| Douglas Downey
Ohio State University
When the time is right: Delayed entry to kindergarten and its consequences for stratification
FINAL REPORT:
Parents are increasingly making the decision to delay their childÕs entry into kindergarten by a year, waiting to start at age six rather than five. If older children have an advantage over younger children, and if high-resource parents more frequently delay their childrenÕs entry than low-resource parents, this practice could be the beginning of divergent paths in the educational system. Analyzing a national sample of children from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, we find that advantaged parents do more often delay their childrenÕs entry to kindergarten, but that there is little evidence that this practice exacerbates inequality. Despite greater skills at the beginning of kindergarten, delayed children gain fewer math and reading skills than Òon timeÓ children during the kindergarten year. They also do not report greater affinity for school or receive better teacher ratings of social behavior than Òon timeÓ children. These comparisons are produced from non-experimental data, however, and so we discuss how our results may represent pre-existing differences between delayed and Òon timeÓ children.
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