

Moving the date up to Sept. 1 would also push California's standardized test scores up, according to a Rand Corp. study and Public Policy Institute of California research.

Yet year after year, the effort has failed.

"Everybody knows it's the right policy," said state Sen. George Runner, R-Lancaster (Los Angeles County), who tried and failed twice to move the kindergarten eligibility date. "We just can't get ourselves out of our way."

The California Teachers Association opposes the bill even though the union likes the idea of moving up the cutoff date. Teachers have concerns about how the savings would be spent.

As currently written, the bill would require half the money saved by the state to be spent on preschool programs to serve disadvantaged children. Simitian would use the other half to help cover state budget shortfalls.

Some teachers said they want to see the money saved put into funding K-12 programs to make up for income lost to schools based on the lower enrollment.

The measure, Senate Bill 1381, has been approved by the state Senate and is headed to the Assembly, where similar bills have been killed by the Appropriations Committee.

E-mail Jill Tucker at jtucker(at)sfchronicle.com.

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)

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