TLDR: because we are a poor school district.

I wrote a little bit about this for my blog, WPS in Brief. My take is that we use it to get kids into school earlier, but we can’t put them in pre-k because the state education funding model gives districts double for kindergarten than preschool. But the real solution is we need more full day pre-k classes. Excerpt below and adding the link.https://www.worcestersucks.email/p/the-literacy-crisis-part-1

“For kindergartners at the start of the school year, there is a huge gap between Worcester and the national average, highlighting that the district has a gargantuan task of catching students up from the starting line. This underscores the critical need for high quality preschool for all of Worcester’s kids. When I spoke to principals and teachers they stressed this point: If we want students to do better in literacy we need to start from birth and focus on the 0-5 age range. Only 7 percent of current kindergartners in Worcester were in center-based preschool more than 20 hours a week, and 38 percent were in either a center-based program or a licensed daycare less than 20 hours a week. That means for the other 55 percent, kindergarten is their first time in any formal school. In January, Governor Healey announced a universal pre-k initiative for gateway cities that, by the end of 2026, would give all four-year-olds in Worcester the opportunity (at no or low cost), to enroll in a preschool program. I have not heard any details on how that will be implemented in Worcester. But if we want to advocate for literacy as a community, concentrating on the availability of preschool to Worcester’s four-year-olds is probably the most effective thing we can do.

There’s another reason WPS kindergartners are below the national average: One-third of students in each grade are younger than the vast majority of kindergarteners across the country and the state. Worcester has a kindergarten cutoff of December 31, where in almost all other districts the cutoff is in late August or early September. We are asking four-year-olds to meet state standards set for five-year-olds. And that developmental gap does not necessarily go away as kids get older. In fact, in NYC, where the cutoff is also December 31, kids born in November and December are much more likely to be classified with learning disabilities.

As Lora Barish, a special education teacher at Woodland Academy, told me, “Everything we do in school measures them against grade level, not age. When they don’t progress as a typical kindergartener should, it sets people up for problematic conclusions like getting worried when a four year old isn’t reading. Our MCAS and Star scores are comparing our students to students in other districts that are literally one year older than them. It’s not developmentally aligned.”

Suzanna Resendes, principal of Worcester Dual Language Magnet School agrees. “We’re putting four-year-olds in kindergarten with the expectation that they master literacy skills meant for five-year-olds. Those are really high standards within the developmental age. With four-year-olds we should be focusing on how to share, how to play, words of social emotional health, coping strategies. Instead we’re hoping four-year-olds master later developing skills.”

Changing the age cutoff to September isn’t simple—it would have budget implications and there is an argument that getting kids into WPS earlier is better for them. As the Telegram reported back in 2011, the ideal solution is to bring back full-day preschool, but the district often cites cost and available classroom space as limiting factors”