This Week, California’s state legislature adopted a bill that would require all children to complete one year of kindergarten before entering first grade. If enacted, the bill would make kindergarten attendance mandatory for all California students.
State Senate Bill 70 was approved by the State Senate monday and will now be signed by Governor Gavin Newsom.
If passed into law, the bill will be implemented in the 2024-25 school year. A similar law, Assembly Bill 1444, was vetoed by then-Governor Jerry Brown in 2014. Newsom did not say whether he would sign Senate Bill 70.
The California state assembly passed SB 70 earlier this month.
SB 70 was proposed by State Senator Susan Rubio, who said that children who do not attend kindergarten miss out on valuable skills and abilities that can be applied during their education.
“As a public school teacher for seventeen years, I have seen the devastating impact on young students who are deprived of important elementary education,” Rubio said in a news statement. Students who attend kindergarten on a voluntary basis are not prepared for the educational environment found in primary school.
If Governor Newsom signs the bill, California will become the twentieth state requiring children to attend kindergarten. Connecticut, Maryland and Wisconsin are three additional states with similar requirements.
This measure specifies that children can meet the kindergarten requirement in a public or private school, but that transitional kindergarten does not count.
Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Alberto M. Carvalho supported the initiative in a news release, saying it would level the playing field for children in vulnerable neighborhoods.
Carvalho said,research indicates that kindergarten is an important aspect of a child’s development, closing opportunity gaps and reducing chronic absenteeism.” A full year of kindergarten guarantees that the student is in high quality academic, social and developmental forms. Enjoy appropriate learning opportunities from
Children in states with compulsory kindergarten are “more likely to attend college, earn higher incomes, and less likely to face poverty as adults,” According to Bill Summary.
In addition to the Los Angeles Unified School District, education groups such as the California Teachers Association, the National Education Association (NEA), and Early Age California support compulsory kindergarten.
According to Students who attend NEA, full day kindergarten, have a significantly higher chance of succeeding in math and reading. group highlighted a Research which examined the test scores of children attending full-day kindergarten, half-day kindergarten, or no kindergarten at all.
“In one Indiana district, for example, students in full-day kindergarten had significantly higher basic skills test scores in third, fifth, and seventh grades than those who attended only half-day kindergarten or did not attend kindergarten at all. were,” the National Education Association wrote in a policy brief.
Opponents of the initiative claim that kindergarten will not necessarily address educational challenges such as reading.
“Making kindergarten compulsory for the relatively small portion of students who do not attend will not alleviate California’s major literacy and numeracy challenges,” said Pacific Senior Director Lance Izumi. research The Institute’s Center for Education.
Izumi says that because children age at different speeds, it makes more sense for parents to decide.
Since the start of the pandemic, school enrollment has decreased. During the 2020-21 school year, the number of households opting for homeschooling doubled, According to US census data.
According to data from the California Department of Education, while kindergarten enrollment for the 2021-2022 school year has increased over the previous year, the number of children attending kindergarten in the state is much lower than before the outbreak.