Best age to begin kindergarten: Opinions shifting

The modern Yorker highlights long-term academic aspects of children who eschew another year of waiting and commence kindergarten on time.

In relation to when you should send a youngster to kindergarten, more parents are questioning the prevalent wisdom of “redshirting,” in line with a different article inside the New Yorker.

“Redshirting could be the practice of holding a kid back to have an extra year ahead of the start of kindergarten, named with the red jersey worn in intra-team scrimmages by college athletes expelled of competition for any year,” Maria Konnikova reported Thursday. “… Many parents attempt to redshirt their children not because they seem particularly immature or young but simply because they hope that this extra year will deliver them a boost in accordance with their peers. …

“The info, however, belies this assumption. While earlier research has argued that redshirted children be more responsible both socially and academically — citing data on school evaluations, leadership positions and test scores — more modern analyses report that the alternative could well be true: the youngest kids, who barely result in the age cutoff but you are enrolled anyway, ultimately wind up on top — not their older classmates.”

Specifically, Konnikova points towards the 2007 paper “First within the Class? Age and also the Education Production Function” by Elizabeth Cascio and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach.

“Look for that experience of more aged kindergarten classmates raises test scores up to eight years after kindergarten, and will slow up the incidence of grade retention and raise the chance of going for a college-entry exam,” Cascio and Schanzenbach wrote. “These bits of information are according to broader peer effects literature documenting positive spillovers from having higher-scoring peers and declare that — unlike much academic and popular discussion of school entry age — being old relative to one’s peers is not beneficial.”

Konnikova’s explanation for why she placed much weight from the findings of Cascio’s and Schanzenbach’s paper: “Their approach differed from most studies of redshirting in a single crucial way: the students ended up being assigned totally randomly with their kindergarten classrooms, without any option for parents to lobby for, say, a different teacher, some other school, or maybe a class that child would've a few other perceived or actual relative advantage. This triggered true experimental variation in relative age and maturity. That may be, identical student may be relatively younger in a class, but relatively older in another, dependant upon his initial class assignment.”

A 2011 post around the Freakonomics blog illustrates the rationale behind the idea Konnikova tries to debunk — namely, that youngsters who definitely are relatively over the age of their peers will parlay that age advantage into higher achievement.

“Children who will be a couple of months older than their peers at five to six have more developed cognitive and motor skills, driving them to more advanced athletes and students,” the Freakonomics staff wrote. “This early advantage can result in self-fulfilling prophecies at a later date: The child thinks she is an underachiever, so will frequently play that role.”