I thought I’d heard all of the stupidest ideas in education, but this one has to top them all.
So the child learns that he can do absolutely no work, make zero advancement, have not an iota of mastery of the grade level material, and still graduate high school?
That explains a whole lot, actually.
This is what it was for me. My folks did enroll me in kindergarten at a young age. I was right at the line to be accepted, talking days.
I wouldn’t have anything to do with it. I was to young. I lasted a few days and returned the next year.
I’m going to disagree, pretty strongly. For one thing, repeating a grade only applies K-8: high school is about credits, not grade level. Second, if a kid fails a grade k-8–which means a pretty complete and utter lack of growth–the problem is virtually never lack of effort on the part of the student. There’s some sort of impediment to learning: a learning difference that isn’t being worked with, a home life marked with hunger, neglect, physical and/or sexual abuse, terrible instruction, a psychological condition, unreasonable home work load (like providing childcare for younger siblings all day/night), a language gap, something.
Maybe a kid is just young for their age. So hold them back a year and let them try again. But if they have to repeat third grade, and then by the end of 5th they are once again more than a year behind their peers, holding them back is not a solution. It didn’t work the first time, it’s not going to work the second time, and it’s likely to make things worse: being 2 years older than your peers is no way to foster healthy relationships: you probably can’t play sports, you can’t relate to your peers, your teachers all think of you as lazy and/or incorrigible. This is the fasttrack for the school-to-prison pipeline.
A kid needing to repeat two grades should be a “never"event” in education, like amputating the wrong leg in medicine. It suggests you need to review your entire system to figure out what the fuck went so catastrophically wrong. When a kid who has already failed one grade starts to drop down again, there should be immediate and radical interventions, and they should continue until you figure out what is going on–because there is SOMETHING. There is always something. As a teacher, whenever i have delved into why a kid–even on the high school level–was being “lazy” to the point of flunking out, it has almost invariably uncovered information that entirely changed my opinion of the situation.
Letting a K-8 system just fail kids over and over again until, inevitably, they become the legal system’s problem is not serving students–it’s letting us, as a society, turn a blind eye to abuse, hunger, exploitation, and disease and tell ourselves it’s just that we can’t risk a 10-year old learn it’s ok not to work hard.
I don’t necessarily disagree with you, but none of that was articulated in the response I was replying to. Yes, it’s clear that radical intervention is necessary OR that the child is simply misplaced in a mainstream classroom. I’m not a fan of universal mainstreaming. I know that’s an unpopular opinion, but I do not believe that every child is educable. Every child is valuable and worthy of love and compassion and companionship, but not every child is able to benefit from an academic education.
I don’t endorse education by grade levels at all, nor keeping children with their age mates for academics. People should advance in academics at their own pace, whatever that pace is. But they should always master the level they’re at, with teaching to the zone of proximal development to advance them to the next level. What the other person is doing should be irrelevant to what this individual is doing, even if they happen to share a birthday.
Sports and extracurriculars are a different beast, and should be based on size and ability, but that’s still only weakly correlated with age.
To illustrate: last year I was at an event in my district, and I ended up sitting next to a very nice, very good teacher who taught at a middle school that many of my (high-school) students came from. Naturally, we started to exchange stories about students we had both taught. I brought up a particular name, and the other lady shook her head because he’d been bright, but lazy. What she didn’t know, but I did, because we ended up going to CPS with that one, was that when he was sitting in her class, he was wearing long sleeves to cover the bruises on his arms–and this is a dark brown kid, so they must have been bad–and he was sitting there with knees that still ached from hours he was made to kneel. And this was a good teacher who loved her kids. We were at an awards banquet! But after fifteen years in education, I’ve really decided that this story is more common than not for the kid who just isn’t performing–and the younger they are, the more common it is. Kids generally want to please. When one doesn’t, the assumption should be that he can’t, for some reason. The system needs to find the reason.
When I was in the seventh grade, I got placed in the low-performing social studies class for some awful reason.
One of my classmates was 16. He had special ed for math and English, but his disabilities weren’t overt. He probably looked like a lazy kid to some teachers.
I’m sure it was just as weird for him as it was for the rest of us. I remember him showing us his driver’s license (he bragged about owning a sports car that the principal wouldn’t let him drive to school :dubious:). Seems to me that since he was receiving special education anyway, they could have promoted him to high school special ed. and spared him that embarrassment.
