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5l08 K'IProlecc8-Pres/ClRC/DateDue.indd

ARE WE THERE YET?: PARENTS’ PERCEPTIONS OF KINDERGARTEN
READINESS

By

V. Susan Bennett-Armistead

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial ﬁilfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of Teacher Education

2008

ABSTRACT

ARE WE THERE Y E T? .' PARENTS’ PERCEPTIONS OF KINDERGARTEN
READINESS

By

V. Susan Bennett-Armistcad

99

In a context where there is little agreement among experts about what qualiﬁes as “ready
for kindergarten, parents can ﬁnd it difﬁcult to determine their child’s readiness.
Additionally, some states are looking at kindergarten entry age as one factor that may
inﬂuence later test outcomes. This interview study, reported in two papers, of 26 Head
Start and Non-Head Start families whose children were kindergarten age-eligible found
that families consider multiple factors when deciding when to send children to
kindergarten. The ﬁrst paper in this report addresses the factors and their frequency of
use by families. Some considered academic, social skills, the child’s age and size. Factors
considered and with whom to consult for advice, differed for Head Start and non-Head
Start families, and for families of girls versus families of boys. Additionally, families
who had older siblings considered different factors than those who were ﬁrst-time parents
of kindergarten-age children. In the second paper, the families’ views of kindergarten are
explored. Families’ perceptions of kindergarten as academic, social or play-based varied
by groups as well with differences between Head Start and non Head Start families as
well as families with older siblings and those without. The most ﬁequent depictions of
more academic, less play based kindergartens, appeared in families with older siblings,
families of boys, families not enrolled in Head Start, and families whose children were

among the older half of the sample.

Copyright by
v. SUSAN BENNETT-ARMISTEAD
2008

DEDICATION

Through the completion of this work, I honor my late father, David L. Bennett. Every day

he came home from work and asked, “So, what do you know?” Here’s what I know, Dad.

iv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to express my deep gratitude to Dr. Nell K. Duke for her tireless
efforts in supporting my program and this project in particular. She has always modeled
the greatest patience, integrity and passion for her work. Through her generous spirit I
have had the pleasure to work with her as a peer on several publications and have gained
the skills to successfully strike out on my own. As I develop my own academic career, I
am grateful every day that I ignored her advice and hitched my career very closely to hers
through the Early Literacy Project. I couldn’t have learned more from anyone else. Thank
you, Nell.

Additionally, I’d like to honor Dr. Pat Edwards for her buoyant good nature and
wonderful advice throughout my studies at MSU. She offered me a vision of teaching
that I have embraced and added to my repertoire. My students are better for it.

Dr. David Plank graciously joined my committee at the eleventh hour and offered
very thoughtful and useful recommendations that enriched the texture and depth of this
work. Unfortunately, Dr. Plank leﬁ MSU before I submitted ﬁnal revisions to this work. I
am grateful to Dr. Cheryl Rosaen for stepping in to read at this stage and for providing
valuable feedback. It is clear to me why Dr. Rosaen is so well respected.

Dr. Anne Soderman, whom I have deeply respected for more than 20 years, has
pushed me to be more, think harder, and be more relevant than I thought possible. Her
advice on this work has enriched the project and has helped me think in new directions.
Further, the model she has offered as an academic is one I hope to emulate. Most of all,

she is a wonderful person and I am honored that she is my friend.

My husband, David Armistead, has worked at least as hard as I have to complete
this degree. His area of expertise has been in kid wrangling, dinner preparation and
listening endlessly to yet another version of the analysis. His gentle encouragement and

not so gentle nudging helped me ﬁnally complete this project. Thank you, Dave.

PREFACE

The ﬁlm Forrest Gump closes with adult Forrest putting Little Forrest on a school
bus. In that moment, Forrest is confronted with the weight of thirteen years of
maltreatment by the school system that developed him. He likely remembers the
tauntings of schoolmates, the unkind remarks of teachers and administrators, and his
struggles to understand the concepts taught. School was not a positive experience for
Forrest. He looks at Little Forrest with love in his eyes, knowing that he has promised
Little Forrest’s mother, Jenny, to take care of him. Forrest makes the decision to put
Little Forrest on the bus, thereby entrusting the person he loves most in all the world to a
system with a proven record of unkindness. Forrest has to believe it will be better for
Little Forrest than it was for himself.

Kindergarten children all over the country wait for busses each fall to start the
adventure of public school. Attached to every kindergartener is a parent who believes that
sending their child to school was the right thing to do. National surveys indicate however
that some children will wait a year longer for that bus than others. In fact, the National
Center for Education Statistics indicates that a signiﬁcant number of children, about 9%,
who are eligible to start school, do not (West, Meek & Hurst, 2000).

Some children, rather than starting kindergarten in the year they are age eligible,
are withheld from kindergarten by their parents, possibly concerned that they are not yet
ready to start. While research exists about the trends in who is withheld, and a growing

number of studies investigate the effects of delayed entry on individual children, until

vii

now, there has been no research that explores the thinking of parents who have made the
kindergarten entry decision. Suggestions about why parents have chosen to delay their
child’s entry, and why the trends in delayed entry exist have been merely speculative.

The following two papers report on a study that was designed to examine parents’
thinking about kindergarten entry for their children. The study was conducted by
interviewing twenty-six families of kindergarten age eligible children in three
communities in Michigan. These families give us a great deal of insight into a decision
faced every year by families all across the United States.

The ﬁrst paper identiﬁes the factors considered by interviewed parents when
evaluating their children’s kindergarten readiness. Almost all families in the study
considered academic factors, but in most cases other factors, such as the child’s size or
gender, were considered as well. Sometimes, these other factors were more important
than academics. Families varied in both what they considered and how they weighed
what they considered against other factors. Examining the number of factors considered
and whether they discussed their decision with others, this paper explores the variation
across individual families’ decision making processes. One parent in the study didn’t
think a decision needed to be made, that her child was just ready. Others processed the
decision by considering a single component. Still others report having agonized over the
decision, evaluating information ﬁ'om as many sources as they could tap and having
many components in their decision-making process. For some, the decision was
emotional and elicited feelings about their own or other family members’ experience with
schooling. For others, it was a clear cut matching of their child’s capabilities to the

classroom they would attend. Some drew on a wide range of family, ﬁ'iends, and teachers

viii

to help them think about their child’s readiness. Others asserted that they talked to no one
about their thinking.

By learning about the factors parents consider and the ways that parents make the
school entry decision, one can better support them when they ask, “Is my child ready for
kindergarten?”

While the ﬁrst paper addresses the factors families consider, the second paper
looks at families’ views of kindergarten. Kindergartens have changed signiﬁcantly since
many parents of kindergarteners were in them themselves. Increased demand for
evidence of academic performance at earlier and earlier grades has necessitated a push
down of academic rigor that is reﬂected in many kindergarten classrooms. While parents
may be remembering rest time and graham crackers, their child may experience
something quite different. In short, the second paper addresses the question, “What do
parents think the child is getting ready getting ready for?” Families in this study
identiﬁed their children’s prospective kindergarten with varying descriptors, some
reﬂecting the trend toward a more academic notion of kindergarten, others describing a
play-based environment with little attention paid to academics. While one might expect
families in the same district to describe their local kindergartens in the same way given
that at any information they might have about the program would be similar, there was
actually more variation within district by groups than across districts. For example,
families who had previous children attending the school described the school setting
more similarly across districts than families whose ﬁrst child was entering kindergarten

compared.

ix

The question of readiness is important but it is also two sided. While a national
debate rages over where readiness should lie, in the child or in the school, the reality is
children are going to school. They bring with them characteristics and knowledge that
may or may not align with the expectations of the school they attend. Researchers can
better discuss the complexities of the kindergarten, and the decision to send or not to
send, by reﬂecting on established facts, from this study, that some families consider and
what views they hold of kindergarten. For example, knowing that many families feel that
knowledge of their child’s potential school is important, researchers might suggest the
enquiring family become familiar with the school their child might attend. This addresses
both sides of the question of readiness by identifying both what the prospective school is
like and what characteristics or knowledge the child may need to be successful in that
setting.Because some families will indicate that knowing the school is not enough, one
might advise them to talk with the principal about individual teachers and the kind of
classrooms they run.

Understanding the factors parents consider and decision-making processes they
employ can also help us consider how best to inﬂuence those processes. For families that
may rely heavily on the characteristics of their child, for example, it is crucial to provide
carefully considered, accurate information about children’s abilities in the preschool
years. For families that have not considered how kindergarten has changed in the last
twenty ﬁve (or even ﬁve) years, researchers might offer information about the demands
of kindergarten and the expectations for an incoming kindergartener. Both papers offer

suggestions for working with families based on the ﬁndings.

Finally, as schools consider the long term implications of having classes with a
chronological age range as wide as two years, as certain demographic groups and districts
experience redshirting more frequently than others, as some groups hold differing views
of what goes on in kindergarten, this study helps us think about how education
researchers might inﬂuence patterns of family decision making in directions believed to
be in the children’s, schools’ or districts’ best interests.

In the long run, families will continue to trust us to do right by their children. In
part, education specialists may have to earn that trust by helping families think about

when the relationship should begin. The following study can assist in that endeavor.

xi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PAPER 1: ARE WE THERE YET?: FACTORS INFLUENCING PARENTS’
PERCEPTIONS OF CHILDRENS’ READINESS FOR KINDERGARTEN

Chapter 1 .................................................................................... 1
Literature Review ........................................................................... 3
Rationale for Current Study ............................................................... 9
Research Questions ...................................................................... 12
Method .................................................................................... 12
Participants ...................................................................... 14

Design ............................................................................ 15
Findings ......................................................................... 22
Discussion ................................................................................ 49
Summary ........................................................................ 49
Limitations of Current Study ................................................ 53
Recommendations Based on Current Study ............................... 55
Direction for Further Research ............................................... 59
Conclusion .............................................................................. 61
Appendices .............................................................................. 63
Appendix A .................................................................... 63
References ............................................................................... 78

PAPER 2: WHAT LIES AHEAD?: PARENTS’ PERCEPTIONS OF KINDERGARTEN

Chapter 1 .................................................................................. 83
Literature Review ........................................................................ 84
Rationale for Current Study ............................................................ 88
Research Questions ..................................................................... 91
Method .................................................................................... 92
Participants ..................................................................... 93

Design ............................................................................ 94
Findings ......................................................................... 99
Discussion .............................................................................. l 13
Summary ...................................................................... 1 13
Limitations of Current Study ............................................... 115
Recommendations Based on Current Study .............................. 115
Direction for Further Research ............................................. 116
Conclusion .............................................................................. 1 l7
Appendices ............................................................................. 1 17
Appendix A .................................................................. 119
References .............................................................................. 133

xii

List of Tables

Table 1.1
Family Demographic Information ................................................ 67

Table 1.2
Demographics of Children in Sample ............................................. 68

Table 1.3
Speciﬁc Factors Considered: Academic and Socio-emotional ................ 69

Table 1.4
Summary of Findings by Gender ................................................. 71

Table 1.5
Summary of Findings by Head Start and Non-Head Start ..................... 72

Table 2.1
Demographic Information of Sample ........................................... 123

Table 2.2
Demographics of Children in Sample ........................................... 124

Table 2.3
Skills Parents Reported as Necessary for Kindergarten Readiness... .. .....125

Table 2.4
Frequency of Descriptions of Kindergarten .................................... 127

xiii

List of Figures

Figure 1.]
Factors considered by families ............................................................ 74

Figure 1.2
Inﬂuence of older children in the family on consideration of
academic and socio-emotional factors ................................................... 75

Figure 1.3
The role of social contacts in Head Start and non Head Start families .............. 76

Figure 1.4
Factors considered by parents of boys and parents of girls ........................... 77

Figure 2.1
Descriptors of kindergarten by school district ........................................ 123

Figure 2.2
Descriptors of kindergarten by parents of children with
older siblings or no older siblings ....................................................... 124

Figure 2.3
Descriptors of kindergarten by family structure ....................................... 125

Figure 2.4

Descriptors of kindergarten among Head Start and
non Head Start families .................................................................... 127

xiv

CHAPTER 1

ARE WE THERE YET?: FACTORS INFLUENCING PARENTS’ PERCEPTIONS OF
CHILDREN’S READINESS FOR KINDERGARTEN

By

V. Susan Bennett-Armistead

Families are called upon to make the decision about when to send their children to
kindergarten with very little institutional guidance. In a context where there is little
agreement among experts about what qualiﬁes as “ready” for kindergarten, this can be a
confusing decision to make. Yet, this decision to start a child’s school career is perceived
by some parents to be a crucial one. Additionally, in light of the increased pressure to
perform in later years, some states are looking at kindergarten entry age as one factor that
may inﬂuence later test outcomes. This interview study of twenty-six Head Start and
Non-Head Start families whose children were kindergarten age-eligible found that
families consider multiple factors when deciding when to send children to kindergarten.
Academic skills, while considered by many families, are not considered by all families
and not the only concern for families. Some consider social skills, the age and size of a
child entering the program and future factors such as the age or size a child will be in
high school. The decision is also given different levels of consideration by different
families. Some spend considerable time on the decision, considering many factors,
consulting with others, and so on, while others do not view it as a decision at all,
automatically sending their child as soon as the child is age eligible. Factors considered,
as well as with whom to consult for advice, differed for Head Start and non-Head Start

families as well as for families of girls versus families of boys. Additionally, families

already familiar with the school process by having older children in the family considered

different factors than those who were ﬁrst-time parents of kindergarten-age children.

Are We There Yet?: Factors Inﬂuencing Parents’

Perceptions of Children’s Readiness for Kindergarten

Each year, parents shuttle children off to kindergarten to start their formal school
career. In all 50 states, there are laws advising parents and schools that by a certain date,
children are eligible to begin school (Saluja, Scott-Little, & Clifford, 2000). The advent
of the No Child Left Behind law (2001) has resulted in many state policy makers
reviewing kindergarten entry age as a possible factor in improving student outcomes on
state tests. However, concern among policy makers that kindergarten entry ages may be
too low considerably predates NCLB. In fact, between 1975 and 2000, 22 states raised
their entry age to some point earlier in the year. None made it later. Advocates of raising
the entry age point to research that suggests that older children perform better on both
standardized tests and other measures than their younger peers (Stipek, 2000; Spitzer,
Cupp & Park, 1995; Stipek & Byler, 2001; Warder, 1999.) This issue has been taken up
by not only in statehouses across the country but by groups including RAND, the
National Association for the Education of Young Children and in the popular press (see
Datar, 2003; NAEYC, 2001; and CBS News, 2003, respectively). While the debate rages,
parents are quietly making decisions about when to send their children to school.

In Michigan, where this study was conducted, children may begin kindergarten if
they turn ﬁve on or before December 1 of the entry year. While children may not start
before this date, there is no law that children must start during this time period. In fact, in

Michigan, children are not legally required to be present in school until the year they turn

six by December 1. As a result, some children start at their earliest opportunity while
others are “held out” of school for another year before beginning kindergarten. Statistics
regarding the number of children who are held out in Michigan are not available but the
National Center for Education Statistics (2000) reports that nationally approximately 9%
of children age eligible to begin kindergarten do not.

This creates kindergarten classrooms that may have children with a wide range of
ages — in Michigan ranging in chronological age from four years 9 months to over six, as
well as variation from district to district in the age range and mean age of children in
kindergarten classrooms. As discussed in the following sections, this spread and variation
may have a number of consequences throughout schooling for both the individual student
and for the school, district, and state.

“Redshirting”

The practice of “giving children the gift of time” by holding them out of school
for one year past initial eligibility was actually proposed by Jones and Sutherland (1981)
as a simple, inexpensive, humane intervention to beneﬁt children who seemed less ready
for school. This was proposed as an alternative to retaining them in kindergarten, or a
later grade, which was perceived to be more harmful. The practice is referred to as
“redshirting”, a term borrowed ﬁ'om high school and college athletic programs that delay
the active participation of a player until he or she matures for a year, under the
assumption that time would result in better athletes. Jones and Sutherland suggested
using the practice for kindergarten entry for children who appear to have academic or
social delays, reasoning that they beneﬁt from an additional year to develop those

abilities outside the pressures of fomral schooling.

While some see redshirting as a valuable tool designed to assist children, others
disagree. The National Association for the Education of Young Children in a policy
statement argues that “The only legally and ethically defensible criterion for determining
school entry is whether the child has reached the chronological age of school entry
(NAEYC, 1990).” Further, the NAEYC stand rejects the notion that children must be
ready for school, rather, they argue, schools should be ready for children—however
prepared or ill-prepared they come. Indeed, there is concern among some researchers that
an increase in the incidence of redshirting, resulting in classrooms of older, seemingly
more capable children, might encourage schools to ratchet up kindergarten curricula to
look more like ﬁrst grade’s, thereby making the situation worse instead of better for
children who are less prepared for school and/or who do begin school when age eligible
(Diamond, Reagan, & Bandyk, 2000). Additionally, some have voiced concern that
children with developmental delays who are kept out of school for a year, hoping that
maturation will have an impact on the issue, lose a year of intervention that might assist
in the development of the child (Ferguson, 1991; Meisels, 1992). In addition, Datar
(2003) suggests that delaying children’s entry can result in additional child care costs for
the additional year that the child is not in kindergarten, either for the individual family or,
in the case of low income families receiving public assistance, for the state.

Both the individual and policy consequences of redshirting remain largely
speculative. Even the question of whether redshirting makes any long-term difference for
the individual child or en masse, for the district, is not yet clear in the literature, as
discussed in the following section.

Research on Redshirting

Who is Redshirted and Why?

As represented in Brent et al. (1996), the National Center for Education Statistics
(N CES) reports that redshirting has traditionally been more common in afﬂuent
communities and in private schools, although Brent et al. (1996) suggest the practice may
also be leaking into a broader range of communities and into public schools. Further,
NCES indicates that parents of boys are more likely to “give them a year to grow” than
parents of girls and that children born between June and December are more likely to be
delayed than children born in the early part of the year (as reported in West, Meek, &
Hurst, 2000). Additionally, white children are more than twice as likely as black children
to have entered later than age-eligible (West, Meek, & Hurst, 2000).

Although researchers have guessed at why children might be redshirted, in groups
or individually, the “why” remains unanswered in the current literature. The purpose of
the current study is to investigate parents’ drinking on this.

The Impact of Redshirting

The impact of redshirting has been studied even though its reasons largely have
not. Several studies have followed the experiences of children who were redshirted for
kindergarten entry. In the short term, the results seem to be beneﬁcial, with children
performing academically and socially on par with or above their un-redshirted peers
(West, Denton, & Germino-Hausken, 2000; Zill, Loomis & West, 1997). A study by
Spritzer et al. (1995), also found that redshirted children may have more conﬁdence and
popularity among their classmates. In contrast, children who were retained and required
to experience a second year of kindergarten did less well than their ﬁrst and second grade

peers. The beneﬁts seem to hold through the ﬁrst few years of schooling for some

children as they receive “less negative feedback ﬁ'om teachers about their academic
performance or conduct in class” and continue to perform on par with their peers (West,
Meek, & Hurst, 2000).

