Four and Five year old kids in the state of Hawaii now face a test on their first day of school. It's an assessment designed to place them either as regular kindergarteners or as junior kindergarteners. A law passed in 2004 requires schools to classify the incoming students into the two categories. There is a wide range of abilities even among children born in the same school year and the law seeks to address that.

For a lot of children, especially those born closest to the cut-off date, the extra year of kindergarten can be an academic lifesaver. They simply may not be developmentally ready to move on to first grade. This program also helps to avoid the stigma of being kept back -- junior kindergarteners get promoted into the regular kindergarten. Sometimes, pushing kids ahead before they're ready can lead to serious problems later on in their educational career -- they may never catch up academically and they'll be behind their classmates socially.

Personally, I like this idea. In California, parents can choose to have their kids wait a year before entering kindergarten; this is extremely common when the child would be one of the youngest in his class. With Hawaii's plan, even if the parent thinks the child is ready, it is the educators that make that evaluation. In addition, the kid is guaranteed to be in school that extra year; think of it as a mandatory year of preschool (although the schools will be teaching the junior kindergarteners the same material as the other kindergarteners.) Unfortunately, not all kids have the opportunity to go to preschool, so this may fill in some of that gap.