A couple of posts down I joked about steroids in Little League, but now this: more and more kids are being held out of kindergarten for an extra year, so that they start school at six rather than five. The reasons are mostly bad, as are the consequences, according to a pretty interesting study from scholars at Harvard's Kennedy School. Some kids gain an advantage by being bigger and older than their peers, but there's a large social cost (not least the lost year of earnings for Social Security). Here's the abstract:
Forty years ago, 96 percent of six-year-old children were enrolled in first grade or above. As of 2005, the figure was just 84 percent. The school attendance rate of six-year-olds has not decreased; rather, they are increasingly likely to be enrolled in kindergarten rather than first grade. This paper documents this historical shift. We show that only about a quarter of the change can be proximately explained by changes in school entry laws; the rest reflects "academic redshirting," the practice of enrolling a child in a grade lower than the one for which he is eligible. We show that the decreased grade attainment of six-year-olds reverberates well beyond the kindergarten classroom. Recent stagnation in the high school and college completion rates of young people is partly explained by their later start in primary school. The relatively late start of boys in primary school explains a small but significant portion of the rising gender gaps in high school graduation and college completion. Increases in the age of legal school entry intensify socioeconomic differences in educational attainment, since lower-income children are at greater risk of dropping out of school when they reach the legal age of school exit. Read more...
Hat tip to The Wilson Quarterly, which covered this awhile ago.
Daniel Akst
I believe this study completely misses the boat. The reason to have older kids in school is so that they can resist social peer pressures for early drinking, sex, drug use, anorexia, etc etc etc. Academic benefits, if they exist, are gravy.
As a middle school teacher, I will tell you that their advanced age does not help them resist social pressures for, "early drinking, sex, drug use, anorexia" it compacts it down to a lower grade level. All of these pressure exist and being redshirted does not help. This is because of the fact that the grades and test scores look better so teachers look better. When a child is slipping for confounding reasons, it seems to be a reasonable route to hold them back, but that is only because is takes the responsibility off the adults to provide support. Much the way ritalin provides the panacea to why a child isn't focuses removing the responsibility off parenting styles and follow through, a lack of an imaginative curriculum, and an under educated, under performing teacher work force who have become zombies to standards. This article needs to be heard for the truth that it speaks.
My children's school refused to let my son start kindergarten "on time" because his birthday came 29 days too late. His sisters' birthday is 11 days too late. What can I do about it? not much.
Most kindergarten classes these days no longer emphasize play, but rather assign daily homework to kids and require them to sit in their seats and fill in little bubbles on standardized tests. What 5-yo wants to do that! Kindergarten is supposed to be for play. There are many 5-year old children--boys especially--who are not socially or developmentally ready for the kind of kindergarten "work" that many schools require of them today and making them sit through that can have a deleterious effect on their attitudes toward school in general. The full text of the paper mentions this as "first grade being the new kindergarten" and says that this rationale deserves to be investigated.
And this: One year lost of paying into Social Security? Are they kidding? That's a laugh!
Further to Brooklyn Teri's remarks, my son's elementary school explained to me that "third grade is the new fourth grade." I asked "and is eight years old the new nine?" And plainly, with the replacement of junior high school by middle school, sixth grade is the new seventh grade. The only defense against this is to make sure that your kid is 10, and not 9, when he is asked to do fourth-grade work in the third grade.
You don't mention, however, that the cut-off age for kindergarten has been generally moved back, so that kindergarteners are older than they once were even if they aren't red-shirted. In the fifties, in NYC, children were accepted into kindergarten at four, if they turned five before 12/31. I was born on 12/23, making me the youngest in the class.
In the suburban Boston schools with which I am familiar, the cut-off is either 9/30 or 9/1. One of my sons, born 10/4, therefore started kindergarten at six, after having spent the previous year in a "pre-kindergarten" (in effect a private kindergarten) with other kids the same age. My son enjoyed his first year of kindergarten very much; he was naturally bored and frustrated by the second. I loved sixth grade, as a big kid in the elementary school, more than any other. My son, on the other hand, is a raging teenager and hates it.
As the partner of a primary school teacher, I have an observation. Boys mature academically a year or so later than girls. To admit this is not sexist so why not provide opportunity by enrolling students accordingly? Has sexual politics led us to this place?
First, full disclosure: I am a parent of a *gasp!* redshirter. Now, Mr. Akst, I have to ask: did you actually ready the study, and do you actually agree with it? Because your post seemed regurgative as to much of the coverage of it I've already seen, e.g. here: http://tinyurl.com/qptm2o.
I finally did read the study, and much of the logic seemed weak to me, honestly. And without doing regression analysis on the data myself, [at least] one fact does not compute to me: if this is a problem driven by upper middle class parents as the authors assert, how again is it contributing to "stagnation in the high school and college completion rates?" This is not to say that students of that class are not capable of stagnation, but as a point of clarification, are the "redshirters" the ones stagnating, really, i.e. the redshirting has a negative impact on them such that they represent a dipsroportionate share of those not completing [hs/college]? This is at least implied by the study and your summary. Or is it that their presence is causing disproportionate stagnation among the "compliers" (i.e. the social cost problem)?
