All incoming Chicago Public Schools students will have access to full-day kindergarten for the first time beginning in the 2013-14 school year, the Associated Press reports.
Hoping $15 million in additional funding will allow students to be even with their peers academically when they enter first grade, Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Chicago Public Schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett announced the expansion on Feb. 25. The money will come from budget cuts at the district’s central office.
About 30,700 students enter kindergarten each year in Chicago, and Chicago already provides full-day kindergarten for about 26,500 students.
Although Mr Emanuel focused mainly on the academic benefits of full-day kindergarten when he and Ms Byrd-Bennett announced the program, I actually see the benefits in three broad categories:
- Academic readiness for first grade
- Fewer shifts during the day
- Entering first grade comfortable with longer days
Academic readiness for 1st grade
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that kids who spent a full day in kindergarten classes finish that formative school year academically ahead of kids who spent only half a day in class. Therefore, assuming all other factors are equal (though they’re not), the full-day kindergartners will enter their first-grade classrooms academically ahead of the half-day kindergartners. Almost every study (e.g., here) that compared math or literacy at the end of kindergarten has shown this type of result.
We might also assume that the new Common Core curriculum will put the half-day kindergartners slightly below grade level, on average, when they finish kindergarten, as Mr Emanuel theorized. If traditional kindergartners’ peers are enrolled in full-day programs, then a good way to make them “even with their peers” is to provide them with full-day programs as well.
It’s hard to study, let alone understand, the long-term effects of the full-day programs, though: schools and state departments of education don’t normally segregate data by whether a student was enrolled in half-day or full-day kindergarten programs at schools where both are options. Data systems that will allow this type of study are now being built, but at the moment, this is all just theory.
I found one study by Charles Milligan at Middle Tennessee State University that used California data to track students through third grade. His study investigated full-day kindergarten as a means of improving later academic achievement. By third-grade, he found “no significant differences” in students who attended the full-day kindergarten program and students who attended a traditional (half-day) kindergarten program.
Academic advantage eventually fades
The effect here is that first graders who attended full-day kindergarten are ahead of those who attended half-day kindergarten. By the time those students are in third grade, or at least at some point in their future, there’s no difference in terms of academics between the full-day and the half-day kindergartners.
Generally, we need to look at both teacher causes and student causes for this effect. After kindergarten, all kids get put into the same classrooms, and teachers tend to teach to the middle. Advanced students get bored, and stragglers get confused. This might cause advanced students to slow down in class, behavior that is reinforced by making them more similar academically to their peers, aka. friends. They might also pursue academic challenges outside the classroom, as in my second-grade nephew who requested a third-grade math textbook for Christmas (I complied, of course). The stragglers might seek additional help, especially if their families are involved in their education, but they also might give up.
These are the dangers of having too many kids in different places academically in the same classroom, a danger Mr Emanuel and Ms Byrd-Bennett are trying to avoid.
It’s also why my hypothetical graph tends to converge on grade-level performance. Nobody really knows what grade level this convergence occurs at—it could be second grade or college, for all we know, because our studies are limited—but academic performance eventually equalizes between full-day kindergartners and their peers who attended traditional programs in kindergarten.
So why give students just a temporary advantage?
Now, even though performance differences tend to fade, there is some advantage to having kindergartners exposed to the types of problems they’ll solve in first grade and to the types of systems and real-world happenings they’ll explore: it makes it just a little easier on the first-grade teacher who doesn’t have to start with counting to teach addition.
For example, the student in first grade, under the Common Core, will be required to “recognize the distinguishing features of a sentence.” A first-grade teacher can go right to that skill only if the kindergarten teacher had enough time to teach them to “understand that words are separated by spaces in print.” If they don’t know what “word” means when they get to first grade, their first-grade teacher has to spend time filling in the gaps left by a kindergarten program that didn’t prepare them before she can explore the concept of “sentences” with them.
That may be doable, but if that first-grade teacher has to cover several kindergarten skills before moving on, she may not have enough time to prepare her students for second grade. Then, in second grade, the same thing happens. Get the idea?
A full-day kindergarten pilot in District U-46
We’ll cover the remaining two benefits of full-day kindergarten in another article about a pilot program of full-day kindergarten in Elgin, Ill.-based School District U-46. The link to that article will be here when available.