Both West and Spritzer speculate that even though successful, redshirted students
may have a sense of alienation resulting ﬁ'om being larger or older than their peers.
Additionally, there is evidence that some redshirted ﬁrst through third graders required
more support from special education services than their non-redshirted peers (Graue &
DiPema, 2000). Opponents of redshirting point to this ﬁnding as evidence that this
practice keeps children from getting early intervention services that might result in
eliminating the need for later support (Graue & DiPema, 2000). Finally, although Zill,
Loomis and West (1997) overall found effects that indicated children redshirted in
kindergarten performed better in ﬁrst and second grade, they caution that there are
differences based on what the child experiences during the year he is held out of
kindergarten. For example, a child who is held out and has the beneﬁt of a rich learning
environment such as a quality child care setting or an enriched home environment will
perform differently than a child who spent another year in a less than stimulating
environment.

It is not until adolescence that negative results of redshirting have been
documented in the literature. A study by Byrd et a1. (1997) suggests that teens whose
kindergarten entry was delayed exhibited more behavioral problems that their classmates.
Because this group also showed a higher rate of need for special education services, there

is a good deal of speculation that these children had special needs misdiagnosed as

“immaturity” and that some intervention other than redshirting might have addressed the
problem more successfully.

There is reason to think that redshirting has consequences for classrooms as well
as individual children. Delayed entry for some results in classrooms with a greater range
of ages. This may in turn result in a greater range of abilities, and more pronounced
differences in boys and girls in the classroom (given that boys are more likely than girls
to be redshirted). Group differences in rates of redshirting may lead to age and/or ability
differences in classrooms by group, such as a disproportionate number of low income,
African-American boys (less likely to be redshirted) being younger than their white, older
more affluent peers. Research has yet to address questions related to the impact of group
differences in redshirting, or questions about the impact of redshirting on those who were
not redshirted.

Teachers in a national survey report that, on average, fully 48% of the children
coming to them are not ready for the current kindergarten curriculum in their districts
(NCEDL, 1998). Can it be possible that even in light of a signiﬁcant percentage of
children employing delayed entry, resulting in older, seemingly more ready children, the
curriculum is still out of reach? One possible answer is that schools see older children in
classrooms as more capable and therefore increase the difﬁculty of the curriculum to
meet a perceived level of competence (Diamond, Reagan & Bandyk, 2000). Younger
(although age eligible) students may perform less well in this new kindergarten cum ﬁrst
grade environment.

Just as one may have reason to believe that redshirting may cause classroom level

variance in achievement, districts may have varying mean entry ages that might result in

district-level variance in achievement. For example, given the trend cited by West, Meek
and Hurst (2000) for lower income children to attend kindergarten earlier than their more
afﬂuent peers, it is likely that lower income school districts will have younger children.
State standardized tests and accountability measures, however, are universally applied to
districts regardless of income and mean entry age. As a result, the poorest districts,
perhaps already at a disadvantage, may be testing children at a signiﬁcantly younger age
on average than their aﬂluent neighboring districts. Because age is signiﬁcantly related to
test scores (Stipek & Byler, 2001), this may partially explain chronically lower scores of
low income districts. If indeed there are trends toward greater use of redshirting, and
differential rates of redshirting in different communities, this may also make efforts to
narrow achievement gaps more difﬁcult.

Given the lack of deﬁnitive research indicating that redshirting is good or bad for
children and given the complexity of the issue, it is no surprise then that some parents
agonize over the decision to send their children to kindergarten. For some, the decision to
send or not may be one of the biggest decisions parents make in the early childhood
years. A quick internet search using Google, of “kindergarten readiness” yielded 397,000
sites (2005). These appear to be largely parent support sites designed to assist parents in
making the decision to send or not to send their child to kindergarten including
checklists, quizzes and materials for purchase. This angst is not surprising in the high
stakes world of education. Every parent wants their child to succeed in school. It seems
when their children begin scth is seen as a consequential decision for some parents.
While the research community works to gain better understanding and agreement on this

issue, parents continue to have to make this decision.

While there may not be widespread agreement about the effects of delayed entry,
there are certainly those who would like to inﬂuence parents’ decisions. For example, as
noted above, there is some concern that delayed entry might unintentionally keep
children from much needed early intervention services. A child appearing “immature”
may in fact have developmental delays or disabilities that would be supported through
services. Better understanding of parents’ thinking and subsequently better
communication with families around their decision making would allow schools to
address this issue as well as conﬁonting other misconceptions that families may have
about schooling.

Policy makers at the local and state levels are also making decisions about school
may age. As stated earlier, many states have considered, and changed their entry dates
over the years. In Michigan, while this study was conducted, in light of pressure for
greater academic achievement on state test scores, the legislatme entertained a proposal
to change the entry date from December to September (MiAEYC, 1999). As in the past,
groups such as the state organization for the Education of Young Children have objected
to that change, based on concerns for children “left behind” in the gap between
September and December in any given year of policy change (MiAEYC, 2006). Further,
the Michigan Association for the Education of Young Children’s policy statement echoes
the National Association’s belief that schools should have a developmental perspective,
welcoming children at whatever age and level they arrive (Ibid). Just as parents are
making choices for their children with little knowledge, policy makers and those who

inﬂuence them are relying heavily on theory and good intentions, not research.

10

Conceptual Framework

When examining the factors parents consider when making decisions, it is
important to keep in mind that families may not be viewing the decision the same way.
Differences in their previous experiences may inﬂuence their choices but it may also be
more fundamental than that. It may be that families perceive the role of school differently
and therefore their decision about when to send their children would be inﬂuenced by
that. Lareau (2000) found that differences exist in parents’ perceptions of the role they
are to play in supporting their children’s education. Working class families in her study
were more likely to view teachers as experts than professional families. Professional
families perceived themselves as equals to their children’s educators. These differences
played out in varying levels and types of parental involvement. Lareau concluded that
varying levels of cultural capital, as it relates to the school system, result in some families
feeling more comfortable being involved with their children’s schooling while others feel
they are best serving their children by leaving them in the hands of those they view as
more qualiﬁed.

The concept of cultural capital, or rather parents’ pursuit of it on behalf of their
children, guides this study. First outlined by Bordieu in 1977, cultural capital is most
commonly used to describe differences in class dynamics and the pursuit of high status
cultural resources. A more reﬁned version of cultural capital as it relates to the current
study is found in Lamont and Lareau (1988). The researchers argue that activation of
resources such as knowledge of the school system is necessary to acquire cultural capital.
Many things can impact a family’s ability to activate their resources. For example,

families in rural communities may have limited access to services as a result of

11

transportation concerns. Some afﬂuent families may have little time to activate resources
as a result of working two demanding jobs. Either group may or may not be aware of
resources available to them and thereby cannot activate them. It can be argued that all
parents want success for their children but capacity to access the cultural capital leading
to that success may vary. It might be expected, based on Lareau’s work, that Head Start
families are less likely to activate the cultural capital of, for example, consulting with a
teacher to make the kindergarten entry decision. Conversely, it may be expected that
middle or higher income families might be more likely to activate that resource. In this
study, the activation of resources across groups is examined as well as the factors
considered as a result of those inﬂuences.
Research Questions
This study addresses the questions:
0 What factors do families consider when deciding when to send their
kindergarten age eligible children to school?
0 Do the factors considered dijﬂr by child characteristics, including the
child '3 gender and age, and family characteristics, including whether they
are eligible for Head Start and whether they have older children who have

been through kindergarten?

Method
Because the purpose of this study is to understand parents’ thinking and attitudes
about kindergarten entry, a semi-structured interview methodology was the most

appropriate choice (Weiss, 1995). That is, basic, open ended questions were crafted prior

12

to the interview along with a series of possible follow-up probes that allowed for the
interview to chart territory that might not have been predicted by the prepared script.

While a survey would allow for study of a larger number of informants, interview
methodology allowed for more probing, less directive investigation into parents’
decision-making. Interview studies in other areas of parent research have yielded many
important insights for the ﬁeld (see Edwards’s work on parent stories (1999), Moll’s
work on families’ ﬁrnds of knowledge (1993), or Bell’s work on parents’ thinking about
school choice (2004), for example).
Context of study

This study was conducted across three school districts in central Michigan, one
rural, one suburban and one urban. Within the rural and suburban districts, children could
attend an alternative to kindergarten called Developmental Kindergarten, Young Fives or
(deceptively) High Fives, depending on who was describing it. In this alternative,
children are expected to complete this readiness year and then proceed to a kindergarten
year the next year. (Very rarely, a child would be placed into a ﬁrst grade program after a
developmental kindergarten year. The included schools report that this occurs about as
frequently as any other grade acceleration or skipping, however. Therefore in this study a
year of developmental kindergarten taken when the child is in fact age eligible for regular
kindergarten is considered “redshirting.”) Additionally, in all the districts, Head Start
provided the opportunity for an additional year of Head Start even when the child is age
eligible for kindergarten if it was determined by Head Start teachers that the child would
beneﬁt ﬁom this experience before entering kindergarten. Since the urban district did not

offer a developmental kindergarten option for its children, only those families qualifying

l3

for Head Start were guaranteed free opportunities to attend an additional year of
preschool. In addition to free, public options, there were several private and parochial
schools across all the districts that offered admittance to children younger than the
mandatory age for school entry. In short, families in the study all had options as
alternatives to kindergarten entry for their children. However, as will be detailed later in
this paper, families varied in whether they were aware of or considered these options.
Informants

Preschool programs were selected at random from a list of licensed child care
centers and preschool programs, contacted by the investigator, and asked for referrals to
families whose children were age-eligible to begin kindergarten (N = 5). Additional
referrals of children came from colleagues of the investigator (N = 3), random meetings
of families in fast food locations and community parks (N = 2) and by word of mouth
through interviewed families (N = 6). Children enrolled in Head Start were referred by
their Head Start teachers (N = 10). In each instance, it was emphasized that the children
need not have any special characteristic other than age-eligibility for kindergarten and
parents willing to discuss their thinking about sending their child to kindergarten.
Families were contacted by phone in most cases (with the exception of the two families
met by chance) and were told that the purpose of the study was to better understand what
factors families consider when making the decision about sending their child to
kindergarten. Families were invited to participate in the study and be interviewed. Four
families whose children were enrolled in Head Start were contacted and declined

involvement. The reason cited was that they didn’t think there was a decision to be made

14

that their children were ﬁve and they were going to school. No other families declined
involvement.

A total of 26 families were included in the study. (Twenty nine were interviewed
but data was lost on three families when the tapes, although tested in advance, were
inexplicably found to be blank.) Each family had a child who was age-eligible to attend
kindergarten in the interview year, 2004-2005. For some, this was the second year of age
eligibility; for others it was not. The children’s ages ranged ﬁorn 4.9 to 6.0 at the time of
the interview (mean = 5.27 years). Ten of the families interviewed had been previously
enrolled in Head Start, four rural and three each in the suburban and urban districts.
Sixteen families either had a child attending a preschool program (other than Head Start)
or a playgroup experience, three rural, six suburban and seven urban. In total, seven
families were in the rural district, nine in the suburban district and ten in the urban
district. There were a number of differences in demographic characteristics of families of
Head Start and non-Head Start children (see Tables 1.1 and 1.2 for detail.)

Across the groups, four of the families were single-parent households. Two of the
families were headed by grandparents rearing their grandchildren. Twenty families had
made the kindergarten entry decision with other children in their families. In nine of the
families, the focal child was male, in seventeen, female. One family was African-
American, one Sudanese and Guatemalan, with the remaining being Euro-American.
Data Collection Procedure

I interviewed each of the families myself. Two parent (or grandparent) families
were given the option of including both adults in the interview or having one parent

represent them both. Only one family opted for having both adults present. Interviews

15

were conducted wherever the family felt most comfortable or found to be most

convenient. Twenty one of the interviews were conducted in the family’s home. One was

conducted in my office, one at the parent’s workplace, two in local coffee shops, and one

in the parking lot of a child’s tae kwon do lesson.

The interview questions were designed to elicit the broad range of factors that

families might consider when deciding about school entry for their children. The

questions themselves fell into several categories:

Questions designed to describe the child, the child’s family, the child’s
abilities and interests. Sample question: What kinds of things does __
enjoy doing?

Questions designed to elicit families’ views of school readiness. Sample
question: What do you think children really should be able to do when they
enter kindergarten?

Questions designed to elicit factors considered by families. Sample question:
When you were thinking about whether or not to send __ to kindergarten
this year, what kinds of things did you consider?

Questions designed to illuminate the process employed by families when
making the decision. Sample questions: Did you consider advice ﬁ'om others?
Whose? Have you used their advice in the past?

Questions designed to draw out families’ knowledge of the child’s potential
school. Sample questions: Are you familiar with the kindergarten your child

will attend? How did you learn about it?

16

0 Questions designed to elicit the parents’ experiences with schooling. Sample
question: When you think about your own school experience, what comes to
mind?

0 Demographic questions. Sample questions: How much schooling did you
have? What do you do now?

The complete interview protocol is provided in Appendix A.

Interviews were conducted in late summer or early fall. This was aﬁer families
had made their decision regarding whether or not to send their child to kindergarten, but
before their recollection of the decision-making process would have faded. This timing
may also have prevented families’ responses ﬁom being inﬂuenced by what was
happening in their child’s kindergarten (or developmental kindergarten) classroom, if
they had indeed chosen to send the child. If interviews were conducted too late in the
year it could have been difﬁcult for families to separate factors they considered at the
time with new factors emerging as their child experienced kindergarten. For example, a
family might not have initially considered whether a child could listen to a teacher’s
directions when making their decision to send him to kindergarten but might later in the
year, upon receiving feedback ﬁ'om the teacher, come to view that as an important
consideration. Therefore, it is hoped, the factor would not inadvertently (and
inaccurately, since questions are retrospective to decision-making prior to sending
children to kindergarten) make its way into the interview. Families whose child had
already experienced a “redshirting” year (N = 3), were asked to consider the decision
made in the ﬁrst year of eligibility as well as any thinking they currently had about entry.

For these families, the portion of the interview dealing with the ﬁrst year of eligibility

l7

was more retrospective than for the other families so their recollections may indeed not
be as thorough or accurate. All three of these families had chosen the previous year to
send their children to developmental kindergarten during the “redshirting” year. Even
although they were asked to recall the decision-making process prior to the
developmental kindergarten year, it is possible that experiences in the developmental
kindergarten year did inﬂuence in some ways their recollections of the decision.

During the interview, I took minimal notes as it has been noted that some
informants, particularly those with previous bad experiences with schooling or “experts”,
can feel threatened or intimidated by note taking (Weiss, 1995). Instead, I relied on audio
recording and, during the interview, employed active listening strategies designed to
draw out and clarify the informant’s position. The protocol, as given in Appendix A, was
held constant for all informants to avoid disparity in responses by individuals or groups
based on how the questions were asked or responded to by me, the interviewer. Of
course, as indicated earlier, while the basic protocol was held constant, follow-up probes
were varied based on the respondents’ answers.

Data Analysis Procedures

All family interviews were assigned a code number and then transcribed by a paid
transcriptionist for later analysis by the investigator. The transcriptionist did not have
information prior to the transcription about the families, including which families had a
boy or girl child or whether or not the families had children attending Head Start. Of
course, some families gave some of this information during the interview. Transcriptions
included both the interviewer’s and the informant’s speech. All meaningful utterances

were included as were pauses longer than 2 seconds (implying thoughtful consideration).

18

Vocal place holders (“um”, “er”, “hm”) were omitted unless they were repeated, which
might denote hesitation or uncertainty in the respondent. This was done to distill the
transcripts down to their meaning rather than their literal translation and to make the ﬂow
of the transcripts smoother. However, if interrupted by a child, the transcription reﬂected
that and the talk was included in the transcript. In three instances, the tape was turned off:
once so the parent could address the child and redirect him or her to another activity so
that we could speak about the child without the child being present; once while a baby
was crying in another room and needed to be tended; and once while a train roared by
rendering the interview inaudible. When the child/baby/train left the area, the interview
resumed and the tape was turned on.

While both Strauss (1987) and Miles and Huberman (1984) suggest that analysis
begin during the data collection phase of interviewing, I did not begin formal analysis
until all interviews were transcribed. I felt strongly that it was important to keep the
interviews as consistent as possible ﬁom one to another; beginning analysis while still
interviewing might have inadvertently inﬂuenced the interview procedures I used (e.g.,,
follow up prompts) in later interviews. Of course, I did hear the interviews as I conducted
them so that I may have unintentionally inﬂuenced my follow up prompts over time.

I developed initial categories for coding based on impressions developed during
the interviews and expectations I had developed in planning for the study. I then applied
these categories to the transcripts employing the method described by Glaser and Strauss
(1967) and Berkowitz (1997). As expected, the initial coding categories were incomplete
and additional categories were necessary to fully capture the factors present in the data.

For example, initial coding categories I had developed did not capture that some families

19

considered ﬁrture factors such as size in high school when considering sending their
children to kindergarten. Coding continued until an exhaustive set of categories was
developed. In addition to coding for factors considered in the kindergarten decision, other
coding was conducted with other foci not addressed in this paper.
The coding system was applied to each transcript. For example, consider the
following passage:
...he was, um, a young boy. We didn’t want him going in at four years old into
kindergarten. And again, the ﬁne motor skills were not there, so we wanted him to
have another year behind him to grow emotionally, you know because he was
young and to work on those ﬁne motor skills. We didn’t want to just throw him
into a kindergarten program. His teacher at preschool said “Go ahead, he’ll be
ﬁne. You know, he’ll catch up.” And we’re like “No, that’s not the plan we have
for him because we don’t want him to hopefully catch up or to be behind going
into kindergarten. Our plan all along was “Okay, we are going to hold him back
into a young ﬁve program.”
This passage was coded as evidencing consideration of socio-emotional skills,
consideration of the child’s physical development, consideration of the child’s birth date,
consideration of advice from other people (even though it was dismissed). For each
interview, the coding category was given a numeric assignment, yes = 1 and no = 0, and
then entered into an SPSS database.
After entering the individually coded cases into a quantiﬁed SPSS database, I
employed a sorting method described by Weiss (1995) to group the data and their

representative cases by category. That is, categorical ﬁles were generated with excerpts

20

ﬁom individual cases reﬂecting each category. For example, the category “academic
skills” included relevant excerpts of interviews with the 23 families identifying that as a
factor. This combination of purely quantitative with qualitative representation allows for
a richer depiction of the data. The quantiﬁed database allows for numeric groupings
while the qualitative collection of excerpts facilitates looking across the text of the
interviews themselves.

