subject: How Your Child Can Benefit From Early Childhood Education [print this page] There comes a point in every parent"s life when he or she needs to decide whether or not it is appropriate to start sending his or her child or children to school. In the United States, it has been left up to individual states to determine compulsory education laws; the age a child is required to start school can range from 5-8 years old, with the majority of states mandating children to start their first year of school by the age of 6. Although early childhood education in the form of preschool and kindergarten is not yet federally provided for children as compulsory education, more and more states are providing preschool Walnut and kindergarten as an state-funded option.
Schooling during the early years of American history was mainly done through private channels: most schools required payment of tuition, and many families chose to provide education for their children within the family. After the American Revolution, an emphasis was placed on education; a few years after the Civil War ended, all states had free elementary schools available for children to attend. But it wasn"t until about a hundred years ago, in 1918, that compulsory education laws were ratified on the federal level. At that time, compulsory education applied only to children of elementary school age and was founded on the idea that schooling was to be provided by the public sector.
Early childhood education is not yet required of all American children; preschool is not mandatory in any state and kindergarten is mandatory only is 14 states. Even though preschool and kindergarten are not compulsory, an increasing number of states are requiring their districts to provide some level of kindergarten programs, with almost most states providing some level of preschool or daycare.
According to statistics released by the Education Commission of the States, approximately 98% of all children in the United States enter the first grade after having had attended some form of kindergarten Diamond Bar beforehand. This demand for early childhood education is most likely catalyzed by the multitude of studies that keep showing the short-term and long-term cognitive and social developmental advantages of children who have had some form of early childhood education over children who have not had exposure to either preschool or kindergarten before attending first grade.
The National Center for Education Statistics has found that throughout the course of the kindergarten school-year, children make measureable improvements not only in their reading, writing, and mathematics skills (shown through higher test scores), but also in their social skills and emotional maturity. Other studies have demonstrated that long-term benefits of early childhood education exist; research on the government-funded Child-Parent Centers in Chicago has provided data supporting a correlation between the not attending preschool and arrest rates: Chicagoan youth who did not attend preschool were 70% more likely to be arrested for a violent crime by the age of 18.
