One in 11 children in the US get “redshirted” by their parents, but you delay kindergarten at your child’s peril, Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt warn:
Teachers may encourage redshirting because more mature children are easier to handle in the classroom and initially produce better test scores than their younger classmates. In a class of 25, the average difference is equivalent to going from 13th place to 11th. This advantage fades by the end of elementary school, though, and disadvantages start to accumulate. In high school, redshirted children are less motivated and perform less well. By adulthood, they are no better off in wages or educational attainment — in fact, their lifetime earnings are reduced by one year.
In short, the analogy to athletics does not hold. The question we should ask instead is: What approach gives children the greatest opportunity to learn?
Parents who want to give their young children an academic advantage have a powerful tool: school itself. In a large-scale study at 26 Canadian elementary schools, first graders who were young for their year made considerably more progress in reading and math than kindergartners who were old for their year (but just two months younger). In another large study, the youngest fifth-graders scored a little lower than their classmates, but five points higher in verbal I.Q., on average, than fourth-graders of the same age. In other words, school makes children smarter.
The benefits of being younger are even greater for those who skip a grade, an option available to many high-achieving children. Compared with nonskippers of similar talent and motivation, these youngsters pursue advanced degrees and enter professional school more often. Acceleration is a powerful intervention, with effects on achievement that are twice as large as programs for the gifted. Grade-skippers even report more positive social and emotional feelings.
These differences may come from the increased challenges of a demanding environment. Learning is maximized not by getting all the answers right, but by making errors and correcting them quickly. In this respect, children benefit from being close to the limits of their ability. Too low an error rate becomes boring, while too high an error rate is unrewarding. A delay in school entry may therefore still be justified if children are very far behind their peers, leaving a gap too broad for school to allow effective learning.
I’m not sure why we should assume that all or most children should follow the same strategy.
So either the logic is sound enough, or it isn’t. If it isn’t, then they’ve failed to prove “school makes children smarter” and we discard the thing.
If it is, it shows that everyone should skip grades. If everyone should skip grades, what are the skipped grades for?
Obviously there’s some limit in reality, but their model implies everyone should take grade 12 at age 5. Enter university at age 6. Everything else was useless nonsense.
The more important issue is whether unschoolers or grade-skippers end up more satisfied with their life overall.
Even if it turns out to be grade-skippers, it has to be shown that the riots that mandatory schooling originally provoked were just peasant ignorance, and not fully justified.
Shouldn’t somneone tell the Finns and Swedes, who tend to keep their kids home a bit later than we do, with better results?
Naw, screw it. We’re number one.