I did both the coding and data entry of all data. To assure reliability in the coding
system however, three interviews were randomly selected for an outside coder to analyze.
The coder was asked to read the entire interview but code only the passages reﬂecting
factors considered by the families. This coding was compared to mine and found to be in
91% agreement.

To determine reliability in data entry, three randomly selected interviews were
blindly double-entered into the database, that is, the original entries were not visible
during entry of the second round of entries. The second round of entries were compared
against the 192 original entries and found to be 99.48% accurate.

After investigating reliability of coding and entry, data was analyzed in two major
ways. First, I examined the occurrence of each code across respondents. Second, I
examined the number of factors considered by any one family. To ascertain frequency of
occurrence across respondents, I calculated this both in number (e.g., 23 out of 26
families) and in percentage (e.g., 88% of families) as well as in relation to child
characteristics of gender, age, and whether the child attended a Head Start program. I also
examined the decision the family made. These categories are reﬂective of the previously

discussed trends of affluent families with boys born in the latter half of the year being

21

more likely to redshirt their sons (Graue, 2000). In this case, Head Start attendance serves
as a proxy for income level. Finally, because I suspected families that previously made
the decision with another, older child might have differing views of the decision, I looked
at families with older siblings relative to families that did not.

In an effort to see how different factors and child characteristics were related,
cross tabulation was conducted, resulting in chi square tests for each factor. Maj or
assumptions of chi square testing were met except that the sample was not drawn
randomly from the population (Howell, 1997). This violation is mitigated somewhat,
however, by the inclusive approach to sampling used in the study. However, in a number
of instances, cell size was small; therefore chi square results should be interpreted with
caution. The factors tested included the age of the child, family structure, the social
network consulted (preschool teacher, other teachers, family and ﬁiends, none), academic
skills, socio-emotional factors, and the physical size of the child. I also investigated
whether the parent had knowledge of other families going through the same decision, and
whether or not parents considered their own experiences with schooling. Factors and
characteristics were tested against gender, age, enrollment in Head Start, decision made
and the presence of older siblings. Where appropriate, Fisher’s Exact test was applied by
SPSS. When SPSS reported Fisher’s Exact Test, those are reported. When SPSS reported
chi squares, those are reported.

Results
Families in this study differed in several important ways. While some families
perceived the entry decision as very complex and high stakes, others did not. The number

and type of factors inﬂuencing parents’ decision making varied across families, with

22

some families reporting considering only a few factors while others wrangled with many
factors, with a range of two to ten factors considered, and with great angst. Contrast these
two responses:

Honestly, if I had known I would agonize over it this much, I would never had

had a child in September. . .I know that sounds really neurotic, but it was that

monumental, I just didn’t want to screw up. I wanted to give him all the tools to
be successful. [Referring to her redshirted previous child who had a September

birthday] (Mrs. Porter’, 8/09/04)

There was nothing to think about. She was just ready. [Child’s birth date:

9/24/99] (Ms. McCormick, 8/26/04)

Elsewhere in these interviews, both parents talk in very caring and loving ways about
their children but both have a very different view of the decision making process and the
factor(s) they considered.

In the following sections, I dig deeper into the parents’ decision making as
follows. First, I report the decisions parents made about whether or not to send their
children to kindergarten the ﬁrst year they are eligible. Next, in answer to the ﬁrst
research question, regarding the factors considered, I identify the factors the families
considered as they made the decision: academic, social, physical size of the child, birth
date, advice from others, others in the family redshirted, familiar with the kindergarten,
knows others making the same decision, parents’ experience as a factor, the child’s
gender, and in one case, the opinion of the child on her own readiness. Then, in answer to
the second research question, regarding whether the factors considered vary by group,

including the child’s gender, the child’s age, the family’s enrollment in Head Start, the

 

' All family and children’s names have been replaced with pseudonyms.

23

presence of older siblings, and the decision to redshirt or not, I look across all factors for
differences in pattern.
Redshirting

In total, this study included six families who redshirted their children. Three were
entered into developmental kindergarten in the year prior to the study and were now
entering kindergarten. Three more were being redshirted at the time of the interviews,
entered into developmental kindergartens to attend regular kindergarten the following
year. Of these six, ﬁve were boys. These children were all born in the later half of the
year: two in September, two in October and one each in August and December. One child
of the six was from the urban district where no developmental kindergarten was offered
and his family placed him in a private developmental kindergarten program offered at a
preschool program. The other ﬁve were ﬁ'om the suburban and rural districts and were in
public settings. The factors considered by these families will be included throughout the
following discussion of individual factors as well as a summary contrasting the families
who redshirted with the families who chose to send their children in the ﬁrst year of
eligibility.
Factors Considered

Families reported considering 11 factors in deciding about their child’s readiness.
Factors considered by one or more families are represented on the chart in Figure 1.1. In
the following sections, the factors considered by several families will be described. The
ﬁnal sections will address the individual nature of some of the decision making and
variation in factors considered by groups.

Factors Considered: Academic Factors

24

When asked what factors they considered when making their decision, 23 of the
26 families (88%) indicated some aspect of academic skills as an inﬂuence on their
thinking. For some, the responses were brief:

She’s just ready. She’s really smart. I really think she’s ready to go. (Ms.

McCormick, 8/26/04)

For others, speciﬁc details were offered:

[I was concerned about] only writing, ya know, I’m not really sure, what a kid,

how a kindergartener should be writing, or how a preschooler should be writing.

She, that’s just not one of her strengths, like actually forming the letters and

forming the numbers and stuff. She doesn’t do very well at all except with her

letters of her name. But we haven’t worked on it very hard either (laughs). (Mrs.

Bridges 8/19/04)

Other academic skills mentioned were that the children knew or did not know
their alphabet or parts of it, could write their names, could count, could read or knew
basic shapes and colors. See Table 1.3 for a display of academic skills parents mentioned
and their frequency, along with speciﬁc socio-emotional skills parents identiﬁed, which
will be discussed later in this paper. Clearly their children’s academic skills are
associated with most parents’ views of their children’s success in schooling.

One might wonder about the three families that did not report considering
academic skills as a factor. Among the three families, one of them considered only the
child’s age when making the decision. The other two considered other factors such as
social skills and the child’s physical size. Most interesting, none of the three families

were familiar with their child’s potential kindergarten.

25

Analyses of consideration of acaderrric factors by different groups found no
statistically signiﬁcant relationships. There was little difference between Head Start and
non-Head Start families in considering academic skills with Head Start families, 90%
(N= 9), non—Head Start, 87.5% (N= 14). Parents of boys were somewhat less likely (78%,
N = 7) to consider academic factors than parents of girls (94%, N = 16), but again, not at
a level of statistical signiﬁcance. No statistically signiﬁcant differences were found
between families who had had older children go through kindergarten (N = 20; 90%
considered academic factors) and those who did not (N = 6: 83% considered academic
factors.) Notably, of parents who had 2 or more older siblings (27% of sample, N=7),
100% considered their child’s academic skills as part of the decision (see Figure 1.2 for
detail). This may be due in part to better understanding of the expectation of schools,
where academic factors are emphasized. Finally, of parents of 4 year olds, 60% (N = 5)
of them considered academic factors with 95% of parents of 5 year olds (N = 19) and
100% of parents of 6 year olds (N = 2) considering academic factors.

Factors Considered: Socio-emotional Factors

Second only to academic factors, children’s socio-emotional readiness was most
frequently remarked upon by parents, with 19 of 26 reporting that this was considered.
This category was challenging to code as the questions, “Did you consider your child’s
social skills? If so, what thoughts did you have about them?”, were designed to get purely
“social” skills like sharing or turn taking but I found that some respondents seemed to
include what I would characterize as emotional factors or self help skills in their

responses. For example:

26

She wanted Mom to be with her, she had been in a child enrichment. center
her last year of preschool and she had done ﬁne academically, got along
ﬁne with teachers, but separation continues to be an issue, she does not
like it when I leave her. (Mrs. Sutton, 7/ 10/04)
To address this range of responses, this category encompasses a range of behaviors
including social and emotional behaviors. It also includes children’s self help skills such
as being able to tend to own needs in dressing or bathrooming.

Parents feeling their child was ready for kindergarten often indicated some
concern over socioemotional skills, although their concern was mitigated by either
reassurance ﬁom a preschool teacher, as with the ﬁrst parent quoted here, or by
reﬂections on the child’s past experiences or behaviors, as with the second parent quoted.

Well, at home he has ﬁts sometimes and [he’ll] get mad and yell at us, but the

teacher said not once did she ever have to get after him or was he in timeouts. So I

thought maybe he was just playing us. If he knew at school that it was time, you

know, to do the school thing. So I had to consider that. (Mrs. Mosher, 7/22/04)

Being shy, I kinda worried a little about that, but, um but I know that she usually

does well when she, ya know, gets comfortable. (Ms. Mills, 10/4/04)
Responses in other categories such as physical development, discussed later, also indicate
a long term interest in children’s success in social situations.

Not all families reported this as a consideration, however. Among parents of 4
year olds, 60% (N = 3) of them considered socio-emotional factors with 74% of parents

of 5 year olds (N = 14) and 100% of parents of 6 year olds (N = 2) considering socio-

27

emotional factors. There was little difference in consideration of this factor by gender of
child. Among families with boys, 78% (N=7) reported having considered socio-
emotional factors. While among families with girls, 71% (N=12) reported this as a
considered factor. Families whose children were enrolled in Head Start were far more
likely to consider socio-emotional factors than families whose children were not enrolled
in Head Start, with 90% (N=9) and 63% (N =10), respectively, reporting having
considered this factor. You may recall that among parents of children with two or more
older siblings that 100% (N =7) of them considered academic skills. Among this same
group, only 57% (N= 4) considered socio-emotional factors. Contrasting this with the six
families with no older siblings, we ﬁnd 83% (N= 5) of those families considered
academic skills. The same percentage considered socio-emotional skills as part of their
decision. It appears that the inﬂuence of some parents’ experience with their older
children’s schooling has bearing on what they consider relevant. As before, no statistical
signiﬁcance was noted.
Factors Considered: Birth Date
I think. . .you’re hard pressed to ﬁnd a kid that’s not ready to go to kindergarten,
ya know? When parents are like, ‘Oh, they’re ready! Oh they’re ready!’ but I
always look at down the road when they’re thirteen, ya know? And if they’re
immature, it doesn’t show when they’re ﬁve or they’re four. It shows when
they’re older and if they’re the youngest. I worry about down the road if they
were too young. I have a September baby who will be staying home when he is

ﬁve. But my March kids. ..so I really look at age ﬁrst... (Mrs. Carson, 07/19/04)

28

This parent was concerned about how the child’s age would locate him at the bottom or
top of his class’s age line up — not so much now but later on in schooling. This factor was
discussed by 17 of the 26 families. This factor is actually one that is often mentioned
along with other issues, such as the child’s size or maturity. In short, birth date can be
simple or complex but certainly oft considered.

Among parents of boys, 78% (N= 7) considered birth date a factor, whereas only
59% (N= 10) of parents of girls characterized birth date as relevant to their decision
making. Among parents of 4 year olds, 80% (N = 4) of them considered birth date with
58%ofparents of5 yearolds(N=11)and100%ofparentsof6yearolds(N=2)
considering birth date. Only 50% (N= 5) of the Head Start families and 75% (N= 12) of
non-Head Start families considered the child’s birth date, (not statistically signiﬁcant).
There was no notable difference between families with older siblings 67% (N = 13) and
families without older siblings, 67% (N = 4), in considering their child’s birth date.
Factors Considered: Advice ﬁom Others

This area represents the most striking difference among families. Some families
reported seeking out the advice of everyone they could think of: family, friends, the
child’s preschool teacher, other educators they knew, while other families reported not
having discussed their decision with anyone at all. It is important to clarify that there
were two different, yet similar questions in the protocol. One addresses advice ﬁ'om
others and the other asked if the respondent discussed the decision with others. The focus
of this section is on identiﬁed “advisors” not just people with whom the respondent
conversed about the decision. Figure 1.3 provides data about information sources

reported by respondents.

29

Family. In this study, the activation of resources across groups is examined.
While one might think that family would be a consistently activated resource, it actually
falls below other factors, with only 46% (N =12) of respondents indicating family as a
factor considered. Even within the “Advice from Others” category, family advice falls
short of ﬁiends’ and is only slightly ahead of teachers’.

That does not lessen the inﬂuence of the advice when present, however. One
family reported that her mother’s advice was “pretty much what I considered”. Other
families may also have strongly considered advice ﬁ'orn family members but that was not
evident in the interviews. Moreover, although not reported by families directly, within
advice from family there may be an inﬂuence of the culture of families around the
decision.

While analyzing by gender, only 41% of the families with girls (N = 7) considered
advice from family while 55% of families with boys (N= 5) reported considering this,
though not statistically signiﬁcant. Among parents of 4 year olds, 40% (N = 2) of them
considered advice from family with 47% of parents of 5 year olds (N = 9) and 50% of
parents of 6 year olds (N = 1) considering family advice. F ifty-ﬁve percent of families
with older siblings (ll of 20 total families with older siblings) indicated they had
considered advice from family, while only 17% (N=l) of families without older siblings
sought that advice. Of the Head Start families, just 30% (N=3) indicated they considered
advice from family while 56% of their non-Head Start counterparts (N=9) reported
considering familial advice. Again the variation was not statistically signiﬁcant.

Friends. Of the 26 families in the study, 58% (N=15) report discussing their

decision with their ﬁiends, making this the most common group with whom families

30

talked about the decision. The role of ﬁiends’ advice varies across families. Some
indicate that the only advice they sought was from ﬁiends, others sought advice from
other sources as well. Most sought-after was the advice of friends who had either recently
gone through the decision-making process or were making it at the same time as the
respondent.

Of the 15 families reporting that they consulted with friends, 33% (N=5) chose to
keep their children out of kindergarten. We cannot draw from the data exactly what
advice was given, however, only that they discussed the decision with their ﬁiends.

Of the ﬁfteen families in this category, 7 were families with boys and 8 were
families with girls. That is, of families with boys, 78% of them considered advice ﬁ'om
friends, while only 47% of families of girls did. Among parents of 4 year olds, 60% (N =
3) of them considered advice from ﬁiends with 58% of parents of 5 year olds (N = 11)
and 50% of parents of 6 year olds (N = 1) considering ﬁiends’ advice. Neither of these
previous two categories, child gender and age, yielded statistical signiﬁcance in relation
to advice from ﬁiends. There appear, however, to be sharp differences among the Head
Start families and the non-Head Start families. Of the non-Head Start families, 81% (N =
13) report having discussed their thinking with friends while only 20% (N= 2) of the
Head Start families had such discussions (Fisher’s Exact Test = .004). This ﬁnding is
confounded with family structure in that neither the single parent families nor the
extended families (families in which parents were living with other adult relatives) were
inclined to talk with ﬁiends about their decision 53(2, N = 15) = 5.720, p = .057. Both of
those family structures fall exclusively within the Head Start group. Instead, it would

appear that the Head Start families were more reliant on the next category for their

31

advice. Families with older siblings were also a bit more inclined to consider ﬁiends’
advice than families whose oldest child was eligible to attend, although not at a level of
statistical signiﬁcance. Fifty percent (N=3) of ﬁrst time families considered ﬁiends’
advice while 60% of families with older children considered this factor.

Preschool teacher. While most children experienced a preschool year before age
eligibility, several families when asked, “Did you consider advice from others?” did not
name the preschool teacher as among the people consulted. In fact, there seems to be an
inverse relationship with the amount of schooling parents had and the likelihood that a
parent would consult with the preschool teacher. However, it should be noted that more
families may have consulted with the preschool teacher than reported or realized it when
asked directly about seeking advice from others. In four cases, the parent discusses
having a conversation with the teacher that could be considered “consultative” elsewhere
in the interview, yet responded negatively when asked if she considered advice from
others. Two of those cases are among Head Start families and two are among non- Head
Start families. For example:

(When asking about sending her child to kindergartenz)

Interviewer: What did you think about when you made that decision? ‘

Mother: Well, I based it on the evaluations. They did two a year at Head Start.

That helped me decide. Plus I talked to his teacher and she said that he did really

good. She never had no problems. He only missed three days of school the whole

year. He was the one with the best attendance and she said his social skills were

really good. He interacted with other kids so that helped a lot. Plus I seen him at

32

home, the way he would do things and help other people, so I thought he’s ready

for kindergarten.

(A ﬁer asking about individual factors: )

Interviewer: Okay. And have you considered advice from other people?

Mother: Umm. Not really. (Mrs. Mosher, 7/22/04)

Even though she clearly had consulted his teacher (and was coded as such), this mother
didn’t perceive the conversations with the teacher as “advice”. It may be that the parent
viewed the conversation as a fact-ﬁnding discussion rather than “advice” per se.

Other families report weighing heavily the advice ﬁom their child’s preschool
teacher(s). In one case, advice ﬁ'om the child’s preschool teacher appeared to be the
greatest or only influence on the family. For example:

Interviewer: What did you think about [when you made that decision]?

Mother: Just the way she did in Head Start. Um, and what they’ve told me. I’ve

met with them an awful lot so I knew she was ready. (Ms. Mills 10/4/04)

More often, the preschool teacher is one of several inﬂuences on the parent’s
decision as in the example in the next section.

In total, ten of the families reported having considered advice from the preschool
teacher. Parents of boys 44% (N =4) were slightly more likely to consider preschool
teacher’s advice than parents of girls, 35% (N=6). Among parents of 4 year olds, 40% (N
= 2) of them considered advice ﬁ'om a preschool teacher with 37% of parents of 5 year
olds (N = 8) and 50% of parents of 6 year olds (N = 1) considering family advice. Head
Start families were more likely to discuss their decision with a preschool teacher (50%, N

= 5) than their non Head Start counterparts (31%, N = 5) although no statistical

33

signiﬁcance is noted. F arnilies having already made the decision with older children
(40%, N=8) were more likely to have consulted the preschool teacher than families
whose ﬁrst child was entering kindergarten (33%, N=2), again with no statistical
signiﬁcance.

Other Teachers. In 10 cases, families talked with other educators in addition to or
instead of the child’s preschool teacher. For example, consider this mother who talked
with her daughter’s preschool teacher, the prospective kindergarten teacher, the mother’s
sister and sister-in-law, who are elementary school teachers:

It seems I know a lot of teachers. So, one of my patient’s moms is a high school

teacher and I actually talk to her quite a bit and she really said go with your gut.

Um she gave me a totally different side. She teaches like ninth, she must teach

tenth and so, tenth grade math and I said, “Okay, so tell me some of your best

students. How old are they?’ And she said, ‘Interestingly enough, they really are
the younger ones.’ So she said the opposite of the coin. And she said, ‘ Ya know,,
don’t worry too much about it, I have these kids that do really, really well and
they are very young, so, she was again very, um, very good at presenting both
things. My sister and sister-in-law were pretty well, give her the extra year, so it
was interesting to be able to talk to her, too. And a high school teacher at that!