Because it’s not really about going to college at 17. They’d be fine with their kids going to college at 17 if the kids with March birthdays went at 16. Some people do it because they truly feel that their child with a November birthday is too immature to start kindergarten in the September that they are four years old- but many others do it because they feel there is an advantage to being one of the oldest in the class rather than one of the youngest regardless of whether their individual child is ready to start kindergarten before turning five. And one of the ways you can tell that this is sometimes the reason is that it doesn’t matter when the cut-off is - even if the age cut-off is set where a child must be five on August 1 to start kindergarten (and he will therefore start college at 18), there will be parents who will try to hold off on kindergarten entrance until the child is 6 (and she will then start college at 19).
I don’t endorse education by grade levels at all, nor keeping children with their age mates for academics. People should advance in academics at their own pace, whatever that pace is. But they should always master the level they’re at, with teaching to the zone of proximal development to advance them to the next level. What the other person is doing should be irrelevant to what this individual is doing, even if they happen to share a birthday.
Sports and extracurriculars are a different beast, and should be based on size and ability, but that’s still only weakly correlated with age.
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Here’s an interesting story. I’ve been in advanced academics for years. Taught very tough courses to all kinds of students, always in a diverse and urban environment. Over the years, one pattern has been very clear to me–when a minority student struggles, people say 'maybe she isn’t cut out for this class" or “I don’t know if he really has the fundamental ability”. I have virtually never heard that said about a white kid, certainly not about a middle-class white kid. Middle class white kids are lazy. They don’t apply themselves. In the world we live in right now, people are going to decide a kid’s “ability” and “pace” on factors like race, accent, social skills, citizenship status, and, over and above everything else, relative socio-economic status.
I really don’t think the issue here is that we have significant numbers of kids who just lack the biological ability to learn at a high level. I think that the vast majority of kids can stay on grade-level with good systems in place, and when they are failing to do that, the problem is more likely external than internal. You know the stats on childhood hunger, abuse, and neglect. In so many cases–most cases–these are the things that are preventing real progress.
At my school, we take really average kids through calculus as sophomores, and they literally all pass the AP exam. We do select our kids: those kids start on grade level–none are below it, but very few are much above it, either. We do not kick kids out, and we use any means we have to stop them from leaving, however hard they are struggling. Used to be about half of that group passed the AP exam. Everyone else that has programs like ours focuses on hard work and selectivity, but 4 years ago, we went the opposite way: we cut homework dramatically. We quit kicking kids out of the program, and started using any means we had to keep them from dropping voluntarily. We learned that you have to work with these kids and their lives, you have to commit to keeping all of them and, when there is a problem or a gap, you have to do the work of figuring out what it is and finding a way to solve it. This had a huge and dramatic impact on scores.
Fundamental attribution error is a huge problem in education, and one that is much more readily fixable than the logistical mess that is age-based education.
It’s worse than embarrassment if he gets a grade-level girlfriend and encourages her to have a sexual relationship or if, instead of trying to impress kids with a mythical sports car, he tries to impress them by inviting them to hand out and smoke pot/drink whatever with his age-level friends. Which absolutely happens, and is all really pretty normal judgment lapses for a 16 year old–but is pretty toxic for the other kids.
As has been said, these policies generally don’t extend into high school. In high school you advance, and ultimately graduate, based on credits, same as always. They just don’t want a situation in elementary school where, say, six year olds are together with twelve year olds in the same class. Too much chance for trouble.
If a kid is so low he would benefit from being kept back multiple years, our district would take him out of the regular classroom altogether.
Thank you Manda JO for making a reanimated thread worthwhile!
FWIW from the outside I sometimes see “holding back” as an inadequate substitute for identifying and providing the interventions that are actually needed.
As to the op, I’ve seen the pendulum swing back forth. From parents who want their child pushed ahead to the longer lived wanting their child to be one of the oldest in the grade. The logic for the latter is the same as the well established reason why professional hockey players “much more likely to be born in January and February and much less likely to be born September-December” … Twelve months older or younger is a lot during early childhood and a lot of cognitive growth and ability is simply age related. The same child who is the youngest in their cohort is less likely to be as high of an achiever in that grade level compared to if they were the oldest in the grade. That translates into how hard they have to work, how hard the parents have to work with him or her, and how the child gets labelled by the teachers. It’s the relative age effect and it matters for sports and socially as well as for academics. Gladwell has highly popularized the concept.
That said its impact academically may be of minimal significance over the long term.
ETA - personally I was a youngest in my grade. Someone has to be.
