Each state is currently allowed to set their own mandatory school attendance age. Though, in recent years, there has been a national push for a uniform age requirement, at age seven. This proposal is detrimental to students. They need to take advantage of their free education in order to be prepared for success after high school.
This new proposal would allow students to opt out of kindergarten which is a crucial educational building block for students. Students learn how to follow schedules, basic reading, writing letters, counting up to 20, and how to interact with other students. Allowing students to skip kindergarten results in them being unprepared for the next grade. Those students who come in unprepared take away from all of the students that attended kindergarten. This proposal will decrease the overall performance of students in schools.
This new proposal would allow students to lose a year of free education, and pay the price for it in college. According to the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education at least 60 percent of incoming college freshman are taking remedial classes. These classes are equivalent to high school courses that students pay to take that do not result in any college credit. Allowing students to miss a year of school will cause the number of students in remedial courses to increase. This increases their college debt and costs the government extra in terms of financial aid.
Finally this proposal would be detrimental to students who decide to attend school on time. Annually school districts predict the number of incoming students based on number of local children born and enrollment the year before. They then hire teachers months before enrollment based on this prediction. If more students enroll it is often too late to hire another teacher, so students are overcrowded in classes. Allowing parents to choose whether or not school is appropriate leads to a insufficient number of staff which decreases the ability for learning within the classroom.
National supporters claim that starting school later gives students advantages on exams because they are older. This is unsupported. If you take two students of the same grade level and one is a year older, the test scores do not favor the older student. If anything the younger student has an advantage because they started school at a younger age which leads to better development. Supporters claim they want to help students, but swaying parents into believing less education will benefit students does the opposite.
If we want students to perform well in school allowing students to opt out of education is not the way to go. Not every student is ready to start school at five, but most are. Instead the focus should be on encouraging parents to start their kids in kindergarten on time, and providing support to children who aren’t ready yet. This could be accomplished by providing resources to parents that explain the benefits of kindergarten, and helping parents realize which kids just aren’t ready. Instead of holding these kids back there should be local programs to help prepare these students to start school the following year.
Nationally we do not need another excuse to leave students out of school for an additional year. Instead the focus should be on showing parents the benefits of kindergarten to help their students be successful in school and beyond.
Caitlynn Bryant
Berwick
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