(Mrs. Sutton, 7/10/04)

However the consultation was conﬁgured, ten families saw the input of educators other
than the preschool teacher worthy of consideration. This number, only 38% of the

informants, seems low.

34

There were some differences within this category however, although none of
statistical signiﬁcance. Of families with boys, ﬁve of the seven (71%) report having
considered advice ﬁ'om other teachers while only ﬁve (29%) of the 17 families with girls
considered this input Among parents of 4 year olds, 60% (N = 3) of them considered
advice from a teacher with 32% of parents of 5 year olds (N = 6) and 50% of parents of 6
year olds (N = 1) considering teacher advice. Additionally, of the 10 Head Start families,
only three (30%) considered advice ﬁ'om teachers other than their preschool teacher
while seven of the 16 non-Head Start families, or 43%, considered this. Surprisingly,
there was little difference in accessing non-preschool teachers among the group of
families with older siblings and those without older siblings, 40% =8) and 33% (N= 2)
respectively. One might expect farrrilies who have greater access to teachers through the
schooling of their older children might consider advice from that quarter but that does not
appear to be true here.

As outside sources, it would seem that educators are not perceived by many
families to be a resource when making the decision. Families and ﬁiends are viewed as a
signiﬁcantly greater resource for some families.

Factors Considered: Knowledge of school/teacher

Many parents (73%, N=19) in this study were familiar with the school and/or
teacher their child would be with for the upcoming year. For some, this knowledge came
from having previous children in the school (62%, N=16). For others, they carefully
interviewed and selected the school and teacher their child would have. Several families

commented speciﬁcally on the sense of relief they felt with this knowledge:

35

[The child’s older sister] went there and then we went to the pre-registration and
so they showed us some of the classrooms there and I feel it was very helpful that
we got a letter from her classroom teacher which is actually addressed to [child].

That made her feel really good to get mail and it was the teacher describing what

their goals were and a list of things they could bring to school and be helpful, and

pictures of her and the teaching assistants, so I thought they did a great job there.

(Mr. Davis, 8/28/04)

Another family had a different take on familiarity with the school, “. . .and her brother’s
gonna be there. That’s a big factor for me.” (Mrs. Cooley, 7/21/04)

In part, familiarity with the school might tie into a family’s sense of control over
the situation. Understanding the expectations might offer more assurance that they can
navigate the system successfully. Of course, having other children already go through a
program would reinforce that as well.

Factors Considered: Physical development

A total of nine families (3 5%) indicated they considered their child’s physical
development. Some worried about their children being small or rmcoordinated in the
kindergarten year while others consider physical development as it relates to some future
experience. The only child whose parents indicated that he had poor ﬁne motor control
was enrolled in a developmental kindergarten. (Parents of the little girl discussed earlier,
who were concerned about her writing, didn’t seem to think of it as a physical issue so
much as an academic one.) His parents believed that behavior and the fact that he was a

boy of small stature linked to his social acceptance. Not all relevant factors were about

36

the child’s imminent kindergarten experience. Two of the families (22%) referred to

considering current issues as they relate to future issues. For example:
We considered his size compared to other kids. That was an issue. My husband
was a late bloomer. Um, and so in high school he very much looked like a junior
high kid and so we considered that that could be in his [their son’s] future. And
that on top of being the youngest child in the class, he could quite possibly be a
very small child in the class come junior high or high school. That was a concern
for us because at this age it doesn’t seem to matter much, but in future years, it
will probably be something that will matter. (Mrs. Linn 8/19/04)

Another family shared this:
I had a neighbor who was a teacher in, I think, middle school or high school, and
she said, ‘It’s not so much the age of kindergarten. You know, are they ready
now?’ She goes, ‘Think about in high school. They’re gonna be a year behind
everybody. A year behind emotionally, physically. Do you want him to be the
smallest kid on the team and he can never do anything like the other kids? Or is
she gonna be underdeveloped ﬁ'om the other girls?’ Based on, you know, all of it,
so I’ve kind of thought of that with all my kids. (Mrs. Andersen, 8/21/04)

Each family is evaluating the child standing before them for their kindergarten readiness

but they are also trying to predict the child’s future, ten years hence, with respect to

physical factors. Those factors, which on the surface appear to be concerned simply with

the child’s birth date and future size, are actually more complex, encompassing perceived

ﬁrture social relationships.

37

Of the 9 families reporting that physical size entered into their thinking, 6 of those
were families with boys. Fully 67% (N=6) of the families with boys thought about
physical size while only 17% (N=3) of the families with girls considered this. Among
parents of 4 year olds, 60% (N = 3) of them considered physical development with 32%
of parents of 5 year olds (N = 6) and no of parents of 6 year olds (N = 0) considering
physical size. There was little difference among Head Start families and non-Head Start
families with 33% (N=3) and 37% (N=6), respectively, reporting this as a factor
considered. Of the 6 families with no older siblings, and therefore less experience with
school, 3 reported considering physical size as part of their decision. This represents a
much higher percentage (50%) than the 6 of 20 families (30%) with older siblings who
considered this factor. No statistical signiﬁcance is noted for any of these groups,
however.

Again, while the families reported considering their child’s physical size, it is not
certain if they are thinking about the child’s current size or contemplating some
interconnection of factors such as current size, future size, and their relationship to other
factors such as social skills. Some families were explicit in discussing this but others may
have responded only to the size portion of the question while considering, but not
mentioning, size as it relates to social skills, or some other factor.

Factors Considered: Previous Redshirting in the Family

The presence of other family members having been redshirted is a factor for
some. Five families (19%) in the study had family members, other than the focal child,
that had been redshirted. Of those families, only one redshirted the focal child. This

mother, who enrolled her child in a developmental kindergarten, reported that her own

38

mother had always said, “Don’t start them too soon.” (Mrs. Sanders, 8/12/04) This
woman had herself been held out until she was nearly six before beginning kindergarten.
As a result of her own experience, she saw no stigma attached to delayed entry and, in
fact, perceived it as a positive contribution to her child’s success.

Of the ﬁve families who had previous redshirting in the family, four of them were
families of girls; all of them had older siblings; four of the families were Head Start
families and the one who redshirted her own child, a ﬁve year old son, was a non Head
Start parent. Only one of the children was four with the rest ﬁve year olds. There were no
relationships of statistical signiﬁcance.

Factors Considered: Parents ’ Experience with Schooling

As with the parent quoted earlier regarding his own struggles with his size in high
school, some parents remember their own experiences when making choices for their
young children. This was true of families that had both positive and negative experiences.
Sixteen of the families (62%) indicated that they were inﬂuenced by their memories of
their own schooling. Three of those (19%) were negative experiences and thirteen (81%)
were positive.

Mrs. Jarvis, who decided to start their son in their home school kindergarten
curriculum, indicated:

Well, early elementary, I well, hmm, I thought it was a difficult experience as far

as, you know I didn’t really do well in a lot of subjects. . ..Some kids, there’s some

hereditary issues so I wanna make sure my kids have a good experience. (8/13/04)
Her perception of how best to do that rested in providing the experience herself. As a

college graduate, she perhaps felt capable of providing a more positive schooling

39

experience for her child than she could count on him having in the local public school.
Contrast that view with Mrs. Sharif who had immigrated to the United States and had
mixed experience with schooling, the mother having dropped out of high school and the
father having earned a college degree in his home country. The mother, who looked
forward to starting her child in the local public school, had hopes for a different
experience for her son:

I hope he’s not like me! ‘Cause I drop out of school in my country. I then finished

tenth grade over here. . .So I wish the best for him, like ﬁnish college, everything.

(8/30/04)
In her comment, “I hope he’s not like me” she seems to be saying that the difﬁculty that
caused her to drop out of school was not a factor of the school, but of herself. So in her
“wish” for “the best”, she is sending him to public school, in the hopes that he is more
capable or successful than she was. Both families want positive experiences for their sons
but each family has different views of the role of kindergarten entry age in the path
toward their child’s success. Mrs. Jarvis seemed wary of public school after her own
difficult personal history, and chose to home school their child, at least for kindergarten.
Mrs. Sharif also had a difficult history, but seems to have faith that the public school
would be the right choice for her child. Both were inﬂuenced by their own experiences
and decided to start kindergarten for their sons but made different choices about what
kind of kindergarten experience to provide.

Families with positive experiences were similarly inﬂuenced. Some who had
wonderful experiences wanted to assure the same for their children. This manifested itself

in one parent sending her child to kindergarten after interviewing 26 different elementary

4o

 

schools to ﬁnd the best ﬁt for her child and another keeping her child in his preschool for
another year before sending him to a kindergarten experience.

Overall, parents of four year olds were more likely to consider their own
experience than parents of older children, x2(4, N = 15) = 14.163, p = .007. In fact, four
of ﬁve parents (80%) with four year olds considered their own experience in school while
only 12 (57%) of parents of 5 year olds did. It should also be noted here that the youngest
children in the sample also were less likely to have older siblings and were more likely to
be enrolled in Head Start, so it is difficult to know if the child’s age or some other factor
or factors determine whether parents consider their own experiences in school.
Diﬂerences in Decision Making by Decision Made

As indicated earlier, at one point, either in the current year or in the previous year,
6 of the 26 (23%) families made the decision to withhold their child when eligible to
begin school. These 6 families differed from the other 20 families in the study in several
ways, although none were statistically signiﬁcant. The ﬁrst difference was that all six
children had birthdays in the ﬁnal third of the year, making them among the youngest
children in their eligibility year. Secondly, all six come ﬁ'om two parent families. None
enrolled in Head Start. All had had previous experience with some other environment for
care or preschool outside the home. Additionally, all six families were familiar with the
school where their children would go.

To contrast, of the 20 families that did not choose to redshirt their children, 65%
(N=13) of the families were two parent families. Only 75% (N=15) of these families had

children who had experienced some other care or preschool outside the home and only

41

80% (N=16) of them were familiar with the school where they would eventually send
their child. Again, none of the 10 Head Start families redshirted their children.

As a group, the families who chose to delay entry for their children approached
the decision differently than the families that chose to send their children in the ﬁrst year
eligible. These differences were reﬂected in the consideration of individual factors
considered as well as how they came to the decision. For example, every redshirting
family considered birth date, but only 55% (N =1 1) of non—redshirting families considered
this factor. Redshirting families also considered their own experience with schooling
more than non-redshirting families did (80% (N =4) v. 55% (N =1 1)). They considered
academic factors less than non-redshirting families (67% (N4) v. 95% (N =19)) and
social factors more (83% (N=5) v. 70% (N=14)). Their children’s physical size was more
frequently considered by redshirting families (50%) (N =3) than non-redshirting families
(3 0%) (N =6).

Perhaps most interesting is the way the redshirting families approached the
decision-making process. Fully 83% (N=5) of the redshirting families reported
considering advice from others while only 40% (N =8) of the non-redshirting families did.
Discussing the decision with a teacher was important to 67% (N=4) of the redshirting
families but only 30% (N=6) of the non-redshirting families. All of the redshirting
families indicated that they knew other families making the decision while only 55%

(N =1 1) of the non-redshirting families knew others with children the same age.
Surprisingly, given the previous results, only 50% (N=3) of the redshirting families
reported familiarity with the potential kindergarten. Contrast that with 80% (N=16) of the

families who sent their children the ﬁrst year eligible.

42

Overall, the redshirting families considered more factors in a tighter range than
their non-redshirting peers. The redshirting families considered between ﬁve and ten
factors while the non redshirting families considered between 2 and nine factors. For the
redshirting families, not only was the outcome different, but the process was as well.
Diversity in Factors Considered Across all Families

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the data is how different the inﬂuences on
individual families’ decision-making are. some families were highly and exclusively
inﬂuenced by a single factor such as the advice of the preschool teacher. Other families
were inﬂuenced by a whole host of factors.

A case of multiple factors.

Mrs. Collins, a single mother rearing her children in her parents’ home, reports
that her daughter Amelia, has two older brothers. Like her brothers, Amelia has gone to
Head Start for two years but is now looking forward to attending kindergarten. Amelia is
four.

Her mother describes her as a social little girl that loves to play both active and
quiet things. She enjoys being read to and writing. When asked what she considered
when deciding what to do with Amelia in the kindergarten year, Mrs. Collins said that
she considered that having been in Head Start for two years that she thought Amelia was
ready for “deeper learning” in kindergarten. She considered that Amelia is taller than
many children her age (her dad is 6’ 4”) and that she also thought

. . .as much as she sits down and writes and can be very attentive and the wanting

to learn and that, I knew she was ready. And she can grasp what you tell her, so, I

think that’s a big step if they’re willing to learn. Take it when you can get it!

43

‘Cause they’re like a sponge (laughs)! If they’re willing to listen, give ‘em as

much as they want as long as they’re willing to sit there. (9/8/04)

She additionally indicates that a big factor in her thinking was that Amelia would have
the same teacher, a man, that her brothers have had. Evidently Amelia has expressed that
she really likes this teacher and Mrs. Collins was able to put in a request to be placed in
his classroom.

She also considered waiting a year, as she had with one of her sons but dismissed
it as Amelia has a June birthday and is already tall so Mrs. Collins thought that would
make her stand out as both too tall and too old.

Mrs. Collins reports having considered several factors here but reports that the
strongest factor for her was the comfort her daughter felt with the known teacher. Other
families in the study reporting considering multiple factors may also have weighed some
more heavily than others but did not report that.

A Case of a Single Factor

In another family, this one headed by a single mom, Ms. Kincaid, has a very
different view of the decision. Her daughter Bailey has been enrolled in Head Start for
the last two years while Ms. Kincaid completes her degree in nursing. Bailey’s
grandparents have regularly provided child care for her since her birth. Bailey is the
younger of two sisters. Her mom describes her this way:

Bailey and Britney are like night and day. They’re totally different, but Bailey is

smart. She catches on. But she’s kinda stubborn and she’s more relaxed in her

learning, where Britney is eager to learn and always asking questions. Bailey, you

have to sit her down and say, ‘Okay, let’s do your ABCs.’ When she learns it, she

likes to show off, but sometimes it’s a struggle to get her to actually sit down and

focus on learning if it’s something she’s not interested in learning. (8/29/04)

Ms. Kincaid goes on to describe Bailey as very verbal and comfortable talking with
anyone, including confronting people in the grocery store that might cut the line. Her
mother also describes Bailey as short statured, getting her size ﬁom both parents, but
very athletic. She’s skilled in ﬁne motor tasks such as cutting as well. While she enjoys
active games, she is most fond of quiet activities such as dress up and being read to. Her
favorite books and TV shows both feature Dora the Explorer.

When asked what she considered when deciding whether to send Bailey to
kindergarten, Ms. Kincaid replied,

Well, I never really thought there was an option of not sending her. And so, I just,
I really didn’t think about it. It was like, ‘she’s going.’ The choice is gonna be is she
going to [a local school] or a different school? That was more of what my decision
process was. It was never am I gonna send her or am I not gonna send her.

Ms. Kincaid reports that all she really considered when making this decision was
Bailey’s birth date. Having sent Britney to school when she was ﬁve, Ms. Kincaid
thought that was what everyone was doing. Ms. Kincaid indicates that she feels that
though she was familiar with her other daughter’s school, Bailey’s school will be
different since Britney’s school has closed. She made a point to attend the school’s open
house to learn more about the school. She indicates though, that she’s not worried. She
thinks Bailey will do ﬁne, but she plans to be vigilant about the schooling her girls

receive. Ms. Kincaid feels like her own schooling was substandard and wants to make

45

sure she “stays on top” of what goes on with her children to avoid the problems that she
had.

While Ms. Kincaid appears a no less caring and interested parent, the decision
making she reports is less complex than other families. In her mind, she was really only
considering one thing, her child’s age eligibility. It appears, though, she is investigating
and monitoring other aspects of the schooling opportunities.

Both of these cases reﬂect thoughtful consideration but they vary in the reporting
0f how many factors were considered. Of course it may always be difficult to parse out

exactly how many factors a parent considers as they themselves may be uncertain.
DWrences in Factors Considered by Child Gender
Recall that previous research has found that parents of boys are twice as likely to
redshirt their sons as parents of girls (West, Meek & Hurst, 2000). Respondents in this
Study align with those ﬁndings as only parents of boys reported even considering gender
When making the entry decision (see Figure 1.4.) The two respondents in this study who
cOnsidered gender opted to redshirt their child either in the current year or in the previous
Y ear by placing their sons in a developmental kindergarten program. One family referred
to ﬁJture ramiﬁcations of being a young boy and another simply referred to variance in
d‘3"elopment across boys and girls, with girls coming out ahead. (Interestingly, the
Pal‘ents of the two redshirted girls in the study did not report taking gender into
corlsicleration when making their kindergarten plans.)
While only two parents reported that gender was a factor in their decision-
makihg, there were some differences in others factors considered that varied by whether

the cl".|jld was a boy or girl (see Table 1.4 for a summary of ﬁndings by gender). Most

46

dramatically, 66% (N=6) of the parents of boys considered physical size a factor while
only 18 (N= 3) of parents of girls found size relevant (Fisher’s Exact Test = .028).
Conversely, academic skills were important to only 78% (N= 7) of parents of boys while
they were important to 94% (N=16) of parents of girls (not statistically signiﬁcant).
Additionally, there are gender differences regarding the signiﬁcance of the child’s birth
date, as discussed previously.

Diyjrerences across Head Start and Non-Head Start Families

In many of the factors considered, there were differences noted in the way that
Head Start families approached the decision making process and in the way that non-
Head Start families considered the decision. This section will summarize those
differences. Table 1.5 illustrates this summary.

By deﬁnition, families eligible for services through Head Start were at poverty
level. While non-Head Start families were not asked directly about their income level one
can surmise that it was higher as they were enrolled in preschool programs based on
tuition. In addition to economic differences, the aggregate education level varied for each
group with all of the 16 non-Head Start families identifying at least one parent with
college degree and only one of the ten Head Start families having a member who
graduated college. All the non-Head Start families were two parent households while in
the Head Start group, 40% (N=4) of the families were headed by a single parent, 40%
(N=4) were two parent households and 20% (N =2) had extended family living with them.
No families enrolled through Head Start reported having other family members redshirted
while 38% (N=6) of non-Head Start families had a family member (other than the focal

child) redshirted previously.

47

The children themselves differed in that 70% (N =7) of the children enrolled in
Head Start were in the youngest half of the sample while only 38% (N=6) of the non-
Head Start children were in this younger half. Of the Head Start children, 7 (70%) had an
older sibling while 13 (81%) of the non-Head Start children had older siblings.

