Redshirted Kindergartners

Interesting piece from last week's NYT magazine, on the push by parents and educators to make sure that their children are older than their classmates at any given grade level. Why? Because the older kids do dramatically better than the younger ones in early levels -- particularly kindergarten -- and continue to do measurably better even in much higher levels:

...And in contemporary America, children are deemed eligible to enter kindergarten according to an arbitrary date on the calendar known as the birthday cutoff — that is, when the state, or in some instances the school district, determines they are old enough. The birthday cutoffs span six months, from Indiana, where a child must turn 5 by July 1 of the year he enters kindergarten, to Connecticut, where he must turn 5 by Jan. 1 of his kindergarten year. Children can start school a year late, but in general they cannot start a year early...

Redshirting is not a new phenomenon — in fact, the percentage of redshirted children has held relatively steady since education scholars started tracking the practice in the 1980s. Studies by the National Center for Education Statistics in the 1990s show that delayed-entry children made up somewhere between 6 and 9 percent of all kindergartners; a new study is due out in six months. As states roll back birthday cutoffs, there are more older kindergartners in general — and more redshirted kindergartners who are even older than the oldest kindergartners in previous years. Recently, redshirting has become a particular concern, because in certain affluent communities the numbers of kindergartners coming to school a year later are three or four times the national average. “Do you know what the number is in my district?” Representative Folwell, from a middle-class part of Winston-Salem, N.C., asked me. “Twenty-six percent.” In one kindergarten I visited in Los Altos, Calif. — average home price, $1 million — about one-quarter of the kids had been electively held back as well. Fred Morrison, a developmental psychologist at the University of Michigan who has studied the impact of falling on one side or the other of the birthday cutoff, sees the endless “graying of kindergarten,” as it’s sometimes called, as coming from a parental obsession not with their children’s academic accomplishment but with their social maturity. “You couldn’t find a kid who skips a grade these days,” Morrison told me. “We used to revere individual accomplishment. Now we revere self-esteem, and the reverence has snowballed in unconscious ways — into parents always wanting their children to feel good, wanting everything to be pleasant...”

Long excerpt, but it's a very interesting piece. Take a read, particularly if you have kids.

Update: 'Jebus' offers the following comment below:

One of the more interesting parts of the article, besides the term 'redshirting', is the economic component. As it turns out, in urban areas, it costs more for a year of preschool than a year of public college (you just try and find a preschool in the NYC area for under 15G, seriously, if you do let me know.) Therefore, pushing the public school cutoff dates back places a huge financial burden on families. All in the name of higher test scores.