"When Should a Kid Start Kindergarten?"

This excellent article covers several issues, including the way kindergarten has changed, the impact of starting kids later, and the very serious implications for the less affluent. An excerpt and the link to the full article:

June 3, 2007
New York Times Magazine
When Should a Kid Start Kindergarten?
By ELIZABETH WEIL

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/magazine/03kindergarten-t.html

Forty-two years after Lyndon Johnson inaugurated Head Start, access to quality early education still highly correlates with class; and one serious side effect of pushing back the cutoffs is that while well-off kids with delayed enrollment will spend another year in preschool, probably doing what kindergartners did a generation ago, less-well-off children may, as the literacy specialist Katie Eller put it, spend “another year watching TV in the basement with Grandma.” What’s more, given the socioeconomics of redshirting — and the luxury involved in delaying for a year the free day care that is public school — the oldest child in any given class is more likely to be well off and the youngest child is more likely to be poor. “You almost have a double advantage coming to the well-off kids,” says Samuel J. Meisels, president of Erikson Institute, a graduate school in child development in Chicago. “From a public-policy point of view I find this very distressing.”