Of the families in my study, all of the Head Start families (N = 10) sent their
children in the ﬁrst year they were eligible while only 62% of the non-Head Start families
(N = 10) sent their child at the earliest possible time. Factors considered varied across
groups, as demonstrated in Figure 1.4. When making this decision, 90% (N= 9) of Head
Start families considered academics while 88% (N=14) of the non-Head Start families
did. Head Start families were slightly more inclined (90 %, N= 9) to consider social skills
than their non-Head Start counterparts where only 63% (N=10) considered social skills.
Many fewer Head Start families, 50% (N=5) than non-Head Start families, 75% (N=12),
considered their child’s birth date as part of their decision. Similar numbers from each
group 30% Head Start (N= 3) and 37% non-Head Start (N=6) considered their child’s
physical size.

The most striking differences were the differences in inﬂuence of others, see
Figure 1.3 for detail. Only 30% of Head Start families (N= 3) considered advice ﬁ'om
others as a factor while 63% (N=10) of the non-Head Start families considered such
advice. The ﬁgure illustrates that while families in both groups discussed the decision
with others, who they discussed it with varied by group, with Head Start families more
likely to have discussed the decision with their child’s preschool teacher than the non-
Head Start families (50% v. 38%, N=5 for each), and less likely to have discussed their

decision with families (30% v. 63%, N=3 and N=10 respectively). In spite of their

48

children being in classes with other same-age children, only 30% (N = 3) of the Head
Start families indicated that they knew other families making the same decision, while
88% (N=14) of non-Head Start families knew other people going through this process.

Again, none of the children enrolled through Head Start were redshirted, while six

of the non-Head Start children were redshirted either in the current or previous year.
Discussion

For many families, the decision to send or not send their age-eligible child to
kindergarten is anxiety producing. On the surface, it might appear that some see the
decision as ﬁ'aught with import while others seem to take the decision lightly without
much consideration. Upon deeper examination, this study indicates that each family
weighed one or more factors and every family seemed to be concerned with their child’s
potential for success.

This study reveals that families consider a variety of factors. These factors include
academic factors, social factors, physical factors, the child’s birth date, whether or not
others were redshirted in the family, the child’s gender, advice from others (including the
preschool teacher, family, friends, another teacher), the parent’s own experience with
school, familiarity with the prospective school, and in one case, whether the child thought
she was ready for school.

Analyses revealed that factors were considered with differing frequency by
subgroups, speciﬁcally by gender of the child, age of the child, presence of older siblings,
and enrollment in Head Start, as well as by the decision made. For example, families
whose children were enrolled through Head Start were more likely to have discussed the

decision with their preschool teacher than other families did. Families who redshirted

49

their children were far more likely to have considered their child’s birth date than the
other families. Families with boys considered physical size more than families with girls.

Recall that the conceptual framework for this study is based on Bourdieu (1977)
and Lamont and Lareau’s (1988) work on cultural capital. Traditionally, cultural capital
relates to class differences in activation of resources. There do appear to be some
differences in factors considered between class-related groups in this study — speciﬁcally
between families whose children are served by Head Start and families who do not
qualify or at least did not chose to enroll their children in Head Start. However other
group differences are seen as well, speciﬁcally in gender. For example, parents of boys
were less likely to consider socio-emotional factors than parents of girls, regardless of
Head Start enrollment or not.

Lamont and Lareau’s (1988) notion of activation of cultural capital seems
relevant to these ﬁndings in that signiﬁcant differences exist among Head Start and non-
Head Start families in the degree to which they sought the advice of others (a way of
activating cultural capital) when making the kindergarten entry decision. Although both
Head Start families and non Head Start families report discussing the decision with others
(60% of Head Start families and 75% of non Head Start families), who they discussed the
decision with was quite different. With 60% more non-Head Start families than Head
Start families discussing the decision with friends, and 30% more non-Head Start
families discussing the decision with family, the decision making process in this respect
seems very different across the two groups. Head Start families were more reliant on the
preschool teacher than any other social inﬂuence while the non Head Start families

indicated that as the least accessed source of advice. The role of social contacts in

50

decision making seems fundamentally different for each group. The non-Head Start
group activates their social connections to process the decision while the Head Start
group seldom does. It would seem that the preschool teacher plays a larger role for Head
Start families than for non-Head Start families and while this might seem to be an
activation of the cultural capital, Head Start’s structure of required meetings between
teachers and families, minimizes the actual “activation”, or agency of the family. In short,
the family may or may not have instigated the contact. Regardless of the initiation, the
inﬂuence is present and while Head Start families reported discussing the decision with
few others, fully half of them discussed the decision with the preschool teacher. In light
of Head Start’s requirement for parent participation in classrooms and family attendance
at family education events, a surprisingly small number of Head Start families were
aware of other families making the kindergarten decision. Of the seventeen families
reporting that they knew others making this decision, only three of them were Head Start
families. It may be that Head Start is focusing on connecting parents to their own children
through parent night events, but not to other families. This may be worthy of
reconsideration, particularly since those families also don’t seem to be talking to other
friends or family about the decision, either. Interestingly, only 30% of Head Start families
report having considered advice from others while actually making the decision.

Findings in group differences by enrollment in Head Start or not, gender, and
child’s age seem consistent with research reported earlier in this paper regarding
differential rates of redshirting for different groups. More importantly, this study reveals
differences in the factors considered by these groups. As noted previously, national trends

in redshirting seem to favor withholding boys more ﬁequently than girls and for more

51

affluent families to withhold more ﬁequently than less afﬂuent families. While this study
reinforces that assertion, with ﬁve of the six children redshirted being boys and all being
non Head Start families, this study illuminates that families of boys are considering
different things than families of girls and that Head Start families are making the decision
with different inﬂuences than their non Head Start, possibly more afﬂuent, counterparts.
Additionally, although not noted in the previous research, families with older siblings
appear to consider some factors differently than families who are making the
kindergarten decision for the ﬁrst time.

In part, this may be related to the way families We the decision making process.
Lakoff (2004) suggests that the way a family ﬂames their understanding of a concept can
impact how they receive new, possibly conﬂicting, information about the concept. If the
Head Start families frame the decision to send or not send their children to school as a
private matter, they may not seek outside advice, outside inﬂuence may not affect their
thinking, and/or they may not identify outside inﬂuences as affecting their thinking. In
other words, the decision is theirs. This ties into the earlier ﬁnding that some families
received information about their children’s development from their child’s preschool
teacher, and discussed this information in their interview yet, when asked “Did you get
advice from anyone?” did not name the preschool teacher as someone consulted. The
information may not have been considered “advice.” Lakoff suggests that in the cases in
which outside inﬂuences agree with the family’s ﬁame, they don’t consider that an
inﬂuence. Where outside inﬂuences do not agree, the inﬂuence “bounces off” the frame

as irrelevant.

52

Families’ ﬂames of social capital for their children may be the best conception of
what is going on in their evaluation of the various factors presented here. Each family has
a view of what they want their child to achieve or become later in life, whether that is at
the end of kindergarten or in high school. They hold that ﬂame up to the range of factors
that might affect that outcome and make their decision with that in mind. For some, there
are few relevant factors and for others, many. Each family however, decides based on
what they believe is linked to their child’s success. This would also explain some of the
differences found in the decision making of the families with old siblings relative to those
without older siblings. Families with more experience in the school setting may frame
success differently than those without previous experience. They evaluate the decision
differently based on their view of the social currency needed for academic success.
Limitations of the current study

Although this study elicited data about many family characteristics, there may be
other important family characteristics that were missed. For example, the age of parents
was not obtained and it became evident over the course of the interviews that there were
substantial differences in parents’ ages, including what appeared to be signiﬁcant
differences between the Head Start parents’ ages and the non-Head Start parents’ ages.
Future studies might investigate the age of the parent as a factor.

Even using a semi-structured interview approach, it may be that some families
considered factors that they did not report because they did not think of it in relation to
the questions asked and/or because they felt uncomfortable reporting it. In addition,
answers to questions could sometimes be interpreted in more than one way. For example,

when asked if they considered a factor, parents may have responded negatively because

53

they really did not consider the factor at all or parents may have responded negatively
because their child showed no deﬁcit in that area and therefore it did not seem to warrant
consideration. These mean slightly different things, as in the latter case there is in fact
some consideration of the factor, at least enough to dismiss it as a concern. As another
example in which there could be multiple ways of interpreting an interview response,
consider the following comment: “She’s ﬁve. It’s a no-brainer.” This might indicate that
there is no decision to make because the family perceives that the child must attend at
that age. It might also mean that she is solidly displaying the behaviors of a ﬁve year old
child and therefore a good ﬁt in their local kindergarten. While I probed when I noticed
ambiguous responses such as this, naturally not all were recognized at the time. Future
studies could include a procedure for follow-up interviews to clarify ambiguous
responses.

Another possible limitation of the study is that the process by which parents were
identiﬁed for participation in the study varied for Head Start versus non-Head Start
settings, with former involving teacher referrals and the latter involving a mix of referrals
from teachers, ﬂiends, my own colleagues as well as by happenstance in two cases.
Perhaps this resulted in a different group of families/children than would have been found
if other means of referral had been used. Also, since Head Start teachers were asked
speciﬁcally for parents who might be willing to be interviewed about their decision, those
nominated may have had a better relationship with the teachers than those not nominated
and, as a result, the factors regarding discussing the decisions with the teacher may have

been over represented among the Head Start families.

54

Additionally, while the sample is adequate for descriptive statistics and use of
quotations, inferential statistics should be interpreted with caution.

Finally, there may well have been issues associated with race or culture that were
not captured by this predominantly white sample. (Recall that national trends in retention
varied along race lines (West, Meek & Hurst, 2003)). A ﬁrture study might investigate
potential differences by systematically designing the informant pool in terms of race,
ethnicity, home language, gender and age of respondent.

Strategies for Supporting Parental Decision Making

The following discussion is based on the assumption that the more informed a
parent is about his child’s skills and development, the expectation of schools, and the
school environment, the better that parent can make choices for that child. In the absence
of expert agreement on the “right” decision regarding delaying or beginning kindergarten,
there is near agreement among experts ﬁom NAEYC to the popular press that individual
families should gather information and give careful consideration when making this
decision for their individual child (see Keith, 2006; Ihejirika, 2006; Beginner’s Guide
Staff, 2006; CBS News, 2003, for examples). While there is no scientiﬁc evidence that
any decisions made are better than a random decision making a process (heads=you go to
kindergarten, tails=you stay home another year), there is fairly widespread belief that
informed choices are better than uninformed ones. That being said, it is important to note
that while the families in this study may have varied in the number of factors considered,
there is no reason to believe that more factors considered leads to better decision making.
The differences in decision making does tell us that families approach the decision in

different ways and that perhaps offering more ways to gain information may reach more

55

families. The following recommendations may assist schools and families in making the
best choice for their incoming kindergarteners.

In light of the broad range of factors that families consider and the variance of
factors across families, educators should consider a multi-faceted approach to discussing
kindergarten entry with families. It seems evident, based on Thelen’s work (2004), that
readiness for one class does not necessarily mean readiness for another. Thelen found that
kindergarten teachers, even within the same building, had vastly different ways of
viewing readiness, even disagreeing on what factors to consider. By preparing families
with a single list of behaviors that “Every Kindergartener Should Know”, parents receive
the false message that there is uniformity in kindergarten and that children can be ready
for it. Offering families multiple strategies for making the decision is the most reasonable
path. Whenever possible, families should be advised to:

0 Meet their child’s prospective teacher(s). Several families in this study
commented on feeling conﬁdent about sending their children to school
because they knew the teacher.

0 Keep in mind that the results of studies on effects of redshirting are mixed,
and in general little difference has been found among early kindergarten entry
and delayed kindergarten entry children in either academic or social
adjustment after kindergarten. The stakes aren’t as high as they may think.

Head Start programs should consider:

0 Head Start families were less likely to have consulted anyone about their

decision than non Head Start families in all categories (“others”, a teacher-not

the preschool teacher, family, ﬂiends) except the preschool teacher category.

56

Half of families with a child in Head Start discussed their decision with the
Head Start teacher. (Contrast that with 31% of non Head Start families
discussing the decision with their child’s preschool teacher.) It would seem
the role of the Head Start teacher in decision making is a signiﬁcant one.

0 Head Start fanrilies in this study reported not knowing other families making
the decision to send (or not) their child to kindergarten. (Recall that only 30%
of the families indicated knowing someone else making the decision.) It seems
that while families are required to engage in parent involvement opportunities,
these events may not be focused on promoting social connections among
families.

a The Head Start families in this study reported that they did not contact other
teachers, including their potential kindergarten teachers, when making this
decision. As a result, Head Start programs may want to take a more active role
in facilitating the relationship with the potential kindergarten.

Schools should be advised to:

0 Reach out to prospective families helping them understand the
expectations of the kindergartens in their building. Families in this study
reported feeling most comfortable with their decision when they knew
more about the program.

0 Make contact with families, by letter or phone in the summer prior to
children’s starting kindergarten. Again, families in this study appreciated

knowing the teacher in advance of enrollment.

57

Make special efforts to connect with families who are new to the district
or are “ﬁrst time” parents in the school. These parents do not have the
experiences of their previous children to help them in their decision-
making. Families in this study who did not have older children considered
different factors than families who did. Schools wanting to inﬂuence
decision-making may want to consider these differences.

Recognize that preschool teacher’s inﬂuence, while considered by some
families in this study, may not carry the same weight as family or ﬂiends
for some families. Create a network of parents who can advise in—coming
kindergarten families about what to expect.

Consider the ramiﬁcations of wide ranges of ages in classrooms and
whether they want to inﬂuence parental decision making one way or the
other. If they do want to inﬂuence parental decision making, some of the
recommendations take on particular importance.

Urge families to consult with preschool teachers and consider their advice
as part of the decision. This study reﬂects variation across groups in
parents accessing preschool teachers’ advice.

Work with families, and other agencies, to identify cases in which possible
developmental delays would beneﬁt ﬁom early intervention. The families
in this study who chose to redshirt their children were less familiar with
the school than their non-redshirting counterparts and might have missed

out on opportunities for their children as a result.

58

Carefully consider creating a kindergarten transition plan to support
children’s entry (Pianta & Bennett, 1997). This may be especially
important for families in Head Start who are seemingly more isolated in

their decision-making and may know less about the potential kindergarten.

Policy makers should consider:

That a child’s age is a factor that families consider. (Recall that in this
study, 17 of the 26 families considered age when making the decision.) As
states are debating the age of entry issue, they would be wise to hear what
families have to say on the matter.

Differential rates of redshirting by different groups reﬂect differing factors
considered. Policy makers interested in inﬂuencing rates of redshirting
need to consider these factors and the decision making processes.

Asking that standardized test results be controlled for the child’s
chronological age at time of testing. Unless and until that occurs, given the
relationship between age and test scores, districts with high redshirted
populations will be at an automatic advantage in test scores over less
afﬂuent districts. Although the numbers in the current study were small,
they replicate the larger national ﬁndings of more affluent families
retaining their children in the eligible year. (Recall that none of the Head
Start families in this study retained their children.) Districts with higher
populations of affluent families are likely to have classes of older children
where districts with families of modest means may have classes of

younger children. Given all the other beneﬁts of afﬂuence on education,

59

this trend adds insult to injury for children in poverty. Controlling testing
for age will at least partially level the playing ﬁeld.
Directions for Future Research

In the course of the interviews, parents discussed their perceptions of their child’s
readiness for school. The study did not investigate the accuracy of those perceptions by
assessing children’s abilities and dispositions across academic and social factors. Future
studies might investigate parents’ ability to accurately evaluate their children’s abilities
and the subsequent decisions they make for their children’s schooling.

This study suggests that a family’s social relationships have some inﬂuence on
their decision making. Further studies to actually track the inﬂuence, perhaps asking
families to keep a log of any discussions they have with anyone, news items regarding
kindergarten entry, speakers they hear present, and so on during the year prior to the
kindergarten entry decision. Deeper understanding of those inﬂuences, and parents’
thoughts on those inﬂuences, might yield a more in-depth sense of the decision-making
process employed.

In part, the current study focused on families enrolled in Head Start and families
that were not enrolled in Head Start. An interesting study might be to examine
differences and similarities of Head Start families and low income families not enrolled
in Head Start. While some of the non-Head Start families in this study may have been
low income, I did not expressly select families to look at that possibility and probably
few were. It would be interesting to see what impact, if any, Head Start had on the

decision making process when controlled for income.

60

Other possibilities include longitudinal studies investigating decisions parents
made when children were age eligible, and how they made them, and then involving
parents and others in re-evaluating those decisions a year, ﬁve years or ﬁfteen years later.
Studies like these can be correlated to student achievement patterns as well as parental
decision making practices.

As suggested previously, a similar study examining differences or similarities in
decision making controlled for race, ethnicity, language, etc. would likely yield
information that allows for better understanding across groups of families. While the
current study gets at some of this thinking, it is limited by its nearly exclusively Euro-
American informant pool.

Finally, examination of standardized testing data across states might reveal that
some districts’ scores are affected by student entry age. In light of the high stakes nature
of state testing in many areas, this, more than any other study, may result in efforts to
better understand and respond to redshirting.

Conclusion

The kindergarten entry decision is considered by some families to be among the
highest stakes decision they can make in the early childhood years. In the families’ eyes,
unlike choosing the wrong stroller or baby food, this decision has long term ramiﬁcations
that are difﬁcult to un—do. Once a child starts school he is unlikely to stop. Other families
see school entry as just another part of what happens in the early years without many
factors to consider. This study points to signiﬁcant differences in parents’ thinking about
entry particularly among parents of boys, families who are enrolled in Head Start, and

those with older siblings.

61

These differences may result in differences in children’s experiences, class
composition, and subsequent student achievement. As education researchers wrestle with
the growing differences among achievement results across children, schools, and
districts, we have examined many factors that may speak to the issue. But redshirting has
received little attention. With respect to this area, researchers need to get off the bench

and get into the game.

62

Appendix A
Interview Protocol for Kindergarten Study

Before the interview, at the initial phone call to set up interview, conﬁrm child’s birth
date as being on or before December 1, 1999.

Upon meeting family, visit a bit to establish rapport. Be honest in purpose for interview
and invite honesty from the family.

TURN ON TAPE.

Thank you, for agreeing to be interviewed for this study. This interview
will be audiotaped so that I can analyze the interviews later. Do you agree to be
audiotaped?

 

Please remember that you don’t have to answer any question that makes you
uncomfortable and you can stop the interview at any time. Are you ready?

{SECTION 1: THE CHILD}
My ﬁrst questions are about your child. Remind me, when is his/her birth date?

Who lives here with you and your child?

Who does your child play with?
0 Are they family?
0 Friends?

0 What ages are they?

What are your child’s academic skills like?

What are your child’s social skills like?

