subject: How Do I Know Which Program Is Best For My Child? [print this page] Unlike elementary school, preschool and kindergarten are not yet a part of compulsory education in the United States. Compulsory education is the mandated, required education of every child. In the United States, each state is left to decide its own compulsory education laws and reforms.
Today, compulsory education laws vary greatly from state-to-state, with some states requiring children to start school by the age of 5 and other states requiring children to begin attending school as late as the age of 8. As a side note, attending school does not necessarily mean a child has to attend a school, children as allowed to be home-schooled no matter what age within the states compulsory education laws; in other words, compulsory education can be understood as the process of obtaining a formal education with set standards and codes of conduct.
Because of these differences in age ranges between states, there has yet to be a federal mandate requiring preschool or kindergarten to be a part of compulsory education. The lack of a federal mandate requiring the attendance of preschool and kindergarten means that state-funding for either preschools or kindergartens in the majority of states is not mandated on the state-level.
Currently, there are only six states that have Walnut preschool programs that have mandates funding preschool at a state-level: New York, Florida, Illinois, Georgia, West Virginia, and Oklahoma. But all states except eight- Alaska, Idaho, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, and Pennsylvania- have mandated state-funded kindergarten programs; however, even though these kindergarten programs are funded by the state, attendance is still on a voluntary basis until the child reaches the compulsory education age set by the state.
Even though preschool and kindergarten are not yet compulsory, more and more states are mandating that preschools be funded by the state and just about all states already have implemented state-funded kindergarten program measures. This can perhaps be explained by the fact that more and more research is showing that early childhood education in the forms of preschool and kindergarten in Walnut can provide social and academic benefits for a child in both the short-term and the long-term.
A well-documented research project on the topic of the importance of early childhood education, that spans almost thirty years and is still going, is the Perry Preschool Experiment. Within this study, James Heckman, a Nobel-prize winning economist, tracked the educational and social achievements of a group of 123 low-income African-American children who grew up in similar backgrounds in the neighborhoods of Yspilanti, Michigan. Half of the group received a preschool education whereas the other half did not.
In the short-term, the study showed that the children who attended preschool tended to do much better in kindergarten and first-grade and beyond when compared to the children who did not attend preschool. And in the long-term, after thirty years, it was shown that those who had attended preschool were 20% more likely to have graduated from high school and 19% less likely to have a history of multiple arrests. They were also more likely to be in stable, long-term relationships and less dependent on social welfare programs.
