The Making of an Outraged Mom

I found out about the school district's scheming more or less by accident. After picking up my two-year-old from preschool one afternoon, I was in the process of getting my four-year-old—who stood outside his classroom in Julie-the-cruise-director mode, saying hi to everyone passing by—when a mom-friend came out of the Circle Room with her son and dropped the bomb:

"Have you heard about this full-day kindergarten thing?"

My stomach lurched. "What?" And take my baby away?

"Yup, looks like they're going to it next year."

"What?!" Next year, when my firstborn would be in kindergarten? Turns out they'd already discussed full-day K at one or two school committee meetings.

That's a warm and fuzzy feeling: my child's fate being decided, and I didn't even know about it.

As I would discover, full-day stands at the confluence of several combustible issues, including the debate over structured time for children versus free play, and the competing priorities of working versus at-home parents. There's also the question of what, in this era of preschool tutoring, where kindergarten is the new first grade, do five-year-olds really need to know…and will half-day kindergarten be the reason my son misses the Ivy cut? Concord was splitting into overlapping factions—from grad degree–toting at-homers to parents who work full time, to moms and dads willing to do anything for an early edge. Then there were those who simply wondered what was actually good for their kids. And my town hasn't been the only one having this debate. From Belmont, Lexington, and Weston to Brockton, Randolph, and Fall River, Massachusetts is converting to full-day. Nine years ago, just 29 percent of the state's students attended such programs. Today, 66 percent do. A bill filed last year would make it mandatory for the rest.

Mandatory? We'll do anything for our kids—all of us. We take them to gymnastics and Music Together and feed them organic soy butter smoothies, and we'd consider junior Kumon if it helped. But my gut kept telling me no, my boys didn't need full-day K. Six hours of school was too much for five-year-olds. And I certainly didn't put my career on hold for three years to have my son in class all day.

Besides, school isn't the only place you learn. My husband and I have many valuable things to teach our boys. Just last week, we watched in delight as they did the chicken dance while belting out the refrain to "I Wanna Be Sedated."

Like a lot of parents in town, I was asked one day to sign the CPKO petition. I sort of knew some of the organizers, and I really felt like signing something. After reading the actual wording, though, I decided to look into the issue a bit more. I called the Department of Education. I put school committee meetings on our Get Fuzzy calendar, in ink. I started talking about full-day kindergarten to everyone I knew.

Jacqui McKenna, a teacher at the Thoreau School who was instrumental in drafting the full-day proposal, stressed that the goal is simply to provide more time for the current workload, not add to it. "Full-day kindergarten needs to stay developmentally appropriate," she said. "We don't want to do algorithms."

As it is, Concord's kindergarten curriculum is hardly an exercise in puffery, covering socialization, scientific inquisitiveness, phonetics, and other pre-reading skills. Nonetheless, I came across some parents of toddler-geniuses who questioned the value of additional kindergarten for their Einsteins. In an online posting, one dad explained how his three-year-old already reads sentences and does math and definitely will not need more time in class. (Intimidating, to say the least, especially when your own four-year-old's major accomplishment that afternoon was navigating the living room with the kitchen trash can on his head.)

I'd hoped that the literature would provide some guidance, but as you've no doubt guessed, it's inconclusive. Whatever side you support, you can find evidence that proves your brilliance—just as you could probably spend five minutes Web-surfing and find a study concluding that clubbing your head is good for you because it increases the blood flow to your brain. And that's exactly what you'll feel like doing after looking at the data. Several reputable studies claim full-day offers all sorts of benefits; another one insists that longer kindergarten days could actually be harmful.

David Elkind, who taught child development for decades at Tufts University, and whose book The Hurried Child has struck a chord with millions of parents over the past 25 years, says full-day has its merits—but done wrong can be detrimental. "People are saying that full-day kindergarten is an educational initiative," he told me. "It's not an educational initiative. It's primarily a childcare initiative." I got the point. It wasn't about education. It was about working parents wanting the childcare benefits of full-day, benefits that at-home parents don't need. Except in Concord, at least, it turned out that didn't exactly fit.