Ever since the one-room schoolhouse faded from the American prairie, some reformers have argued that clumping students by age is ill-advised. After all, where a child’s birthday falls on the calendar is only a crude proxy for their academic readiness. Some students enter kindergarten with emerging literacy and robust knowledge, while others can’t count to ten. And any teacher will tell you of the difficulty trying to teach a class with multiple grades-worth of differences in academic readiness.
Yet calls to disrupt age-based grouping altogether—such as by allowing everyone to literally proceed through grade levels at their own pace, as some mastery-based schooling advocates want—sounds too radical and unfamiliar to gain widespread support. Parents recoil at the idea of seven- and ten-year-olds sitting side-by-side in the same class.
There is less resistance to this practice when kids are older. For instance, at my son’s high school in suburban Maryland, most classes are open to students in any grade. His pre-calculus class serves precocious sophomores but also (less precocious) juniors and seniors. So it is with most courses. It seems that once we are talking about teenagers, a mishmash of students of various ages is more acceptable to parents and to teachers.
Back in elementary school, imagine if we took small steps in the same direction. Picture, for example, a fourth-grade class made up of mostly nine-year-olds but also a few eight-year-olds and a few ten-year-olds—more age variety but a greater consistency in academic abilities. That doesn’t sound so crazy.
And indeed, there are already two well-known ways for schools to move closer to that model. The first, of course, is via grade retention. In the context of “third grade reading guarantees,” students who have not yet mastered the basics of reading are made to repeat third grade, and schools are required to provide intensive interventions to help them get up to speed.
On the other end of the achievement spectrum is the long-standing (if too rare) practice of letting high achievers accelerate, also known as skipping a grade. This can be done either in a single subject, such as math, or for the whole enchilada.
In many respects, grade retention and grade acceleration are two sides of the same coin.
(Then there’s the Richard Reeves idea of redshirting all boys, given that they tend to be more immature and less prepared for school at age five than girls are. Though that merely replaces one weak proxy for readiness—age—with another—gender.)
Grade retention and acceleration face fierce resistance from the status quo, however. Educators seem to hate both ideas. When it comes to retention, the worry is that we will make kids feel bad. And with acceleration, the concerns are similar: Some kids might be ready academically to learn with older peers, but they will suffer socially or emotionally if removed from their agemates. Thus we see even red states like Ohio and Tennessee backing away from mandatory grade retention and observe very few districts embracing grade acceleration for high achievers.
That’s a shame because there’s lots of research evidence about both practices, and overwhelmingly the findings indicate that retaining low achievers and accelerating high achievers is what’s usually best for their educations. It certainly helps them learn more than they otherwise would. And to the extent that the issue has been examined, there is little evidence to suggest that the concerns about social and emotional well-being are well-founded. Kids who can’t read don’t tend to feel great about themselves, and kids who are bored tend to act out, tune out, or drop out.
Yet resistance to mixing schoolkids across ages remains sturdy. I’ve suggested a few times that we could add a little more flexibility by creating a “grade 2.5” as way of making “third grade reading retention” into more of a default option and therefore carry less of a stigma. But, so far, that idea doesn’t seem to have gained much traction.
Another baby step via TK–5
So here’s another one. Let’s borrow the language of “transitional kindergarten” from California, where it refers to programs for four-year-olds within public elementary schools, but instead use it as an option for five-year-olds who enter school without the prerequisite readiness skills to succeed in kindergarten. We might call it TK–5.
Let’s say you are a typical elementary school with four kindergarten classrooms. Every summer you assess entering five-year-olds via a battery of readiness assessments, looking both at academic readiness and social and emotional maturity, and then place students into either transitional kindergarten (TK–5) or kindergarten (K) classrooms. (One might hope that communities with strong pre-K options might not need to send too many kids to transitional kindergarten.) Some advanced kids might be ready to start in first grade.
Depending on the results of those assessments, you might turn one, two, or even three of your classrooms into transitional kindergarten rooms. These classrooms would focus on kindergarten readiness skills—both academic and social-emotional—and then would start making progress through the beginning of the kindergarten curriculum.
The following year, the transitional kindergarten kids would matriculate into kindergarten, though some students might be back on track and ready to go all the way into first grade. (You might also make some adjustments mid-year.)
Now you have created grade cohorts that have a little more diversity in terms of students’ ages but a lot less diversity in terms of their academic achievement and, thus, readiness for learning new material. And that’s really what this is all about: making it more likely that every student will get the appropriate level of challenge by giving teachers a smaller target to hit in terms of the variation in students’ readiness. For example, all students in kindergarten would know their letters and numbers on day one, allowing the class to dive right into reading and math. And no kindergarten students would already have mastered all of the skills covered in the kindergarten curriculum. These would be enormous changes from what happens now.
The big question is how parents would react when told that their five-year-old is not ready for regular kindergarten. As a dad who redshirted his own son back in the day, I personally don’t think that’s going to be too big a deal, especially if schools are using good data and judgment about who is ready for today’s elementary school curriculum and who is not—and if TK–5 becomes a well-trod entry route into the education system.
Economists and budget hawks may complain that we are adding a year of school to taxpayers’ bill, given that some children will now attend public schools for fourteen years instead of thirteen. That also means less time earning money in the labor market for the kids who are held back, thus creating opportunity costs, as well as the budgetary kind. But if this change serves to boost achievement for the late bloomers, the payoff will be well worth it, both to students individually and to society. Plus, by also accelerating advanced students—letting them skip kindergarten—we will be recouping some of those same costs by shrinking some kids’ K–12 experience from thirteen years to twelve.
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There are lots of ideas in education that make good sense but also seem to be politically impossible—for example, getting rid of elected school boards, merging districts within the same metro area, or eliminating school boundaries. If we were dreaming up an education system from scratch, we could put these notions into practice. But we’re not. We’re largely stuck with the system we inherited from our forebears.
The best we can do is find workarounds. Launching the charter school sector, for example, has allowed us to create new schools that themselves do not have elected boards or attendance boundaries. Developing alternative certification routes for aspiring teachers has loosened the ed-school monopoly.
Similarly, we’re probably stuck with grade levels, from K–12, tied to children’s ages. The best we can do is to try some workarounds. Embracing transitional kindergarten for some five-year-olds and accelerated placement into first grade for others would be steps in the right direction. We just need some schools or districts willing to try it. Any volunteers?
