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My son's private school also has that extra grade between K and 1st. Lewisville ISD used to have a Transitional class, too. Not sure if they have that still. I think it was called T-1. So after kinder the school decided if the child gets to go to T-1 or 1st grade. After T-1 the child goes to 1st.
Hmm, I read the linked article. Unless 17% now constitutes a majority, most parents are NOT holding their kids back - at least not beyond those with summer birthdays. Certainly something to be aware of, but hardly "Everyone's doing it!".
17% is a national average. I would suspect in many districts it's near 0% and in others it's 75%+.
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Originally Posted by Big G
Perhaps TurtleCreek80 can give us some insight into how popular red-shirting is in HPISD.
"Red-shirting" has been going on for 30+ years in HPISD. I'd venture to guess that the majority of kids with January-August birthdays are entering Kindergarten at age 6. Even 25+ years ago, I entered kindergarten at "just turned 5" and was one of the youngest in my grade.
Wow! January-August would be 2/3 of the kids. If a majority of them are being red-shirted, that means 1/3 of the HP kids are 6 years old before kindergarten???
If that's true, that seems like an awful waste of human lifespan. That's one less year of all those kids being productive citizens. (450 kids x 1/3 x 1 year = 150 years of wasted lifespan. Figure 30 years of lifetime productive output on average, and that's like 5 competely wasted lives EACH YEAR.) All for a spot on the football team? Or to be the teacher's pet? Yes, I've read Gladwell's Outliers. I'm just skeptical that these kids' lives are improved that much by being coddled an extra year.
Then again, maybe I'm looking at it with a skewed vision. My kid is performing just fine among his age-peers. Hold him back a year? I can't imagine that any slight improvement in academic performance wouldn't have been more than countered with extreme boredom in the classroom.
Maybe if I had a below-average performer, I'd be more tempted to hold him back to improve his relative standing. However, my wife's cousin has done that with her two kids. Now she has two overaged kids who still don't do well in the classroom.
I just view the whole thing as a punk-a$$ move. Setting aside kids with genuine learning challenges, I don't see much difference between this and a parent lying about the kid's age to put him/her on a lower-aged sport team, so he/she can be the star.
Wow! January-August would be 2/3 of the kids. If a majority of them are being red-shirted, that means 1/3 of the HP kids are 6 years old before kindergarten???
Again, it's not just an HP thing. I think you would find the EXACT same thing at Southlake, Coppell, Westlake/Eanes ISD, Alamo Heights ISD, Lamar HS in Houston, most all private schools, and comprable school districts in other states (Westchester Co NY, Rockland County NY, New Trier schools in Winnetka, IL, etc).
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Originally Posted by Big G
If that's true, that seems like an awful waste of human lifespan. That's one less year of all those kids being productive citizens. (450 kids x 1/3 x 1 year = 150 years of wasted lifespan. Figure 30 years of lifetime productive output on average, and that's like 5 competely wasted lives EACH YEAR.) All for a spot on the football team? Or to be the teacher's pet? Yes, I've read Gladwell's Outliers. I'm just skeptical that these kids' lives are improved that much by being coddled an extra year.
Well, how's this for an argument? I bet if you tracked the 6 year old Kindergarteners over time, you'd find that a larger percentage of them graduate from college in 4 years vs 5 or 6 years....so that "awful waste of human lifespan" is equalized by age 23.
I'd venture to guess that the majority of kids with January-August birthdays are entering Kindergarten at age 6.
That hasn't been our experience. More like May through August. January through May kids are usually still sent on, and they are now the youngest kids. Some are redshirted, but very few.
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If that's true, that seems like an awful waste of human lifespan.[...] All for a spot on the football team? Or to be the teacher's pet? Yes, I've read Gladwell's Outliers. I'm just skeptical that these kids' lives are improved that much by being coddled an extra year.
My, aren't we getting philosophical? Please point me to the study you've found of the economic cost of these "lost years" versus the economic benefit of the differential in achievement these kids have had. Oh wait...you dismiss the economist who HAS studied this right there in your post. I understand, don't let these annoying studies interfere with your world view. Or given your disdain, should I say "studies?"
God forbid we coddle kids. GOD FORBID. But I'd argue we aren't coddling them, we're expecting a lot more and earlier, and sending them to college with even more rigorous coursework than ever before.
My, aren't we getting philosophical? Please point me to the study you've found of the economic cost of these "lost years" versus the economic benefit of the differential in achievement these kids have had. Oh wait...you dismiss the economist who HAS studied this right there in your post. I understand, don't let these annoying studies interfere with your world view. Or given your disdain, should I say "studies?"
Gladwell is a journalist, not an economist. Outliers is a great book - I highly recommend you read it, if you haven't already. However, nowhere in Outliers is there any economic analysis done, cited, or postulated w/r/t differential in achievement for older kids in a classroom, let alone any economic advantage to any such potential achievement gain. (Or, for that matter, college graduation rates and completion times. )
The study cited in Outliers looked at the birthday stats for Canadian junior hockey players. The interesting point brought up in the book is that the advantage gained by these players at a young age, rather than going away, continued into their late teens. This is refered to by Gladwell as "accumulative advantage". That is, these bigger, older kids get more playing time, thus get better faster, thus get even more playing time, get even better, etc.