How does your child’s size compare to others his/her age?

What are your child’s physical skills like?
o Is s/he pretty coordinated?
o How does s/he do with running, jumping, climbing, etc.?
o How does s/he do with small motor tasks like holding a pencil or cutting

with scissors?

What kinds of things does your child enjoy doing?
0 Does s/he choose activities that are active or would s/he rather be quiet?
a Does s/he like to be read to? If so, what kinds of things does s/he like?
0 Does s/he watch TV? What are his/her favorite shows?

How does your child handle new situations?

63

Has your child ever been left somewhere without you? How ﬁequently? Tell me about
that environment. How long has s/he been going there?

{SECTION 2: THINKING ABOUT DECISION}

When children are your child’s age, people sometimes send them to kindergarten in the
fall and sometimes keep them home for another year. Have you considered what you’ll
do for {child’s name} in the fall?
{If sending to school, go on. If not, ask:

What will you do with him/her instead?

What did you think about when you made that decision? OR What kinds of things are
you considering while you are making this decision?
PROBE {repeat until parents respond no}:
Is there anything else you have considered in making this decision?
POSSIBLE FOLLOW-UP PROBES:
0 Did you consider your child’s academic skills? If so, what thoughts did you have
about them? Did you have any concerns about them?
0 Did you consider your child’s social skills? If so, what thoughts did you have
about them? Did you have any concerns about them?
Did you consider your child’s physical size? What did you think about it?
Did you consider advice from others? Whose? Have you trusted their advice in
the past? How did that turn out?
0 Did you consider something I haven’t asked about?

What concerns do you have about them?
How do you feel about your child’s physical size?

How have your ﬂiends and family responded to your thinking?
Do you know other families in your family or community that have gone through this
process?

0 Did you talk with them about their decision?

0 What did they share with you?

0 What did they do/ are they doing?

{SECTION 3: PERCEPTIONS OF SCHOOL}
These next questions are about the school where your child will eventually go.

In general, what do you think goes on in kindergarten?
What do you know about the kindergarten your child will attend?

How did you learn about it?

Do you have other children in school? How old were they when they entered
kindergarten? What were their experiences like?

What do you think a child really should be able to do when s/he enters kindergarten?

{SECTION 4- PARENT’S BACKGROUND}
These last questions are about you and your own experiences.

How old were you when you entered school?

How was your own transition to school? IF APPLICABLE: Do you know if your
spouse/partner had a similar experience?
0 Why do you think you had the experience you had?
0 Did you consider your own experience when deciding what to do for (child’s
name)?
When you think about your own schooling experiences, what comes to mind? IF
APPLICABLE: Do you know if your spouse/partner had a similar experience?

How much schooling did you have? IF APPLICABLE: How about your spouse/partner?
What do you do now? IF APPLICABLE: What does your spouse do?

{SECTION 5: FINAL THOUGHTS}

Is there anything you’d like to add to help me understand your thinking about sending
{child’s name} to kindergarten?

Thank you very much for your time! If you think of anything you’d like to add or change,

please let me know. Here is my card and you can reach me at anytime.
TURN OFF TAPE.

65

Table 1.1
Table 1.2
Table 1.3
Table 1.4

Table 1.5

List of Tables

F arnily Demographic Information ............................................... 67
Demographics of Children in Sample ......................................... 68
Speciﬁc Factors Considered: Academic and Socio-emotional ............ 69
Summary of Findings by Gender ............................................. 71
Summary of Findings by Head Start and Non-Head Start ................. 72

66

 

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socio-emotional factors .................................................................... 75

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82

CHAPTER 2
WHAT LIES AHEAD?: PARENTS’ PERCEPTIONS OF KINDERGARTEN
By
V. Susan Bennett-Armistead

Parents make decisions about their children’s readiness for kindergarten with varying
levels of knowledge of and experience with current kindergartens. In light of recent
changes in the demands of kindergartens, parents making this decision may not have an
accurate view of the kindergarten their child will enter. This interview study, part of a
larger study on parent decision making around kindergarten entry, examines the
conceptions of kindergarten held by 26 families whose children will be age eligible to
enter kindergarten in the focal year. Some of the families seemed aware that kindergarten
has become more academic in nature while others describe the kindergarten their child
will enter reﬂecting little actual knowledge of the kindergarten. The most frequent
depictions of more academically focused, less play based kindergartens, appeared in
families who had older children, families of boys, families not enrolled in Head Start, and

families whose children were among the older half of the sample.

83

PARENTS’ (MIS)CONCEPTIONS OF KINDERGARTEN

When most parents of today’s preschoolers were in school, kindergarten looked
quite different than it does today. It may have included a rest time, milk and graham
crackers, an introduction to the alphabet and writing names, and an outside play time.

The kindergartens of 25 years ago have been transformed (Freeman and Hatch, 1989;
Hitz and Wright, 1988; Shepard and Smith, 1988). The views of kindergarten of some of
those former kindergarteners have not. Not surprisingly, some adults are unaware of the
evolution of kindergarten in the last generation. This lack of awareness may have
implications for families making decisions about sending their children to kindergarten,
about how families prepare their children to attend kindergarten, and about how families
interpret information coming from the school about their child’s progress (Graue, 1992).
For example, families envisioning kindergarten as a welcoming play-based environment
might send a child to school sooner than if they thought of the school as structured and
imbued with academic rigor. Families that see kindergarten as an academic setting might
work with their child to gain certain skills and dispositions that they expect would come
in handy in that setting, such as letter identiﬁcation or counting to 20. Families perceiving
kindergarten as preparation for later learning in ﬁrst grade, and not academic in its own
right, might dismiss information about a child struggling academically in the kindergarten
year as irrelevant and premature, thereby potentially missing opportunities for early
intervention. Families’ perceptions of kindergarten may matter, in the decision to have
their child enter, how they prepare that child for entry, and how they perceive the

experience while the child is enrolled.

84

A Brief History of Kindergarten

Friedrich Froebel started the ﬁrst kindergarten in Germany in 1840. The program
was designed as an opportunity for young children to explore their world and play
materials, which he called “gifts” rather than toys, with gentle support from caring adults
(Brosterman, 2002). F roebel’s vision was brought to the Boston area in the late 1800s by
Elizabeth Peabody. Here, she advocated for a “genuine kindergarten” that is “a company
of children under 7 years old, who do not learn to read, write, and cipher.” Alternatively,
“false” kindergartens focused on academics (Weil, 2007). This play based design held
steady in many kindergarten classrooms until the mid 19803.

Change in kindergarten design and focus began in earnest at that time and was
met with varying responses. In Spodek’s Today ’s Kindergarten (1986), he summarizes
the debate in the introduction:

Some educators have argued that since most of the children in kindergarten

already have had 1 or even 2 years of prior education, kindergarten programs

ought to be modiﬁed to take this learning into consideration. Kindergartens could
become more educationally advanced. What has been taught in the primary grades
might now be taught in kindergarten. Others argue that whatever the prior
educational experience, kindergarten children as S-year-olds are not any more
mature than they ever have been and the traditional kindergarten programs, which

have always served 5-year-olds well, will continue to do so. (p. vii)

Additionally, perhaps in part in response to increasing numbers of children enrolled in

full day child care prior to kindergarten, full day kindergartens started to appear around

85

the state in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. Debate raged about the appropriateness of a
full day kindergarten for such young children and what the content of such a kindergarten
should be. Programs such as Developmental Kindergartens, Begindergartens, and Young
Fives classrooms popped up to offer environments for children perceived as not yet
“ready” for the traditional kindergarten.

Take Michigan, where this study took place, as a case. In Michigan, kindergartens
have altered signiﬁcantly in the last 25 years. While today we have kindergarten grade
level content expectations (Michigan Department of Education, 2007), in the 1980’s,
when many of the parents in the current study would have been in kindergarten
themselves, no statewide standards existed. Individual districts generated their
expectations for kindergarten outcomes. The Michigan Association for the Education of
Young Children published The Developing Kindergarten: Programs, Children and
Teachers (1990) to publicly discuss the issues associated with the changing kindergarten.

Given the range of opinions among experts on the topic, it’s not surprising that
the Michigan state standards for early education (deﬁned as pre-kindergarten through
second grade) were not in place until 1992 (Buch, 2004). These new standards reﬂected
the discomfort of the ﬁeld in their necessary vagueness, which allowed individual
districts to continue to decide full day or half, and what the content should be (Michigan
Board of Education, 1992). For example, while there is much space dedicated to what
children can do, what children are expected to do remained open with language such as,
“Children will. . .understand that oral language can be recorded. . ..begin to develop an
understanding of purposes for writing. . .increase in the understanding of sound/symbol

relationships” (Michigan Board of Education, 1992). These standards were written to

86

address the continuum of development from preschool through second grade rather than
with speciﬁc expectations children should meet by the end of kindergarten.

Today, graduating kindergarteners in Michigan are expected to know all the
letters, upper and lower case, and begin to associate letters and sounds, have a developing
sight word bank, understand how books “work”, ability to share their ideas in writing
using phonetic spelling, ability to count to 30, Although not named in the Michigan
standards, in my experience, schools also continue to expect young children also master
such basics as knowing their colors and ability to care for their own dressing and toileting
needs. In all, there are 59 language arts standards and 18 math standards for kindergarten
(Michigan Department of Education, 2007). We’re way past milk and graham crackers.

Other states have struggled in their own way with these issues. Walsh (1989)
chronicles the changing kindergarten in Virginia, noting more children repeating
kindergarten, increased use in screening instnunents to sort out “readiness”, increase in
districts offering a prekindergarten or Young Fives program, and increasing numbers of
schools focusing on academic skills. Still other states (22 total) have conﬁonted the
change since the 1975 by increasing the school entry age (Saluja, Scott-Little, & Clifford,
2000).

Some might point to the No Child Left Behind Act with its national attention to
test scores in the early years of elementary school outcomes as party to the increased
attention on academics in kindergarten. In order for third graders to be reading at grade
level, second grade, ﬁrst grade, and kindergarten all become years to prepare to meet this
benchmark. The reality is of course that this trend started long before NCLB arrived on

the scene. Spodek (1982) documents an erosion of play in kindergartens in favor of

87

increased attention to academic topics. Walsh (1989) echoes it a full decade before
NCLB.

This change in the climate of kindergarten has not gone unnoticed by educators.
At the same time, educators are not in agreement about what it means for kindergarten.
Nationally, differences in teachers’ perceptions of what children need to be ready for
kindergarten were noted by Lin, Lawrence, and Gorrell (2003). By investigating 3035
kindergarten teachers in the Early Childhood Longitudinal study, these researchers found
that younger teachers were more inclined to describe readiness in academic terms while
older teachers focused on social aspects of readiness. There were regional differences as
well, with teachers in the south expecting higher academic preparedness than those in
other parts of the country. In one study conducted in one of the districts also used in the
current study, Thelen (2004) found that even teachers in the same building didn’t
necessarily agree on what skills children should have when entering kindergarten.

We do not know to what extent parents are also uncertain. Given that the
kindergartens they themselves experienced existed a generation ago, they may or may not
be in touch with the current climate. As stated earlier, this may matter as families are
making choices about sending their children to school, preparing them for success in that
setting, and responding to information coming home about the child’s success or
struggles in that environment.

Why Parents’ (Mis)Conceptions of Kindergarten Matter

Just as there is controversy about the content and structure of kindergarten, there

is also a raging debate about what it means to be “ready”. The issue comes down to a

discussion of where the “readiness” lies. The National Association for the Education of

88

Young Children stance rejects the notion that children must be ready for school, rather,
they argue, schools should be ready for children. . .however prepared or ill-prepared they
come. NAEYC in its policy statement argues that “The only legally and ethically
defensible criterion for determining school entry is whether the child has reached the
chronological age of school entry” (NAEYC, 1990). Parents in the meantime have been
making the decision themselves for decades, weighing a variety of factors as discussed in
another paper from this study. For several years, the popular press has noted parental
anxiety regarding the decision to send their children to kindergarten (see Ihejirika, 2006,
for example). My own mother-in-law recounts the worry that her oldest child, with a fall
birthday in 1960, wasn’t ready for school. Although she sent him when eligible, she
continues to wonder how his life might have been different had she retained him for a
year. Would he have had all the issues of poor judgment as a new driver? Would he have
stayed in college were he not nearly two years younger than everyone else? Although he
eventually did complete college and has proven to be a contributing member of society,
the parental guilt still nags at her 40 years after the decision was made.

Other parents might decide to take a different actions to prepare their child
quickly, such as buying academic workbooks for their prekindergarten child or enrolling
them in enrichment classes, in the hopes that teaching their child academic skills would
assist them in preparedness for the kindergarten year. These actions may depend on what
they think the kindergarten will be like.

Still other parents, like me, might argue that while their child is ready, the
pressure of the school environment is so great that we do not want to prematurely expose

our children to it. I withheld my fall birthday child for just that reason. This practice of

89

delaying entry for a year, called “redshirting’ after the practice in athletics, although
controversial, appears to be on the rise among some groups as noted by Graue and
DiPerna (2000). In particular, affluent, Caucasian, families with boys, families with
children born in the later half of the year are more likely to choose delayed entry. The
redshirting trend is beginning to cross those old borders however, with up to one in 11
children being delayed (Graue & DiPema,2000). Evidently, in some affluent parts of the
country, these numbers are much higher. Weil (2007) reports a district in North Carolina
with a 26% redshirting rate. It seems that families are increasingly deciding their children
are unready for formal school, or perhaps, like me, that school is unready for their
children.

This practice has caused concern among some researchers that an increase in the
incidence of redshirting, resulting in classrooms of older, seemingly more capable
children, might encourage schools to ratchet up kindergarten curricula to look more like
ﬁrst grades, thereby making the situation worse instead of better for children who are less
well prepared for school and/or who do begin school when age eligible (Diamond,
Reagan, & Bandyk, 2000). In the already ramped up kindergarten, this might leave many
more parents in doubt about the readiness of their children. . .if they are aware of the
changes.

As a preschool teacher and administrator for nearly twenty years, I learned
ﬁrsthand that families regularly worry about when a child should go to kindergarten.
Every year, around February, parents would ask, “Do you think __ is ready for
kindergarten?” Curiously, families never asked about the kindergarten itself. It would

seem that the other side of the question is what do parents think their children should be

90

ready for? In other words, what do families think goes on in kindergartens? If school
districts are to adequately advise families thinking of sending their children to
kindergarten, in part, helping them understand what they are signing up for is essential. It
may be that some families continue to view kindergarten as play-based as they
themselves may have experienced years ago, not anticipating the level of rigor demanded
by many 21St century kindergartens. This raises several concerns. First, is that such
families would simply send their children to kindergarten without even investigating the
program or seeking advice about readiness. While the National Association for the
Education of Young Children would applaud that, children might well get caught in the
crossﬁre of the readiness debate. Second, parents might not be preparing their children
for entry into a more academic setting by taking advantage of home- or preschool-based
opportunities to promote academic skills such as letter recognition or phonemic
awareness through word play or read alouds. Third, once the child is enrolled,
communication from the school around academic topics might be read with a jaundiced
eye if families perceive the school as departing ﬁ'om what the parents experienced
themselves. In short, parents perceiving school as largely social and play based might
view comments regarding academics as premature and not feel the need to act on that
information.

In an effort to better understand parents’ thinking about readiness, this study seeks
to explore what families think is happening in contemporary kindergartens.

Research Questions

This study addresses the questions:

91

o In what ways do families with age eligible kindergarten children describe
kindergarten?

0 Do the descriptions of kindergarten differ by child demographic
information, including presence of older siblings, school district in which
the child lives, and whether or not the child attended Head Start?

0 In what ways, if any, do families report learning about their children’s
potential kindergarten programs?

Method

Because the purpose of this study is to understand parents’ perceptions about
kindergarten, a semi-structured interview methodology was the most appropriate choice
(Weiss, 1995). That is, basic, open ended questions were crafted prior to the interview
along with a series of possible follow-up probes that allowed for the interview to chart
territory that might not have been predicted by the prepared script.

Even though a survey would allow for study of a larger number of informants,
interview methodology allowed for more probing, less directive investigation into
parents’ views of kindergarten. Interview studies in other areas of parent research have
yielded many important insights for the ﬁeld (see Edwards’ work on parent stories
(1999), Moll’s work on families’ funds of knowledge (1993), or Bell’s work on school
choice decision-making (2005) for example).

Context of study

This study was conducted across three school districts in central Michigan, one

rural, one suburban and one urban. Within the rural and suburban districts, children could

attend an alternative to kindergarten called Developmental Kindergarten, Young Fives or

92

(deceptively) High Fives, depending on who was describing it. In this alternative,
children are expected to complete this readiness year and then proceed to a kindergarten
year the next year. (Very rarely, a child will be placed into a ﬁrst grade program after a
developmental kindergarten year. The included schools report that this occurs about as
frequently as any other grade skipping, however. Therefore in this study a year of
developmental kindergarten taken when the child is in fact age eligible for regular
kindergarten is considered “redshirting.”) Additionally, in all the districts, Head Start
provided the opportunity for an additional year of Head Start even when the child is age
eligible for kindergarten if it was determined by teachers that the child would beneﬁt
from such an experience before entering kindergarten. Since the urban district did not
offer a developmental kindergarten option for its children, only those families qualifying
for Head Start were guaranteed free opportunities to attend an additional year of
preschool. In addition to free, public options, there were several private and parochial
schools across all the districts that offered admittance to children eligible age for
kindergarten. In short, families in the study all had options as alternatives to kindergarten
entry for their children. However, families varied in whether they reported awareness of
these options.
Informants

A total of 26 families were included in the study. (Twenty nine were interviewed
but data was lost on three families when the tapes, although tested in advance, were
inexplicably found to be blank.) Each family had a child who was age-eligible to attend
kindergarten in the interview year, 2004-2005. For some, this was the second year of age

eligibility; for others it was not. The children’s ages ranged from 4.9 to 6.0 at the time of

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the interview (mean = 5.27 years). Ten of the families interviewed had been previously
enrolled in Head Start, four rural and three each in the suburban and urban districts.
Sixteen families either had a child attending a preschool program (other than Head Start)
or a playgroup experience, 3 rural, 6 suburban and 7 urban. In total, seven families were
in the rural district, nine in the suburban district and ten in the urban district.

Preschool programs were selected at random from a list of licensed centers,
contacted by the investigator, and asked for referrals to families whose children were age-
eligible to begin kindergarten (N = 5). Referrals of children not enrolled in Head Start
came from colleagues of the investigator (N = 3), random meetings of families in fast
food locations and community parks (N = 2) and by word of mouth through interviewed
families (N = 6). Children enrolled in Head Start were referred by their teachers (N = 10).
In each instance, it was emphasized that the children need not have any special
characteristic other than age-eligibility for kindergarten and parents willing to discuss
their thinking about sending their child to kindergarten. Families were contacted by
phone in most cases (with the exception of the two families met by chance) and were told
the purpose of the study was to better understand what families consider when making
the decision about sending their child to kindergarten. Families were invited to participate
in the study and be interviewed. Four families whose children were enrolled in Head Start
were contacted and declined involvement. The reason cited was that they didn’t think
there was a decision to be made that their children were 5 and they were going to school.
No other families declined involvement.

