Issue link: http://educator.cta.org/i/1103796
L E A R N I N G I S F U N for Rodriguez's students at Mark Keppel Elementary School in Paramount. They sing songs as their teacher strums guitar, play house, dress up as police officers and firefighters, and create artwork with sparkles and ribbons. ey also study numbers and learn how to read basic words. ey attend transitional kindergarten (TK), which is neither preschool nor kindergarten. In many ways, it is how kindergarten used to be, before high-stakes testing and No Child Left Behind turned kinder classrooms into pressure cookers by pushing down academics previously taught in older grades. (NCLB has since been replaced by the Every Student Succeeds Act.) A bold California experiment Students in Rodriguez's TK class would have been old enough to attend traditional kindergarten under the old guidelines, which allowed children as young as 4 years and 9 months to enroll. California raised the kindergar- ten age to 5 in 2010 with the Kindergarten Readiness Act. To accommodate the 4-year-olds who were previously eligible for kindergarten — those who turn 5 between Sept. 2 and Dec. 2 — TK was established as a brand-new grade level and gradually implemented. By 2014, districts were required to offer the state-funded program to eli- gible youngsters. According to the California Department of Education (CDE), more than 100,000 students were enrolled in TK I t's an exciting day in Leo Rodriguez's class. Students jump up and down with enthusiasm as they follow him to the playground for the big event. "We're going to let them go," says Rodriguez, gesturing to a net containing monarch butterflies, which students saw metamorphose from caterpillars. "Yay!" shout the students, as the butterflies emerge hesitantly from the net, then fly away. Leo Rodriguez releases butterflies that his transitional kindergarten students have watched develop from caterpillars. 33 A P R I L / M AY 2 019