Side note: Please observe that junior hockey players make up a small fraction of those kids who would like to be junior hockey players. That is, even though an early birthday is a clear advantage, there are thousands of boys who do NOT derive a meaningful advantage from their early birthday. That's important when you extrapolate from this to academic performance.
Now, one could postulate that the same effect happens academically. The older kids are viewed as smarter, thus get more attention from the teachers, thus get even smarter, etc. But, AFAIK, no such study has been conducted. It certainly wasn't cited in Outliers.
One key difference is that school is not a competition, certainly not in the way getting a starting spot on a hockey team is. I could postulate the exact opposite - by putting kids into school at a younger age, they get academic attention earlier, thus become smarter, thus get still more attention at a younger age, etc.
Which view is right? Well, I think the second one is, you think the first one is. That doesn't make either of us wrong. Gladwell is silent on the issue, and I believe the scientific literature is as well.
I was (am) a December birthday and graduated from HS at 17. In retrospect, it was probably not the best plan for me. I was always academically successful, but would have been more so in the correct grade, and I was always behind maturity-wise. I guess my point is, academics are only part of the picture. Sports - who knows whether they'll really care about them. But everyone needs like-minded friends!
I'm an October birthday. When I started Kindergarten it was not even offered in the public schools in Texas. One had to attend K at a private school. My parents started me a year early. Stayed in private thru 1st grade then moved to public for 2nd and on. I graduated HS at 17 and was in college at 17. I had all of my credits to graduate HS at 16 at the end of my jr year. In hindsight I SO wish I would have done it. The only time I felt at a disadvantage AT ALL was in a few college classes my 1st year ONLY because my advisor put me in a few classes that were for 3rd & 4th year students that were in my area of study (based on my knowledge in that area from HS courses I had taken). Then I was in class at the age of 17 with others that were 20+. The prof and the other students were great..... no problems there whatsoever but I just felt I really was not ready for it even though I did just fine in the classes grade wise. I could have done better had I waited to taken one course in particular. That was the only time that being younger I feel made a difference. Throughout junior high and high school being a full year younger than most classmates did not bother me at all be it academics and was always somewhat bored with that area as I did not feel it was challanging at all (no such thing as AP back then) or maturity wise.
Big G, please read the NYT article that TC80 posted. There is a lot of research to suggest (as did much of the work in Outliers, which I have read, and which is based on primary economic research sources) that being older in class provides a statistically significant advantage in terms of future success. Not opinion, research findings.
Big G, please read the NYT article that TC80 posted. There is a lot of research to suggest (as did much of the work in Outliers, which I have read, and which is based on primary economic research sources) that being older in class provides a statistically significant advantage in terms of future success. Not opinion, research findings.
Ya know, I'd actually be extremely interested in cites about this topic. But the Times articles are a dry well.
The first article contains this:
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Citing a study from Malcolm Gladwell's book "The Outliers" about Canadian hockey players, which found that the strongest players were the oldest, she said, “If he’s older, he’ll have the strongest chance to do the best.”
So this is some mom taking the hockey player study and extrapolating that to academic success. That was the closest thing to a research cite or source in the whole article.
And the second article? The one titled Kindergarten Redshirting Is Bad in Many Ways ? That one really doesn't help your argument.
It references the same problem I brought up - the economic impact of kids delaying their entry into the workforce. It also brings up a point I hadn't thought of - those red-shirt kids can (and do) legally drop out after fewer years of schooling.
The Education Forum has an old thread on the topic of delaying school. Opinions are all over the place in that thread, but it makes for interesting reading on this topic.
One outlier he identifies is the distribution of NHL players' birthdates: for decades, NHL players have been twice as likely to be born in the first three months of the year than in the last three. The reason why is fairly obvious - because little kids are divided into teams on the basis of what year they were born, the kids born earlier in the year are, on average, bigger and stronger and have almost an extra year of development. So they're the most likely to get picked by coaches focused on having the best team over the new few months. That leads to better coaching and competition and ultimately being more likely to get picked for a better team the next year.
This effect continues all the way through Junior hockey and the NHL, where the ratios of Q1 to Q4 birthdates are 3:1 and 2:1, respectively. Gladwell suggests that a lot of hockey talent is being squandered because professional players only started out a little bit better when they were kids but benefited tremendously from better coaching and competition.
So far, so good. But note what happens when those junior players try to move on to the next level - the NHL.
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One thing that's very unintuitive about this effect is that, other things being equal, if you have a 17-year-old player who puts up the same number of points as an 18-year-old player, the 17-year-old will have a much higher performance ceiling. I like to call this the 'Wayne Gretzky-Dan Hodgson' effect - two players who had identical stats their last year in junior; but Gretzky was 16 and Hodgson was 19, and so it was obvious who would have the better NHL career.
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The ratio of early-to-late birthdays is much higher in junior hockey than it is in the NHL, and so while the player development process may favor the older players from age 5-18, the jump from junior hockey to the NHL actually favors players born later in the year. ... The first time that players aren't strictly grouped by birthdate is when they reach professional leagues. At this point, younger players outperform older players by a wide margin, making the jump from junior hockey to the NHL at a 50% higher rate.
Ruh-ruh. That seems to show that you're handicapping your red-shirted kids. Once they go out into the world as a whole, and can't just be (figuratively) beating up younger and weaker competition, things fall apart.
Last edited by Big G; 04-08-2011 at 05:02 PM..
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