That 5-year-olds aren’t required to attend kindergarten in Michigan was surprising enough. Even more surprising is that kindergarten is optional for school districts in a handful of states.

Sixteen states, though, mandate kindergarten attendance for 5-year-olds, and Michigan should, too. The simplest argument for it is what was obvious until yesterday, when nearly all of us learned that kindergarten was optional: Just keep on doing what we’ve been doing for generations. Shop for your child’s first-day-of-school outfit and make an appointment for kindergarten roundup, not necessarily in that order.

School and kindergarten are not the same as they were a few decades ago. Milk, cookies and naps are off the kindergarten syllabus. They’ve been replaced by reading, writing and arithmetic. When American kindergarten was invented – amazing, not until the late 1800s – educators’ goals were to tame the little beings who didn’t know how to sit still, hold a pencil or play well with others.

Today, the goal at kindergarten graduation is to hand out diplomas to kids who can read them.

Some call it the new first grade, but it really is the first year of formal schooling for nearly all our children. Any parent who exercises the option of keeping his child out of kindergarten is placing him at a serious disadvantage both in first grade and in the rest of his school years.

We expect more from schools and the education they deliver. We set standards and then we raise them. Leaving kindergarten out of the mix – even as an option – seems as backward and old-fashioned as a pot-bellied stove in a one-room school.

Mandatory kindergarten is clearly the right thing to do.

All-day kindergarten might be a harder sell.

It, too, is the right standard to set. Just as with optional kindergarten, parents already have voted. When given a choice, parents sign their children up for kindergarten more than 90 percent of the time. When given a choice between half-day and full-day kindergarten, parents overwhelmingly choose all-day classes. In some districts, they choose all-day kindergarten even when they have to pay out-of-pocket to attend.

Of Lansing’s many educational reforms, mandatory full-day kindergarten might be one of the smarter ones.

– The Port Huron Times Herald.