| Does a longer day in kindergarten equal better results for students? BY MIKE UNGER
Photo by Jeff Watts |
Were you an AM or PM kindergartner? As school districts across the country trend toward all-day kindergarten, it’s a question that’s quickly becoming moot to the latest generation of children beginning their educational journeys. The thought process behind the switch is that students who spend twice as much time in a classroom during their initial year of formal education will get a leg up. The move to all-day kindergarten is seen in many circles as a way to boost low-performing students in critical disciplines such as math and reading. But are these assumptions based on facts or just hopes? School of Public Affairs professor Alison Jacknowitz set out to answer that question, and when her study, which she completed with two colleagues from the University of Southern California, was published earlier this year its findings sent ripples through the education policy community. “We wanted to see what the effects of full-day kindergarten were on academic achievement, social behavior, and maternal employment,” Jacknowitz says. “The other piece of that was we wanted to look at it over time. We saw that yes, there were academic improvements at the end of kindergarten, but by third grade the improvements were gone. So whether you went to full-day or half-day kindergarten didn’t really matter in your academic achievement in third grade.” This conclusion has been hard for many people in some educational circles to swallow. Full-day kindergarten is being implemented as a result of new school accountability standards, such as No Child Left Behind, Jacknowitz said. According to the U.S. Census, 60 percent of kindergartners were in full-day classes in 2000, as compared to 13 percent in 1970. “I think kindergarten was seen as getting kids primed for going to first grade,” Jacknowitz says. “You practice being away from your mom. You practice socialization and playing with other kids. I don’t think kindergarten was ever seen as very much of an academic thing. When welfare reform was passed in 1996, that forced mothers into the workforce, so between that and more school accountability with this emphasis on more testing, kindergarten is now being seen as an academic year.” Jacknowitz first became intrigued by the topic while working on her PhD at RAND Graduate School in Los Angeles, a city that has embraced the full-day kindergarten concept. Jacknowitz, a native Long Islander, has been interested in issues relating to families, children, and maternal work policies since her undergraduate days at Colgate University. When USC doctoral candidate Jill Cannon suggested they research the kindergarten question further, Jacknowitz leapt at the opportunity. The two, along with USC School of Policy, Planning, and Development professor Gary Painter studied a nationally representative sample of 8,540 children compiled by the National Center for Education Statistics. “We thought that low-income children were going to get an extra benefit,” Jacknowitz says. “We thought there was going to be a long-term benefit. We didn’t expect the advantage of full-day kindergarten to evaporate so quickly, like it did. “There was no extra benefit for low-income kids. You would expect that low-income kids would benefit from this full-day kindergarten a lot more than high-income kids, just because they have less enriching activities to choose from. We didn’t find that. A lot of schools are offering full-day kindergarten as a way to benefit low-income disadvantaged families, and now we have this study that’s saying there’s no extra benefit. If you want to help lower-income families then you should be spending the money elsewhere. Full-day kindergarten is pretty expensive. It’s costing money for extra teachers, extra space, potentially more busing. The money could be used elsewhere on reducing class size, or for teachers aides.” The study certainly has brought national attention to Jacknowitz, who joined AU in 2004 and teaches in SPA’s master’s of public policy program. She’s now working on papers examining the federal Women, Infants, and Children program, hoping to uncover why it consistently is underutilized. Jacknowitz has no children, but if she did, which kindergarten model would she send them to? “There’s no harm in going full-day,” she says. “If full-day was available I’d probably choose it. But if full-day wasn’t available, I don’t think I’d campaign for it. If you’re expecting kids to get an edge [from all-day kindergarten] for second grade, third grade, fourth grade, they’re not getting that leg up.” |
