What to do about the Covid kindergarten cohort?
January 28, 2021
Last week I (re)stated the case for adding a year to elementary school, now and forever. That’s both because, even pre-Covid-19, we hadn’t succeeded in getting most kids to grade level standards before entering middle school, and post-Covid learning loss is going to make matters much worse. I fervently hope that states give the green light for at least a handful of schools to try this experiment in extended learning time.
But even if that is a bridge too far for most schools, there’s no getting around the particular education challenges facing today’s five-year-olds, what we might call the Covid Kindergarten cohort, especially in districts whose schools have been shut tight all year and are likely to stay that way.