Table 2.1 details the variation of demographic characteristics of the participating

families. These differences are ﬂamed by enrollment or non-enrollment in Head Start.

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Two of the families were headed by grandparents rearing their grandchildren. Twenty
families had made the kindergarten entry decision with other children in their families.
Table 2.2 indicates the demographics of the children in the study. In nine of the families,
the focal child was male, in seventeen, female. One family was Aﬁican American, one
Sudanese and Guatemalan, with the remaining being Euro-American.
Data Collection Procedure
I conducted all the interviews. In the cases of two parent (or grandparent)
families, they were given the option of including both adults in the interview or having
one parent represent them both. Only one family opted for having both adults present.
Interviews were conducted wherever the family felt most comfortable or found to be
most convenient. Twenty one of the interviews were conducted in the family’s home.
One was conducted in my ofﬁce, one at the parent’s workplace, two in local coffee shops,
and one in the parking lot of a child’s tae kwon do lesson.
The interview questions and responses that are the focus of this paper are as
follow:
0 Designed to explore families’ perception of kindergarten: In general, what
do you think goes on in kindergarten?
0 Designed to elicit families’ views of school readiness. Sample question:
What do you think children really should be able to do when they enter
kindergarten?
0 Designed to draw out families’ knowledge of the child’s potential school.
Sample questions: Are you familiar with the kindergarten your child will

attend? How did you learn about it?

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These are a subset of questions from a larger interview focused on parents’ decision
making about whether or not to send their child to kindergarten, including factors
families consider when making that decision. The complete interview protocol is
provided in Appendix A.

In an effort to minimize any inﬂuence that experience actually attending the
kindergarten classroom might have on the families’ responses, I conducted the interviews
in late summer or early fall. This was after families had made their decision regarding
whether or not to send their child to kindergarten, but before their view of kindergarten
would have been inﬂuenced by their child’s experience. If interviews were conducted too
late in the year, their experience in the kindergarten may color their report of decision
making. Three of these families had chosen the previous year to send their children to
developmental kindergarten during the “redshirting” year. It is possible that experiences
in the developmental kindergarten year did inﬂuence in some ways their thinking about
kindergarten.

I took minimal notes as it has been noted that some informants, particularly those
with previous bad experiences with schooling or “experts”, can feel threatened or
intimidated by note taking (Weiss, 1995). Instead, I employed active listening strategies
designed to draw out and clarify the informant’s position. The protocol, as given in
Appendix A, was held constant for all informants to avoid disparity in responses by
individuals or groups based on how the questions were asked or responded to by the
interviewer.

Data Analysis Procedures

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All family interviews were assigned a code number and then transcribed by a paid
transcriptionist for my later analysis. The transcriptionist did not have information prior
to the transcription about the families, including which families had older children or
whether or not the families had children attending Head Start. Of course, some families
gave some of this information during the interview. Transcriptions included both the
interviewer’s and the informant’s speech. All meaningful utterances were included as
were pauses longer than 2 seconds (implying thoughtful consideration). Vocal place
holders (“um”, “er”, “hm”) were omitted unless they were repeated, which might denote
hesitation or uncertainty in the respondent. This was done to distill the transcripts down
to their meaning rather than their literal translation and to make the ﬂow of the transcripts
smoother. However, if interrupted by a child, the transcription reﬂected that and the talk
was included in the transcript. In three instances, the tape was turned off: once so the
parent could address the child and redirect him or her to another activity so that we could
speak about the child without the child being present, once while a baby was crying in
another room and needed to be tended, and once while a train roared by rendering the
interview inaudible. When the child/baby/train left the area, the interview resumed and
the tape was turned on.

While both Strauss (1987) and Miles and Huberman (1984) suggest that analysis
begin during the data collection phase of interviewing, I did not begin formal analysis
until all interviews were transcribed. I felt strongly that it was important to keep the
interviews as consistent as possible from one to another; beginning analysis while still

interviewing might have inadvertently inﬂuenced the interview procedures I used (e.g.,,,

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follow up prompts) in later interviews. Of course, I did hear the interviews as I conducted
them.

I deve10ped initial categories for coding based on impressions deve10ped during
the interviews and expectations I had developed in planning for the study. I then applied
these categories to the transcripts employing the method described by Glaser and Strauss
(1967) and Berkowitz (1997). As expected, the initial coding categories were incomplete
and additional coding was necessary to fully capture the factors present in the data. For
example, initial coding categories I had developed did not capture that some families
viewed kindergarten readiness as being able to respect authority. Coding continued until
an exhaustive set of categories was developed. In addition to coding for parents’
perceptions of kindergarten, other coding was conducted with other foci not addressed in
this paper.

The coding system was applied to each transcript. For example, this passage was
coded as including academic descriptors and social descriptors, but not play descriptors:

Based on knowledge ﬁom my older son. School , it’s a lot more intense I guess

than you would think, we used to think of kindergarten. I feel like they already

should know the basics, the alphabet, counting. A lot of it’s rules, learning how to
work together as a group. Reading skills. (Mrs. Coolidge 8/31/04)
Each code was given a numeric assignment, yes = 1 and no = 0, and then entered into an
SPSS database.

After entering the individually coded cases into an SPSS database, I employed a
sorting method described by Weiss (1995) to group the data and their representative cases

by category. That is, categorical ﬁles were generated with excerpts from individual cases

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reﬂecting each category. For example, the category reﬂecting “academic description”
included excerpts of interviews from the 20 excerpts of families that used academic terms
in describing kindergarten. This combination of purely quantitative with qualitative
representation allows for a richer depiction of the data. The quantiﬁed database allows for
numeric groupings while the qualitative collection of excerpts facilitates looking across
the text of the interviews themselves.

As the investigator, I did both the coding and data entry of all data. To assure
reliability in the coding system however, three interviews were randomly selected for an
outside coder to analyze. The coder was asked to read the entire interview but code only
the passages reﬂecting parents’ perceptions of kindergarten. This coding was compared
to my own and found to be in 92% agreement.

To determine reliability in data entry, three randomly selected interviews were
blindly double-entered into the database, that is, the original entries were not visible
during the second round of entries. The second round of entries were compared against
the 192 original entries and found to be 99.48% accurate. After investigating reliability of
coding and entry, data was analyzed to ascertain frequency of occurrence of the type of
descriptors used (play, social or academic) across respondents, as well as in relation to
child characteristics of age, whether or not the child had older siblings who might have
attended kindergarten previously, and whether the child attended a Head Start program.
Additionally, the data was analyzed by frequency of occurrence across districts and
subgroups within districts. Descriptive statistics and interview excerpts are used to report
results.

Results

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In the following section, I report on parents’ perceptions of kindergarten in
general including the content of their descriptions and the complexity of their
descriptions. This section will also address the nature of the descriptions, in particular
whether they focus on kindergarten as academic, as social, as play-based, or some
combination of these. Additionally, in subsequent sections, these responses will be parsed
out by groups including individual districts; those families whose children were enrolled
in Head Start and those who were not; and families who had older children having
already experienced kindergarten and those families who did not. Finally, it is useful to
note that families reported a number of skills as necessary for children to be ready to
begin kindergarten. Table 2.3 outlines those skills and the frequency of the farrrilies’
reporting.

Variation in the Perceptions of the Role of Kindergarten

Parents varied a great deal in their perception of what goes on in kindergarten.
While some families indicated they didn’t know about the kindergarten, others described
kindergarten in terms of opportunities to play, learn acadenrics and/or social skills (see
Table 2.4). It is important to note that some families had more than one response to this
question and therefore more than one of these three categories might have been
represented in their answers. For example, some families indicated that the kindergarten
was focused both on academics and social experiences. The following sections are
broken down by those responses. If a farrrily had responses that fell into more than one
category, I discuss those in the sections of combined categories and do not include them
in the discussions of individual categories (i.e. play only, academic only, social

descriptors only).

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No Descriptors

There were two interviewees who provided no descriptors for this kindergarten.
One was a Head Start parent; one was a non Head Start parent, both from the suburban
district. While offering no actual descriptors, this Head Start parent did indicate a
knowledge of kindergarten change:

Urn, well, I think, it’s not like how it used to be when I went to school and I,

when I went to kindergarten. There’s not a lot of play time anymore. So ah, I

know they get their recess, but other than that... (Ms. Mills, 10/ 4/ 04)

Mrs. Mills describes kindergarten as not play based and could indicate that she thinks it
is academic instead. She is not explicit enough, however for us to be sure of her views.
Although both parents in this group indicated that they didn’t know about kindergarten in
general, both went on to say they were familiar with the kindergarten where their child
would attend.

Play-Based Descriptors

Of those families who described kindergarten with a single descriptor, two
described it as play-based. Both were Head Start parents, one from a rural district and one
from the urban district.

A play-based case. Ms. McCormick is a single mother of two children, Taylor,
age 7 and Katie, whose birthday is in late September. Katie attended Head Start in the
two years prior to kindergarten. Her mother describes her as very smart, able write
everyone’s name in the family, knowing the alphabet as well as colors and shapes. Ms
McCormick reports that though Katie doesn’t like to share, she’s a people person who

makes ﬁiends quite easily. As her mother describes her, physically, Katie is taller and

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heavier than her peers, but active and skilled in both ﬁne motor tasks such as cutting and
large motor tasks such as climbing and running. Katie also enjoys being read to and
watching Cliﬂord, Rugrats, and children’s videos. When Ms. McCormick goes to work,
Katie stays with her grandpa.

When asked what Ms. McCormick was planning to do with Katie during the
eligibility year, Ms. McCormick quickly reported that Katie would be attending the
neighborhood kindergarten, indicating that little thought was necessary about the
decision, “She’s just ready. She’s really smart. I think she’s ready to go.” Her only
concern about Katie was her ability to share. “Sharing’s a big deal. She really gots to
learn how to share.”

She was far more detailed in what she thinks children should be able to do in
kindergarten however, “Be able to write her name, know the alphabet, colors, shapes and
be potty train .”

Although Katie’s birth date will make her one of the youngest children in her
class, Ms. McCormick indicates that she never thought about that, instead focusing on
how smart Katie is. Katie will start kindergarten at age four years, eleven months, fully
six months younger than Taylor was when he began school. (8/26/04)

Katie will be having the same teacher that her brother Taylor had two years ago.
Her mother reports, “He’s really awesome. He’s a man so I like that because her dad’s
not always around so that’s a really good role model, and um, he’s an awesome teacher.”
Taylor had a positive experience that his mother equates with his being smart. “He was in
ﬁrst grade last year. He read at a sixth grade level. He’s just very smart.” Despite her

previous experience with this kindergarten, indeed, this teacher, when asked what she

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thinks goes on in kindergarten in general, Ms. McCormick stated, “A lot of hands on
playing. Um, I have no idea.”

Ms. McCormick presents a case of a parent with some knowledge of a classroom
through her previous experience but still a bit unclear about the nature of that
kindergarten. Her response to what children should be able to do is fairly academic yet
she reports that kindergarten is play-based. Her added focus on Katie’s ability to share
might make us wonder if she thinks social skills will or won’t be a focus of instruction in
the kindergarten. The other parent who indicated that play was part of the classroom was
similarly vague. It is difficult to know whether this vagueness comes ﬁ'om unfamiliarity
or from a lack of vocabulary to describe what goes on in a play-based setting. In any
event, her comments are at least mixed and make analysis difﬁcult.

Academic Descriptors

Six parents used only academics to describe the role of kindergarten. Three of
them were Head Start parents; three were non Head Start parents. Of these one was from
the rural district (non Head Start), one was from the suburban district (Head Start) and
four were from the urban district (2 Head Start and 2 non Head Start). One such parent,
of a child who was not in Head Start in the rural district, said

A whole lot of nothin’! They get their ABCs. They get their 1238 and their safety

and stuff like that, I think, is um great. I know they’re doing a lot more than I did

as far as computers. I just think they’re way ahead, that they don’t need to be

doing that right now. (Mrs. Landon, 10/5/04)

Mrs. Landon is indicating mixed feelings about the change. Evidently Mrs. Landon

preferred a somewhat less acaderrric-focused kindergarten.

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A Head Start parent, who was in the urban district, described it this way, “What
goes on in kindergarten? Urn, they learn the letters, the numbers, and ya know, colors, ya
know, the basics, stuff to get them ready for ﬁrst grade.” (Mrs. Sharif 8/30/04) While
academic in focus, Mrs. Sharif retains a view of kindergarten as a readiness year in
preparation for ﬁrst grade.

An academic-based case. Nina Anderson is ﬁve years, one month at the time of
the interview. She lives in a suburban neighborhood with her dad, who works in
advertising and her stay at home mom, along with her two brothers, one of whom is older
and one younger than Nina. Nina’s mom describes her as very social and a person who
enjoys being in charge, often leading her brothers or nearby cousins in made-up games.
Her parents see her as competent physically and academically. She enjoys drawing and
reading but her favorite activity is making up games.

Nina has been involved in a community play group in which her mother was
present while the children played nearby. She has never been left with people that were
unfamiliar to her. If extended care was required, she stayed with a grandparent, an aunt or
family friend.

Nina’s parents decided to send her to kindergarten in her ﬁrst year of age
eligibility. They based their decision on the fact that she’s already ﬁve and can’t wait to
learn.

She keeps asking me to write things, how to spell things, yet she won’t sit down

with me and have me. . .she’ll practice enough with me if I ask her to write a letter

a certain number of times. She wants it from a teacher, not her mom. Laughs. And

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her older brother was in school last year and she came a lot, you know. I’d help

out in the classroom, so she’s anxious to be in that classroom setting.

Mrs. Anderson reports that in addition to thinking about her academic skills, she worried
about Nina being able to take direction ﬁ'om another adult or be able to ask for help if she
needed it. Mrs. Anderson decided that Nina is ﬁne and is capable of handling herself in
the classroom.

Because Mrs. Anderson volunteered in her son’s classroom, the previous year, she
was familiar with the full day kindergarten that Nina will attend. “To be honest, I don’t
know how they stretch it for a whole day, but they do a lot of group time, a little play
time, rest time, they learn their, you know, ABCs, the basics, counting and telling time.”
She went on to share, “He actually had homework in kindergarten that I would see when
he came home. . .so I was very on top of what they were learning.”

The Andersons chose this school, a parochial school, to reinforce the values they
have at home. When asked what a child should know when she enters kindergarten, Mrs.
Anderson replied,

I think they need to be able to explain themselves and be able to um you know tell

the teacher and other kids how they’re feeling. I think that’s a lot of kids, well a

couple of kids in my son’s class who just threw tantrums. They would not listen.

It was like a home setting. It was awful and I thought, well, great if my son picks

up these behaviors, I’m taking him out. I am because this isn’t what we accept at

home, so I think they need to be able to listen, follow direction and just respect
the authority of the teacher and then, you know, do the work that’s set before

them and if they have a problem, to explain that they need help.

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While Mrs. Anderson’s description of Nina’s school includes several references
to academic aspects, her discussion of what children need to be able to do is heavily on
social skills or perhaps more accurately, knowledge of how school “works”. It is
interesting that Mrs. McCormick describes readiness largely in acaderrric terms yet
kindergarten in social terms. Mrs. Anderson describes readiness largely in social terms
yet the kindergarten is described in largely academic terms. Other families in this study
were also interested in social dimensions of kindergarten as outlined in the following
section.

Social Descriptors

None of the parents seemed to have a view of kindergarten as promoting social
skills alone. The parent (actually a grandparent) who comes the closest was living in the
rural district with her granddaughter, Susie, who attended Head Start.

Susie lives in a small town in a rural school district with her grandparents who are
her primary guardians. She shares her home with her three siblings, two older brothers
and a younger sister.

Her grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Crossman, indicate that Susie enjoys both active
and quiet activities such as water play and dress up. She also likes to play school and bike
ride. Primarily, she plays with her siblings and some of the neighborhood children who
are two to three years older than she is. Mrs. Crossman reports that Susie likes to be read
to regularly and while she enjoys listening to almost anything, she’s particularly drawn to
fairy tales.

The Crossmans plan to send Susie to their neighborhood school, which is just

around the block from their home. Mrs. Crossman is familiar with the school since

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Susie’s older brothers attended it in the previous year. When asked what goes on in
kindergarten, she replied, “I think their personality and their skills develop much more
and I think with Susie, she has, you know, like when uh Nate was in kindergarten and
she’s walked with me when she was really little when Tommy was in kindergarten and
you know, I don’t think she’s going to have a problem.” There was some concern about
Susie’s comfort with being left some place without her grandparents but Mrs. Crossman
feels that since Susie loves school and is farrriliar with this school in particular that it
won’t be a problem for her. Based on her excitement in attending Head Start for two
years, the Crossmans are conﬁdent that the kindergarten transition will be a comfortable
one for Susie. “She was so excited. She was always ready on time. And if the bus was a
little bit late, she wanted me to call and ﬁnd out [when it would come].”(7/22/04)

While this parent did not explicitly respond to the speciﬁc question of what goes
on in kindergarten, because of her reference to her granddaughter’s “personality and
skills”, it indicates that her view of kindergarten is one in which her granddaughter’s
social skills will play a role and will develop. However, she seems to also have some
sense that academics are addressed — she indicated that one of the things that she likes
about the kindergarten is that they have a mentoring program for the children. This
mentor “helps them with whatever they’re having a difﬁculty with academically and I
think it helps their social skills, also.” (7/22/04)

In all, 80% (N =8) of the Head Start parents used a single characteristic to describe
kindergarten, and of them, about half (43%, N=3) chose academics as their single
characteristic. Of the 16 non Head Start parents, 25% (N=4) used a single characteristic

to describe kindergarten. All of them said kindergarten was academic. Fourteen of the 26

107

parents (56%) used multiple characteristics in describing kindergarten. Those results are
outlined below.
Play and Academic Descriptors
No Head Start parents described kindergarten as involving play as well as
acaderrrics. Two non Head Start parents did however. These were in two different
districts (one rural, one urban, respectively).
Uh, I know their biggest thing is to let them play. Let them enjoy and learn as
they’re playing. Um, so I know that he will get a lot of that. Um, but I know that
they do sit down and do different things as far as using the scissors and writing
and learning new words and counting, so I know he gets that too. But they’re
really, you know into the the . . .make sure that they can play and that they’re
having a good time and then everything else will just come with that. (Mrs.

