The way it works locally: At the end of kindergarten, kids who have started reading well enough, etc., move into first grade. The others go into another “inbetween” class for a year and then into first grade. They are not considered held back and there is no stigma.
It’s a pretty good system for making sure that most kids going into first grade are at the same level. Prevents a lot of problems later, especially socially. You really can tell that early which kids are a bit behind others and this helps a lot.
(As to the “back in my day” side. We didn’t have kindergarten.)
I have a distinct memory of being shown a chart with pictures of a dog, door, goat, and one other short d-word. The initial Ds were blue, the G was red, and the other letters were black.* Mrs. Page read the words aloud, slowly, and then asked the class which word was different. A young Smartass Drake raises his hand and says something like “the ‘g’ in ‘goat’ is red, but all the 'd’s are blue.” Mrs. Page, whose chief joy in life was teaching little kids to read, had the wind taken out of her sails a bit and developed such a dislike for young Smartass that Mama Drake had to move him to another class.
True story. The point? Oh, that I guess 1976 kindergartners weren’t expected to have much, if any, reading knowledge when starting kindergarten. (I had also gone to what was then called preschool.)
*My hatred of sans-serif fonts persists to this day.
Oh how this burns me up. One far-too-common failing among teachers is a lack of confidence in teaching bright kids, and that can easily translate to a cordial mutual dislike between student and teacher. If you can’t handle bright kids, get a job teaching kids with a learning disability, or get out of the profession.
Shit we’re afraid of The Mrs. Pages of the world. We’re pretty sure (quite, thanks to this thread) that the Devilling is a bit ahead of the curve reading-wise. (It was kind of to be expected–we write books for a living, work from home, and this is a very word-focused house). Without getting into specifics, we figure he’s also a bit ahead in math, too.
But there is so much more to school than the three Rs (though I could never figure out what those were) He won’t have social interactions and a thousand other little things that his classmates will, nor will he have the maturity to sit still and follow the teacher’s instructions, etc. So part of the reason for not jumping him ahead is so he won’t be expected to sit down and shut up before he’s ready. Again, that’s probably fodder for another thread.
In addition to our concern that a teacher or administration will want to promote him based on just the two or three testable bits–is that a Mrs. Page will resent him for already knowing his alphabet and leave off on teaching him the rest of things. Or that she’ll figure he’s got the basics down, he doesn’t need anything from her during class time. That way lies madness.
The Mrs. Page story ended well: she and I weren’t a good “fit” (as the kids say these days), but once I moved classes, all was as well as could be expected. I certainly don’t have any lingering trauma! (I did really hate school for a while, and reverted to certain unfortunate infantile behaviors, but time heals all wounds and all that.)
