Beyond the Basics

Full-day kindergarten is finally catching on—but at a price.

Holding up stiff cardboard figures, Mariam Kupalian runs her kindergartners through a quick review of shapes such as the hexagon and the trapezoid. The children, seated at desks, raise their hands when their teacher asks if anyone can think of a shape with no sides.

She then asks individual students in her class at Cheremoya Elementary School to think of patterns using the names of shapes. “Square, circle, triangle,” 5-year-old Blaize Smith offers. Next, the group moves on to a study of the numbers 15 and 16 and the terms “one more” and “one less.”

“I’m working on getting them to use their math vocabulary,” explains Kupalian, who’s been teaching kindergarten for five years. The extended math lesson is just the kind she would not have had time for in the 2003-04 school year, when kindergarten classes ran a little more than three hours. But this past year, her Hollywood school was among the 173 in the Los Angeles Unified School District offering full-day kindergarten; the remaining 280 in the nation’s second-largest district will follow during...