Analysis Finds Risk Factors Cause Kindergarten Students To Fall Behind

 

The Huffington Post (7/16, Klein) reports that an analysis from the nonprofit Sesame Workshop found four identifiable risk factors, including poverty, affected how well kindergarten students did, with “perhaps unsurprisingly, the more risk factors a child had, the worse he or she did in math and reading school readiness assessments.” Moreover, children with all four risk factors “were almost a year behind” and “would need to make almost twice as much progress” to catch up. The analysis used data from the Department of Education-funded Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2010-11 that followed 18,000 US students from kindergarten through fifth grade.

New Study Looks At Effect Of Decorated Walls On Kindergarten Education

 

The New York Times (6/10, Hoffman) reports a new study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University has shown that kindergartners in highly decorated classrooms were more distracted, had gazes that wandered off task more, and had lower test scores than kindergartners taught in a more austere classroom environment. The researchers emphasized that educators should establish standards when decorating classrooms, but not to totally eliminate any decorations.

Bill Would Make Kindergarten Mandatory In California

 

The Pleasanton (CA) Weekly (6/7, Aguilar) reports the California State Assembly approved a bill that would require children to attend kindergarten before they enter first grade, although the bill doesn’t require children to attend kindergarten when they’re five. Assemblywoman Joan Buchanan (D), a sponsor, said the bill was inspired in part by “the new Common Core State Standards,” which “have academic expectations for kindergarten students.” Assemblywoman Shirley Weber (D), another sponsor, said the state is designing much of its educational policy “around the assumption that California’s children will attend kindergarten.”

Analysis: Extending California Transitional Kindergarten Would Cost $1.46 Billion

EdSource Today (3/13, Mongeau) reports that a new analysis from the California Department of Education finds that a bill in the California state Senate “to expand transitional kindergarten to all 4-year-olds would be more expensive than originally predicted” and would cost $1.46 billion “in addition to the $901 million already being spent on the current transitional kindergarten program.” The piece notes that the bill’s sponsor had said that the plan would cost $990 million.

California Considers Five-Year Plan For Expanding Pre-K

The San Mateo (CA) Daily Journal (1/14, Swartz) reports on California state Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg’s Kindergarten Readiness Act of 2014, which proposes spending $198 million annually towards offering pre-k for all four-year-olds. The program would take five years to reach all eligible children. The plan includes “a model of both a morning and afternoon session for two-teacher teams.”

Study: Kindergarten Redshirting Rare

The Washington Post (9/17, Chandler) reports that according to a new study from the University of Virginia and Stanford University, kindergarten “redshirting” “is not as widespread as previously reported,” noting that some 4% of students are delayed by a year, whereas some past studies have placed that figure at from 5% to 19%. The Post adds that the study found that “most children who did delay kindergarten were not likely to struggle in school,” and that the current rate “is not large enough to exacerbate achievement gaps.”