Kindergarten has a variety of controversial topics and pressures that teachers and principals go through still to this day. I am a future Kindergarten teacher and I want what’s best for my students every day. Since we know so much about the development of the child and early childhood pedagogy, there are so many pressures put on Kindergarten students and also the Kindergarten teacher. One of the pressures is whether or not preschool or pre-kindergarten (pre-K) should be required before they come to Kindergarten.
Both public and private Kindergartens served less than half of all 5-year-olds in America during 1965. Today, kindergarten attendance is almost universal for 5-year-olds, with the overwhelming majority of these children in public-school…show more content… When programs started to get funding from the federal government, it attempted to reduce social inequalities and maximize learning of underprivileged children.
The development of the Head Start program in the 1960s had an effect on the change in kindergarten enrollments during that period. Head Start is a public preschool program for disadvantaged children. It was designed to close the gaps between the more disadvantaged children and their more advantaged peers. All three and four-year-old children living in poor families are eligible to enroll in the program. Today, Head Start serves more than 800,000 children at a cost of around 5,400 per child. Even though this may sound like a lot of children, they only serve about one-third of eligible…show more content… Children who enter preschool earlier have the opportunity to remain in an educational program for twice as long as their older peers. The critical period for developing a range of cognitive and language skills, which are the building blocks of later social and academic capacities, begins even earlier than the age of 3 and continue throughout childhood and adolescence. Supporters of the two-year preschool model will argue that the longer children spend in a cognitively stimulating environment, the more they are likely to benefit from it. They also say that two years are necessary to deliver a comprehensive preschool program effectively. Only 65 percent of children in the lowest two income quintiles attended preschool at age 4, showing that children from the most disadvantaged backgrounds may not even be receiving one year of