Redshirting

Over the past few weeks we’ve looked at kindergarten redshirting, when parents delay children’s entry to kindergarten for a year after the child is eligible to start kindergarten because they don’t think the child is ready for school yet. Overall, the evidence suggests that holding a child back a year is unlikely to confer lasting educational benefits, and does carry potential costs parents may not be aware of. Yet ultimately this is a personal choice for parents, often a difficult one, and we respect the choices that individual parents make based on their children’s needs and the options available to them.

We're still talking about kindergarten redshirting*.

Slate's Emily Bazelon surveys the evidence (including the recent Deming and Dynarski study) and suggests we should be skeptical of public policies that delay children's entry to kindergarten--but the calculus is more complicated for individual parents, who might seek potential advantages from redshirting even if there's no evidence they actually exist, and even if such individual decisions may collectively have negative results.

Matthew Ladner (via Joanne Jacobs) disagrees, dismissing kindergarten redshirting as a fad and saying parents should look elsewhere for educational advantages. He also pointed us to this summary of research on Vox, an excellent website that translates policy-relevant economics research into useful analysis for lay readers. International evidence suggests that starting school later doesn't improve attainment or test scores, and that it depresses earnings at age 30.

A new study by economists David Deming and Susan Dynarski suggests that the trend towards delaying children's entrance into kindergarten (commonly known as kindergarten redshirting) may be partially to blame for the stagnation in higher education attainment for American youth:

I don't often agree with Richard Whitmire*, but I do enjoy reading his new-ish blog, "Why Boys Fail?" Richard is smarter, more honest, and more data-driven than most other proponents of the current "boy crisis" storyline, and to the extent that the boy crisis has a kernel of truth to it--and it does, particularly for poor and minority boys--he's one of the more thoughtful people investigating that.

But this post he recently ran, by University of Alaska-Fairbanks Professor (and noted boy crisis hysteric) Judith Kleinfeld, makes no sense whatsoever. Like many "boy crisis" promoters, Kleinfeld believes many boys are not developmentally ready to enter school or begin learning to read at age five, and that this is one reason boys tend to lag girls in reading achievement. Kleinfeld has proposed delaying boys' entry into kindergarten as one potential strategy to address the literacy gap. She notes that the practice, known as "kindergarten redshirting," is common among affluent, white parents, and suggests that poor and minority boys, whose parents are much less likely to redshirt, would do better if they were held back from kindergarten too.

Then she does something really wierd.