The Danger of Full- and Half-Day Labels: The Case of Kindergarten

Yesterday, New America’s Alexander Holt released “Making the Hours Count: Exposing Disparities in Early Education by Retiring Half-Day and Full-Day Labels,” a report in which he argues:

The education system in the United States is unable to track the amount of time that young children spend in school. This is largely due to the labels “full-day”and “half-day,” loose terms that make it impossible to accurately determine the actual length of the school day. This lack of data masks significant disparities in children’s access to early education.

The ability of vague labels to obscure the considerable variance in learning time across different districts and states is a problem that plagues all of early education in the United States and kindergarten is no exception. As the Education Commission of the States has documented, the number of hours students spend in kindergarten varies a great deal, even within the labels of full- and half-day:

However, when it comes to kindergarten, it is worth remembering that there is an added level of opacity to the way we describe the existing learning opportunities. Because kindergarten is embedded in the larger K-12 system, the fact that kindergarten is subject to different instructional hour requirements and funding formulas than the rest of the system is a fact of which the public is often unaware.

Both of these sources of confusion mean policymakers can take advantage of the public’s misunderstanding to pass funding reductions to kindergarten programs with fewer political ramifications. While states such as Pennsylvania have seen such cuts affect full-day kindergarten in the state, perhaps the most extreme example of reductions to kindergarten funding comes from Arizona. In February, our report, Raising Arizona: Lessons for the Nation from a State’s Experience with Full-Day Kindergarten, examined in depth how just such a cut passed there. It’s an important example of how focusing on the importance of the full- and half-day labels is not an abstract, academic exercise. Such labels have consequences, and Arizona is a strong example of that.