It may be tempting, and certainly is sensational, easy and self righteous to say things, as you do, like "the reasons are mostly bad, as are the consequences," without identifying for whom they are bad; but this is not looking at actual reasons of any actual family's very personal decision, nor at actual consequences for any actual child.
I can say that in our case, our decision was driven by our perception that there *has* been a shift in peer ages, our assessment that the expectations for that year actually have shifted downwards since we were kids, and our simple desire to place our child at the right place on the spectrum. I do not care if it is called Kindergarten, First Grade, Pre-K, or Grad School. And the thought that as a parent I would not do everything in my power to do that placement properly b/c of some economist's best guess at aggregate social cost is absurd and insulting.
The data and the analysis in this study are exceptionally weak. Most discouraging is the tone and vocabulary, which I find too often in education research, that suggests the authors are interested in a particular outcome for reasons that aren't apparent. The linkage between delayed kindergarten entry and the college drop out rate is not supported by the data the study authors provide. The fact is, that countries where students routinely enter college at a later age, show higher matriculation rates than we do in the U.S. but that isn't the only factor in this outcome.
I am surprised that the authors of the Harvard study did not reference a study conducted by Stamford University's Bridge Project that was published under the title "Betraying the College Dream". This was a rigorous, well designed study that sought first to analyze existing data suggesting that just under half of all students entering four year BA programs at public universities in the U.S. drop out. This statistic proved to be accurate; the remaining students took an average of six years to complete their BA degrees. The Bridge Project study which I believe took some five years to complete further stated that a disconnect between the K-12 and college curricula proved to be a major determining factor.
Put simply, too public school K-12 graduates are not prepared to undertake the curriculum they find in most 4 year public university programs. It's not how old our children are when they enter school (though greater maturity is cited as a helpful factor in completion) but what we teach them, when, and how we prepare them for college.
The Bridge Project authors state that a curriculum design that is a coordinated and systematically implemented concept of education from K through 16 and 20 is what promises to support higher college matriculation rates.
As a parent of a son now in college I can attest to other comments made here that the growing impulse to delay kdg entry for boys is as much or more a reaction to the remaking of kdg into an academic program, a change many more girls than boys can handle. Still, delaying kdg entry does not promise what many parents hope for. At whatever age our kids start school, they have to encounter a curriculum that both in terms of content and critical thinking skill, prepares them for what their college professors will demand.
I agree completely with the person who points out that kindergarten is far more academic then it was when I went thru it (1971). So the kids should be older. You can't just look at one number (age entering kindergarten) and draw a conclusion w/o considering the changing context.
As for Socail security, why not graduate kids from HS at 16, then we would have two moreyears paid in.
Brian
I am also in agreement with those that have said that kindergarten is becoming increasingly academic. As an NYC kindergarten teacher, I know that not every child is ready for kindergarten at four or five, especially children whose birthdays are close to the cutoff date (and yes, in New York, the cutoff date is still December 31st, and I have kids in my class who were born on December 28th. There is a huge difference between the development of that child and the child whose birthday is January 17.) I don't really understand how keeping kids out of kindergarten until they are ready for it causes stagnation in high school. The vast majority of things I see in terms of kids who are held until they are five or six are beneficial. Bottom line: you need to know your child, understand what he or she is capable of, and accept that some four-year olds cannot even sit for today's half-day kindergarten, let alone full day which is what many programs have become.
This has nothing to do with the ability of the kid, and everything to do with the expectations of the parents' the parents don't know how to value anything except academic advancement-- not knowledge or wisdom or creativity-- and so will use any shortcut available.
Books like Closing Of The American Mind and What Do Our 17 Year Olds Know? lamented the lack of any real interest in knowledge in the youth, only an emphasis on grades and advancement. Well, those two books were written in 1987. Those 17 year olds are 39 now. And they're parents.
The Dumbest Generation is only the second dumbest generation-- I'm not sure it has ever happened before in history, where the kids, as kids, are smarter than the adults.
Don't tell me Malcolm Gladwell's book OUTLIERS has had this much influence on parents.
RE: the comment that older kids "resist social peer pressures for early drinking, sex, drug use, anorexia, etc"
I think there is more pressure on older kids to engage in these activities.
Peer pressure: younger kids look to the older kids to lead the way since there is the perception that with age comes experience. If you're going to engage in adult or ilicit behavior in junior high or high school, who would you pick to be your accomplice: someone younger than you, or older than you?
Media pressure: as one nears adulthood, there is increased pressure to act like an adult. Media purposefully exploits images of the young and beautiful to motivate behavior. As one nears the age of these media figures, one is expected to perform just like these figures.