In my experience, kids who have it easy at a young age have it tougher when they grow older, because they never learn how to work hard. It was certainly that way with me, unfortunately.
As a parent it can be very difficult to look at a four year old child and know if they are “ready” for kindergarten, much less will be ready for college in another dozen years. Ready isn’t only an intellectual state, its also a physical and emotional state. Will they sit still for the length of time necessary, have they developed the social skills? How about the time they are in school - a girl who hits puberty too early or too late in middle school can have a rough time - can you, as a parent - look at the genetics and sort of time it?
And there are types of “tough” that don’t make you stronger. Like Dangerosa alludes to, the girl with boobs well before everyone else and becomes the target of clumsy, sexually charged taunting doesn’t really learn much intestinal fortitude from the experience–she’s more likely to internalize a lot of negative ideas about herself and sexuality. Likewise, a boy who can’t meet the standards of behavior for elementary school is more likely to learn to be okay with being the bad kid–and more likely to be treated as inherently bad–than to learn better self-control from his peers.
My oldest son was the youngest in his class. Athletically he always seemed to “get it” the following season thus he rode the bench in school. In community based sports, his birthday was after the cutoff so he was almost always the oldest on his team. He held his own there but many times was not on the same teams as his classmates.
Academically and emotionally it took a few years for him to even out with his class but age chart wise he was well within the norm.
My other children were in the middle of their classmates ages and had no real issues like that.
A teacher told us that middle school is often where the youngest kids have trouble so that’s why my son started out as the oldest in his grade rather than the youngest.
Seems to me you completely missed the point.
“Redshirting” is a real thing done in college NCAA athletics. Amongst people who are competing to be in the NFL, MLB, NBA orwhatever. It’s about timing your entry into NCAA competition, which is limited by rule to 4 years, to be at the ideal point versus your own athletic development. It’s a dumb name, but it’s the one in use.
The term got borrowed by people doing the same thing for kindergartners: deliberately starting them a year late if local rules permit to secure an advantage in the lifelong competition for the good schools, good jobs, good mates, etc.
As pointed out above, most schools don’t allow that option willy-nilly to all takers. It only applies to kids who’d otherwise be in the youngest (WAG) 10% of their class.
Equally obviously, if 100% of that would-be bottom 10% take the option, then all we’ve done is moved the goal posts. There’s now a different group of kids who are the youngest 10%.
That’s not good, but it’s not a disaster either. Most of human society is like that: an arms race where we need to run ever faster just to stay in place. In an ideal world devoid of selfish people we’d avoid this silliness.
So let’s get to work on reducing the selfishness and then all the rest will fall into place automatically. Tackling symptoms like kindergarten “redshirting” is just doing whack-a-mole: frustrating and futile.
I wasn’t redshirted, but I have seen both sides of the coin. In Texas, the cut-off for school class years is September 1st, in that if you’re 5 years old before then, you’re in that year’s class, even though you may be exactly 5 years old starting kindergarten. If your birthday is Sept. 2, you’ll turn 6 either right before or after the beginning of kindergarten.
My birthday is Sept. 19th. I had a couple of friends growing up whose birthdays were late July and mid-August. So we were about a month apart in age, more or less.
My two friends were invariably the smallest and most immature kids in their grades, and were pretty much picked on non-stop. I was always the flip side of that- one of the biggest kids, and reasonably mature.
When my oldest was born in late July, and has turned out to be somewhat emotionally immature for his age (he’s 5), we agreed that redshirting him would be a good idea. Mostly because we hope he’ll mature a little, and also because if he’s still a bit immature, at least he’ll be big (he’s already a very tall 5 year old) and somewhat intimidating.
He’s academically fine- ahead in most respects of where kindergartners are expected to be, for what that’s worth.
Some special-needs students are able to attend public school until age 21, and I have definitely heard of kids using those classmates to buy alcohol for them, often with disastrous consequences. :mad:
I remember seeing a case of this on IIRC 20/20 a few years ago; the kids all looked like megajocks to me, and the boy they used had very severe fetal alcohol syndrome, and he had been found dead in a trash can. They denied any knowledge of how he got there, but everyone knew what had happened: they had invited him to go out with them so he could get them some booze, and when he got drunk himself and passed out, they dumped him in a trash can. And of course those kids were believed.
That sounds like the football team at my school, almost 40 years ago. :eek:
If a child does not benefit from being held back once, and still can’t master material at that early grade level, they should probably be in special ed.