Denton 8/26/04)

I think they learn their ABCs, probably early phonics stuff, urn some of ‘em.
Some programs I’m sure teach the kids how to read. Um, I think they do counting
and simple addition. I think they do an awful lot of playing. I think they are
exposed to, you know, trips to. . .they do ﬁeldtrips, trips to the zoo, nature walks
type stuff. Let’s see, oh I don’t know, probably leaning um some coordination
type things dribbling a ball, um you know, running. I don’t know. Skipping, those
sorts of things. I don’t know. That’s what I think mainly goes on in kindergarten

programs. (Mrs. Selby 8/19/04)

Academic and Social Descriptors

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Of the ten Head Start families, only one parent (10%) described kindergarten as
promoting acaderrric and social skills. Eight non Head Start parents (50%) used that pair
of descriptors. Four of them were in the suburban district and four were in the urban
district. The following examples are reﬂective of the group:

I think they do quite a bit of learning, the phonics, I know my son got pushed up

on so much last year, and the alphabet and we, so they have an easier time

learning how to read. But beyond the learning part, I think one of the biggest
things, that is gonna be primary in every kindergarten in the whole USA is

structure, consistency, the rules, sharing, getting along with the other kids, a

routine of, this is what you’re gonna be doin' for the next thirteen years, you go to

school and ya know, it’s the same every day, structured. (Mrs. Collins, 8/14/04)

Um, the, they continue to learn the, the alphabet, and, actually start working on
reading, usually at the end of the year, I know that. Um, numbers and I’m, a lot of

it’s social skills. (Mrs. Sailors, 8/30/04)

Based on knowledge from my older son, um, school , it’s a lot more intense I

guess than you would think, we used to think of kindergarten I feel like they

already should know the basics, the alphabet, urn counting, a lot of it’s rules

learning how to work together as a group. reading skills. (Mrs. Coolidge, 8/31/04)
Play-Social-A cademic Descriptors

There were two parents--one Head Start and one non Head Start- who used play,

academics and social skills as descriptors of the role of kindergarten.

109

I think they do a lot of play but also in combination of learning like, playing with
other kids and um, learning, grouping, colors and numbers. (Mrs. Thompson,

9/8/04)

I think, I would think it probably varies to a degree because of the fact that some
children have had Head Start and other children are just going into a classroom
environment for the ﬁrst time, so I’m thinking they’d probably start with uh more
just making the kids feel comfortable and more like uh initiating some
entertaining ways of teaching like reading books to ‘em and showing pictures and
then getting them physically active with maybe touching things, you know,
shapes and sizes and getting naps involved. (Mr. Davis, 8/24/04)

Mrs. Thompson and Mr. Davis, who have other children in school, seem conﬁdent in
their responses. The inﬂuence of older siblings will be addressed further when discussing
how the families learned about kindergarten.

Variation by Home District

One might hypothesize that families in the same district would describe
kindergarten in the same way, given that they might share knowledge of the same
schools. Instead, I found variance within the districts. In fact, each district was similar to
the others in how the descriptors were used. About half (43% N=3) of the parents in the
rural district chose a single descriptor, 44% (N=4) of those in the suburban district and
40% (N=4) of those in the urban chose a single characteristic to describe kindergarten.

Slightly less than half (43%, N= 3) of the parents in the rural district used multiple

110

descriptors. Similarly 63% (N=5) of those in the suburban district and 60% (N=6) of
those in the urban district chose multiple characteristics to describe kindergarten.

However, there was some variation between Head Start and non Head Start
families. The home district was largely irrelevant given that all non Head Start families,
regardless of the district, used academic descriptors. Among the Head Start families, the
numbers are too small to draw any conclusions with Head Start parents in the rural
district 50% (N =2) describing kindergarten in academic terms. In the suburban district,
33% (N=1) did so, and in the urban district it was 100% (N=2). Consider these three
quotes from families in order by rural, suburban and urban families not enrolled in Head
Start.

1 think they do a lot of play but also in combination of learning like, playing with

other kids and um, learning, grouping, colors and numbers. (Mrs. Thompson

9/8/04)

Um, the, they continue to learn the, the alphabet, and, actually start working on
reading, usually at the end of the year, I know that. Um, numbers and I’m, a lot

of it’s social skills. (Mrs. Sailors, 8/30/04)

Well, I think a lot of it is kinda early literacy things and learning about
relationships and just exploring different material. Having lots of exposure, urn,
learning some of that social stuff about turn taking and listening and following

directions. (Mrs. Sanders 8/12/04)

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Each of these women point to a blend of social and academic experiences in the
kindergarten classroom. And although from different districts, their responses are more
alike than different. It seems to be Head Start more than non Head Start that distinguishes
families, rather than district (see Figure 2.1).

Responses by Enrollment in Head Start

As noted in previous sections, there appear to be several differences among the
responses of families enrolled in Head Start and those not enrolled in Head Start (see
Figure 2.4). Half of Head Start families described kindergarten as promoting academics,
40% (N=4) viewed it as promoting social skills, and 40% (N=4) also viewed it as play
based. Among parents not affiliated with Head Start, 100% (N=15) viewed kindergarten
as academically focused and 60% (N=9) of them saw it as promoting social skills. Only
27% (N=4) described kindergarten as including play.

Additionally, Non Head Start families seemed to convey a more complex view of
kindergarten as well. Of the Head Start families, 3 out of 10 (30%) chose multiple
descriptors (both Academic and Social, for example). The remaining 70% chose either
one or 0 attributes to describe kindergarten. The result for non Head Start families is
nearly the exact opposite. Only 20% (N=3) chose only one descriptor (always
“Academic”), the remaining 80% (N=12) had multiple descriptors and all of them
included “Academic” (see Table 2.4). These variations were not mitigated by district,
only by Head Start status.

Sources of Information about Current Kindergartens
Of the twenty-six families in the study, 22 reported that they were familiar with

their child’s kindergarten. Four families indicated that they did not know about the

112

kindergarten program their child would attend. Paradoxically, one of those mothers
reported having interviewed 26 schools in the area before selecting one.

When asked how they learned about the kindergarten that their child will attend,
16 reported that they had an older child in the school that had recently experienced that
program. In fact in the rural district, two families expected the focal children to have the
same teacher that their older child had. Five of the families, including families with older
children, chose to attend school open houses or visited the school where they received
information about the school and what to expect. Four families reported learning about
their anticipated kindergarten experience through friends or acquaintances.

This variation suggests that while families indicated knowledge of the school, the
source of that knowledge, its amount and quality varied.

Discussion

Summary

While there is variation in description across other subgroups, the most signiﬁcant
ﬁnding of this study is that Head Start families and non Head Start families think
differently about kindergarten. Only 50% of Head Start families thought of kindergarten
as teaching acaderrric skills, and 33% of them reported that kindergarten taught social
skills. By contrast, those parents who came from a wide variety of prekindergarten
experiences (non Head Start) uniformly regarded kindergarten as promoting academic
skills and 60% of them thought that kindergarten taught social skills as well. At the very
least, the difference should be noted by those working in Head Start to design transition

plans from Head Start to the public schools.

113

Why might these differences exist? It has been noted that families of differing
socioeconomic status may view schooling differently. Lareau (2000) notes that families’
perceptions of schools may be inﬂuenced by their own status. For example, working class
families in her study perceived schools and their staff as experts on education and
trustingly turned their children over to the experts to educate, with little interference from
the homes. Conversely, families from upper class, professional homes perceived
themselves as capable of educating their children and when they turned their children
over to the schools, it was not with the idea that the schools were expert but that the
children would beneﬁt from a collaboration between the school and the home. The
subsequent parent involvement rates were quite different across schools.

In the current study, it may well be that the fanrilies enrolled in Head Start, by law
families that are low SES, have not been given much information on what kindergarten
will be like. They may trust Head Start to prepare their child for kindergarten and see
little need to consider the goodness of ﬁt. The uni—dimensional responses (just play, just
academic, just social) provided by the families in Head Start might be indicative of less
information about what happens in kindergarten. Contrasted with the woman who
interviewed 26 schools, there may be a big difference in how the two groups are viewing
the kindergarten as well as what it means to be fanriliar with the school.

The question remains, would it make a difference to the Head Start families to
know that kindergartens may be different from what they might recall from their
childhood? In some cases, it would not matter as the families would send their children to
kindergarten regardless of what the kindergarten might be like. They simply cannot

afford to keep them at home another year and may not be aware that an additional year of

114

Head Start may be an option for their child. For others, they might choose to make other
arrangements such as another year of child care, pursuing private developmental
kindergartens or remaining home for another year. Still other families rrright choose to act
on additional information about the kindergarten might preparing a child socially,
perhaps by visiting the school or reaching out to potential classmates, or academically,
perhaps through more at-home focus on academic skills. Most assuredly however, they
can’t make a fully informed decision without the knowledge of options and possibilities.
Of course as Thelen’s (2004) study pointed out, with signiﬁcant variation among
classrooms, children may or may not be ready for the particular classroom to which they
are assigned.
Recommendations for Schools

It has been noted that many families struggle with the decision of whether to send
their children to school or not. In short, parents wonder if their child is “ready” for
kindergarten. Given the shifting nature of kindergarten, schools would do well to help
families recognize that “ready” has changed over time as well. Public schools should
connect with preprimary programs, including, but not limited to, Head Start, in their
district. The purpose being to reach out to families prior to enrollment in kindergarten to
help articulate a kindergarten transition plan that includes helping families understand
what to expect from kindergarten and what their role can be in promoting their child’s
success (Pianta & Cox, 1999). Head Start has wisely started to mandate “Kindergarten
Transition Plans” that do exactly this. Meeting with local school districts, the Head Start
staff gain information about the district to pass along to families to ease their child’s

transition. Unfortunately, it appears from this study, that the Head Start families were less

115

aware that the climate of kindergarten has shifted to a more academic environment.
Reaching out to families in a variety of ways, informational mailings, home visits or
phone calls might assist families in having a more accurate view of what to expect from
kindergarten for their child.

Limitations of the Study

This greatest limitation of this study is that the interviews on which it was based
were not designed to exclusively capture this information. As part of a larger study, the
questions that addressed the parents’ view of kindergarten did not probe as deeply as
other parts of the interview. More questions with deeper follow up would likely yield
much more detailed information about parents’ perceptions.

Additionally, a larger, more diverse pool of respondents would enrich a future
study. This study happened to have almost exclusively Caucasian families born in the
United States. Families of color, ﬁ'om a variety of countries of origin might have very
different views of kindergarten.

Although I did not collect data on parents’ age, it became evident that there were
large differences in the ages of the respondents. Especially in light of generational
differences in their own experiences with kindergarten, there may have been a
relationship between the age of the parent and the response given that was missed in the
analysis.

Data on the kindergartens that the children would attend was not collected for this
study but would have allowed for an examination of the validity of the parents’
perceptions of the school. While the state standards exist, there is always the possibility

of a teacher who teaches to a very different set of goals. For example, there may well

116

have been an individual classroom in which the teacher still approaches kindergarten as
entirely for play and social development.

For families with older children, it would have been useful to ﬁnd out what that
child’s kindergarten had been like and how long ago they attended. Even “current” data
ages quickly in this time of kindergarten change.

Directions for Future Research

Given the above limitations of this study, future studies of this topic would do
well to interview a larger group of families with an eye toward racial, ethnic, economic,
educational and age diversity of respondents. Such an interview should be crafted to fully
probe the respondents’ own experiences with schooling in general and kindergarten in
particular, as well as capturing the farrrilies’ views of their current kindergarten program
and what children need to be able to do to be ready for it. Questions designed to get at
why parents believe what they do might provide useful information that might assist
designing transition plans for families.

A larger, and perhaps more compelling, question is actually to what degree does
the parent’s perception of school in general, kindergarten in particular, affect their
perceived role in preparing their child for schooling (and presumably, success in that
environment)? This question might be probed either through an interview study or a
survey but both would have to be designed not only to get at the perceptions of school but
families’ views of their responsibilities toward “readiness”. As above, such a study
should capture the widest swath of parent diversity possible. As a longitudinal study, this
data could be correlated with later student achievement.

Conclusion

117

As kindergartens continue to shift and evolve, families sending their children to
school for the ﬁrst time are put in the position to hit a moving target. The kindergartens
of today may be very different from the kindergarten the parent was last involved
with. . .even if only a few years ago. Given that, schools should make every effort to help
farrrilies understand the programs their children will enter, offering recommendations that
assist the family in preparing the child for the anticipated school environment,
particularly reaching out to families new to the district and “frrst time” families. In
addition, Head Start programs should work to assist families in making knowledgeable
transitions to kindergarten. Families making the decision about readiness need to know

that “ready” has two sides. . .the child and the environment the child will enter.

118

Appendix A
Interview Protocol for Kindergarten Study

Before the interview, at the initial phone call to set up interview, conﬁrm child’s birth
date as being on or before December 1, 1999.

Upon meeting family, visit a bit to establish rapport. Be honest in purpose for interview
and invite honesty from the family.

TURN ON TAPE.

Thank you, for agreeing to be interviewed for this study. This interview
will be audiotaped so that I can analyze the interviews later. Do you agree to be
audiotaped?

 

Please remember that you don’t have to answer any question that makes you
uncomfortable and you can stop the interview at any time. Are you ready?

{SECTION 1: THE CHILD}
My ﬁrst questions are about your child. Remind me, when is his/her birth date?

Who lives here with you and your child?

Who does your child play with?
o Are they family?
0 Friends?

0 What ages are they?

What are your child’s academic skills like?

What are your child’s social skills like?

How does your child’s size compare to others his/her age?

What are your child’s physical skills like?
0 Is s/he pretty coordinated?
0 How does s/he do with running, jumping, climbing, etc.?
0 How does s/he do with small motor tasks like holding a pencil or cutting

with scissors?

What kinds of things does your child enjoy doing?
0 Does s/he choose activities that are active or would s/he rather be quiet?
0 Does s/he like to be read to? If so, what kinds of things does s/he like?
0 Does s/he watch TV? What are his/her favorite shows?

119

How does your child handle new situations?

Has your child ever been left somewhere without you? How frequently? Tell me about
that environment. How long has s/he been going there?

{SECTION 2: THINKING ABOUT DECISION}

When children are your child’s age, people sometimes send them to kindergarten in the
fall and sometimes keep them home for another year. Have you considered what you’ll
do for {child’s name} in the fall?
{If sending to school, go on. If not, ask:

What will you do with him/her instead?

What did you think about when you made that decision? OR What kinds of things are
you considering while you are making this decision?
PROBE {repeat until parents respond no}:
Is there anything else you have considered in making this decision?
POSSIBLE FOLLOW-UP PROBES:
0 Did you consider your child’s academic skills? If so, what thoughts did you have
about them? Did you have any concerns about them?
0 Did you consider your child’s social skills? If so, what droughts did you have
about them? Did you have any concerns about them?
Did you consider your child’s physical size? What did you think about it?
Did you consider advice from others? Whose? Have you trusted their advice in
the past? How did that turn out?
0 Did you consider something I haven’t asked about?

What concerns do you have about them?
How do you feel about your child’s physical size?

How have your ﬁiends and family responded to your thinking?
Do you know other families in your family or community that have gone through this
process?

0 Did you talk with them about their decision?

0 What did they share with you?

c What did they do/ are they doing?

{SECTION 3: PERCEPTIONS OF SCHOOL}
These next questions are about the school where your child will eventually go.

In general, what do you think goes on in kindergarten?
What do you know about the kindergarten your child will attend?

How did you learn about it?

120

Do you have other children in school? How old were they when they entered
kindergarten? What were their experiences like?

What do you think a child really should be able to do when s/he enters kindergarten?

{SECTION 4— PARENT’S BACKGROUND}
These last questions are about you and your own experiences.

How old were you when you entered school?

How was your own transition to school? IF APPLICABLE: Do you know if your
spouse/partner had a similar experience?
0 Why do you think you had the experience you had?
0 Did you consider your own experience when deciding what to do for (child’s
name)?
When you think about your own schooling experiences, what comes to mind? IF
APPLICABLE: Do you know if your spouse/partner had a similar experience?

How much schooling did you have? IF APPLICABLE: How about your spouse/partner?
What do you do now? IF APPLICABLE: What does your spouse do?

{SECTION 5: FINAL THOUGHTS}

Is there anything you’d like to add to help me understand your thinking about sending
{child’s name} to kindergarten?

Thank you very much for your time! If you think of anything you’d like to add or change,

please let me know. Here is my card and you can reach me at anytime.
TURN OFF TAPE.

121

Table 2.1
Table 2.2
Table 2.3

Table 2.4

List of Tables

Demographic Information of Sample ...................................... 123

Demographics of Children in Sample ..................................... 124

Skills Parents Reported as Necessary for Kindergarten Readiness. . . 125

Frequency of Descriptions of Kindergarten .............................. 127

122

Table 2.1

Demographic Information of Sample

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Head Start Non Head Start
N 10 16
Mean Age of Child 5.21 5.44

Family Demographics

Percentage N Percentage
Single Parent Household (N =4) 40% 4 0%
Two Parent Household (N =20) 40% 4 100%
Extended Family Household (N=2) 20% 2 0%

 

 

Education Level of Household

 

 

 

 

 

No College Graduates in Household (N=9) 90% 9 0%

At Least 1 College Graduate in Home (N=l7) 10% l 100%
Household Setting

Rural (N=7) 40% 4 19%

Suburban (N =9) 30% 3 38%

Urban (N=10) 30% 3 44%

 

123

Table 2.2

Demographics of Children in Sample

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gender Boys Girls
9 17
Age of Child 5 yrs, 2 mos. and younger 5 yrs, 3 mos. and older
Median = Syrs, 2 mos. l3 13
Type of School Head Start Non-Head Start
10 16
Siblings No older siblings Older siblings
6 20

 

124

 

Table 2.3

Skills Parents Reported as Necessary for Kindergarten Readiness

 

 

 

 

Comment Frequency Comment Frequency
Alphabet ll Potty Trained 3
Numbers 1 1 Separate from Parents 3
Write name 8 Get along with others 2
Colors 7 Self Care 2
Listen 5 Sit 2
Shapes 5 Respect authority 2
Know their own name 3 Dress Self 1
Recognize some words 3 Follow Directions 1

Address

Interest in numbers and
letters

Opposites

Phone Number

Sizes

125

Friend

Interact with others

Not be disruptive

Not be harmful

Brush Teeth

Respect peoples'
Property

Sharing

Social things

Table 2.3 (continued)

Tell how they're feeling

Tie shoes

 

126

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Figure Captions

Figure 2.1
Descriptors of kindergarten by school district ......................................... 129

Figure 2.2
Descriptors of kindergarten by parents of children with
older siblings or no older siblings ....................................................... 130

Figure 2.3
Descriptors of kindergarten by family structure ...................................... 131

Figure 2.4

Descriptors of kindergarten among Head Start and
non Head Start families .................................................................. 132

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