Help every student belong in school with these practices for school climate. Content provided by Panorama. Nov 16 Tue. And while most students in special. See More Events. Teacher Jobs. Search over ten thousand teaching jobs nationwide — elementary, middle, high school and more. Principal Jobs. Find hundreds of jobs for principals, assistant principals, and other school leadership roles.
Administrator Jobs. Over a thousand district-level jobs: superintendents, directors, more. Support Staff Jobs. Search thousands of jobs, from paraprofessionals to counselors and more. Create Your Own Job Search. Rick Hess. Experts say these students will need significant help come fall. Sarah D. LaTasha Hadley of Waterford Upstart about its use of adaptive software to close gaps in kindergarten readiness. Charles Dinofrio. Compulsory school age the age at which a child is required to attend school.
Age 6. Age 7. Age 5. Age 6 on or before Aug. District of Columbia. July Age 6 by Jan. Age 7 by the first day of school. Age 6 on or before Sept. Age 6 by Sept. Age 6 by Aug. District decision. Age 6 by Dec. New Hampshire. New Jersey. New Mexico. Age 5 by Sept. Kearney For example, using national data, we calculated that a summer-born boy who is in the bottom third of the national height distribution will be, on average, the fourth-shortest child in a class of If he is redshirted, the height he gains during the additional year of preschool will move him closer to the middle of the pack.
On the other hand, if the boy enters on time, he will also tend to gain relative height over the years, and by 3rd grade the odds are only fifty-fifty that he will remain in the shortest third of his class. Emotional development presents a thornier issue. Parents correctly want their child to be able to walk into his kindergarten classroom with confidence—standing tall, asking questions, developing relationships with the teacher and with other students.
Most parents wrestling with these issues ultimately decide to enroll their child on schedule, as the vast majority of children are not redshirted. Among parents of the kindergarten class that entered in fall , 6. The rate was higher among highly educated parents see Figure 1b , with college graduates approximately twice as likely to redshirt their sons as high-school graduates are.
The variation by parental education was especially stark for boys born during the summer months: among those with college-educated parents, approximately one in five was redshirted, a rate that is about four times as high as that for summer-born boys with high-school-educated parents. Note, however, that even among summer-birthday boys with college-educated parents, the great majority of them enter kindergarten on time. In his analysis, Gladwell overstates the benefits of redshirting to some degree.
In fact, a balanced look at the research suggests that while children derive a short-term gain from being redshirted, that advantage dissipates quickly over time. It is difficult to study the impacts of redshirting because students who are redshirted differ across a host of dimensions from those who start on time. As noted, children of more-educated parents are more likely to be redshirted; separating out the effects of the delayed school entry from those of other characteristics, such as family background, presents a challenge.
No one has conducted a true randomized trial related to redshirting. Once these effects are known, one can simulate the impact of being redshirted by statistically aging a kindergarten entrant by one year, and predicting the impacts of absolute age and of relative age on his outcomes. For example, a study by Todd Elder and Darren Lubotsky leverages cross-state differences in birthday cutoff dates for kindergarten entry.
In some states, a child must turn five by December 1 to be eligible for kindergarten in a given year; in others, the cutoff date is September 1. In states with earlier cutoff dates, eligible children who enter on time and not a year late or early are, on average, older than their counterparts in states with later cutoffs. Another study, co-authored by Elizabeth Cascio and Diane Schanzenbach, uses data from the well-known Project STAR experiment in which students were randomly assigned to classrooms prior to kindergarten entry.
Project STAR was initially designed to study the effects of reductions in class size. The random assignment of students to classrooms, however, meant that pairs of children with the same birthday fell into different positions in their classroom age distribution by the luck of the draw.
Both studies find that the benefit of being older at the start of kindergarten declines sharply as children move through the school grades. In the early grades, an older child will tend to perform better on standardized tests than his younger peers simply by virtue of being older. This makes perfect sense—a redshirted kindergartner has been alive up to 20 percent longer than his on-time counterpart, which means his brain has had more time to develop and he has had that many more bedtime stories, puzzles, and family outings from which to build his general knowledge.
This initial advantage in academic achievement dissipates sharply over time, however, and appears to vanish by high school when, as a 9th grader, the redshirted student is at most 7 percent older than his peers. One benefit that redshirting might indeed confer has to do with grade retention and special education placement. Statistically, older children are less likely to be retained in a grade or to be diagnosed with learning disabilities such as ADHD.
Most parents who are considering redshirting, however, have children who are not likely to perform at levels that would put them at risk for grade retention; thus, we would argue that the slightly decreased probability of retention afforded by redshirting should in most cases be given relatively little weight. Both of us have stories of children who were redshirted and would likely have had a better school experience if they had enrolled on time.
Larson tells the story of Joshua, a preschooler with a spring birthday who was on the low end of the normal developmental range in terms of work habits: he had trouble sitting still during circle time, for instance, and finishing multi-step projects.
His parents decided to hold him back and give him an extra year of preschool. By fall, though, he had matured tremendously and clearly would have been flourishing in the kindergarten classroom. That made it likely she'd be the very youngest in her grade, something I've come to see could actually be a positive thing academically.
Surely that should have bought us some time to decide whether she'll be ready at almost-5 for kindergarten. Still, you can't blame parents of children on the younger side for their grade for worrying early and often, particularly when we have to suffer through anxiety-inducing commercials for websites and other wares peddled to get our kids prepared for kindergarten, which sounds increasingly like an intimidating, unforgiving place rather than the warm welcome to education that it used to be.
According to Superpages , an online source of local information from across the country, a total of 32 states in the United States require that a child be 5 years old on or before September 1 in the year he or she starts kindergarten, with 11 states having a cutoff date between September 1 and October There are also 7 states that offer local schools the option set their own required dates for when children should start school. You can start by finding your state's rules here , but it's still worth a call to your school district's office as these rules can change.
You can also find out if special exceptions can be granted by the school principal, as was the case for one of the moms Parents interviewed. Will you be as happy with your decision, whichever way you lean, when your child enters older grades? I admit, I didn't love the thought of my daughter being a youngin' in, say, fifth grade with redshirted boys who are a year and then some older, or sending my year-old baby off to college.
On the flip side, there could have been some downsides to holding her back: After talking to a couple of parents of teens, I wasn't crazy about the thought of her getting a driver's license at the beginning of junior year of high school, a potential distraction during a crucial academic year for college.
Some parents interviewed agreed with their teachers' assessments that another year of preschool would help, whether with developing fine motor skills or confidence or maturity. Others felt that these weren't necessarily good enough reasons to delay kindergarten, and were glad they trusted their own instincts that their kids were ready enough. State regulations aside, your child's mere age doesn't need to be the sole qualifier for whether he or she should begin kindergarten or wait another year.
Elizabeth Matheis, a licensed clinical psychologist and certified school psychologist. Here are a few questions Matheis recommends answering honestly to help you to begin to make your decision on when to start kindergarten:.
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