As private kindergartens prepare to send out acceptance letters this week, competitive parents are trying to game the system with so called red shirting—delaying their kids' start in school so they'll be more advanced than their classmates. Kristina Dell on why it's backfiring.
Holly Korbey's son, Holden, was easy to spot in his kindergarten class—he was the one who actually looked kindergarten sized. "The other kids were just taller," says his mother.
That's because unlike his classmates, most of whom were six years old, Holden was only five—the traditional kindergarten age. But entering kindergarten at age six is becoming more and more common, say researchers. "My parents went to my son's kindergarten and said, 'The kids are so big! They look like they're eight,'" says Korbey.
Holding back kids so they'll enter kindergarten at the ripe old age of six has become such a common practice there's even a term for it: redshirting, a word borrowed from the sports world where an athlete sits out a year or more in order to lengthen eligibility. It's an apt metaphor. Not only are pre-schoolers grabbing an extra year to brush up on their ABCs, they're also gaining a year of growing time, which many parents believe bestows all sorts of future advantages—mainly for boys. "This has been a trend for years, but it has accelerated in the last five," says Emily Glickman, president of Abacus Guide Educational Consulting, a service that helps parents navigate private school admissions in Manhattan.
And indeed, for a variety of reasons, it's the boys who are increasingly being redshirted. "Private schools in general tend to be less forgiving of younger boys than girls," says Glickman, "and parents feel like boys mature more slowly." As we approach February 11, the date most of New York City's private kindergartens mail out acceptance letters, the growing trend of keeping kids in pre-school an extra year is once again stirring heated debate.
One primary driver of redshirting is the schools themselves. "There has been a supply-and-demand problem in New York City independent schools in the last five years," says Lydia Spinelli, director of the Brick Church School, a pre-school in Manhattan. "The older children interview better and are more likely to get the slots." Adds Glickman: "Private kindergartens are looking for older, more mature students because they are the ones more likely to succeed."
But redshirting is not just a private school phenomenon. Many public schools have similar policies, often at the request of parents who want their children to have a head start academically (an extra year of reading can mean better test scores and more self-confidence, at least in the short term) and more physical prowess (forget soccer, he's going to be a running back.) Studies differ as to whether there is any long-term academic advantage. "But if everyone holds their kid back a year, then we're right back where we started and no one has a leg up," says David Deming, co-author with Susan Dynarski of a 2008 study published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, titled "The Lengthening of Childhood," which documents the increasing likelihood of six-year-olds to be enrolled in kindergarten rather than first grade. It's like having a race where one of the athletes is doping—if the others want to compete, they have to follow suit. "It's a zero-sum game," says Deming.
According to Deming and Dynarski's study, in the fall of 1968, 96 percent of six-year-old students were enrolled in first grade or higher. By 2005 that figure had fallen to 84 percent, even though school attendance rate for those children had remained steady. The authors found about a third of the decrease was due to legal changes—almost every state has upped the age when kids are allowed to start primary school—and two-thirds was because of parents or teachers redshirting kids. Those numbers don't include private schools, the worst offenders. For many lower-income families who can't afford to pay for pre-school, starting kids a year later in kindergarten simply means a bigger disadvantage and one less year of school when they graduate. "In economics, one of the most consistent findings is that kids who are at risk of dropping out, if they stay in school one more year they will make more money and are less likely to commit crimes," says Deming.
Redshirting's boy-girl divide seems to have a lot to do with societal pressure as well as the differing pace at which boys and girls mature. "Boys develop slower in the things schools value," says Spinelli of the Brick Church School. "They are slower to read and to write, and their fine motor skills develop more slowly." Younger boys are often at a disadvantage when it comes to interviewing to get into a private school or simply when compared to many girls of the same age. "Boys' handwriting often develops more slowly and they often can't sit still," notes Glickman. Holding them back gives them an extra year to catch up.
In Dallas, to enter public kindergarten a child must turn five by September 1. Holly Korbey's son, Holden, turned five on August 21st, so he just made the cutoff for kindergarten the following year. But two months after he started pre-school, the teacher talked to Korbey about keeping Holden back even though he was doing fine academically and socially. (She wrote a personal essay about her experience for Babble.com.) "They kept using the term 'Summer Birthday Boy' with me," she said. "If you are born after the last day of school here, you're held back. But if you're a girl you move on." Korbey had Holden switch schools to one that would take him in kindergarten on the proper timetable. Now seven, Holden is thriving at a magnet school and Korbey has no regrets.
Likewise, Lorraine Lorenc, a mother of three who lives in Manhattan, redshirted one of her boys when he was in kindergarten. Her son is now in seventh grade and she regrets holding him back. "I thought it was the right decision and now I wish I wouldn't have done that," she says. "He is the biggest kid in his class and all of his friends are just turning 12 when he is 13. He's this big kid acting like all the 11 year olds." But parents often add that the decision really depends on the individual child. Some kids need the extra year.
Still, most parents will tell you that kindergarten is not what it used to be. "Many say that kindergarten is the new first grade," says Glickman. "Kindergartens across the country are getting rid of play areas and becoming more about reading and math." Mothers like Korbey talk about kindergarteners sitting at desks for seven hours with only 15 minutes of recess sprinkled in, which leads many teachers to support the notion of holding back younger, unruly boys because it makes the class easier to control.
But often it's the parents, not the teachers, who insist on redshirting their sons. Besides academics, many see multiple bonuses for their boys to be bigger. "A majority of boys' parents that I have spoken to feel like the social life of a boy has a lot to do with sports," says Debbie Moussazadeh, a mother whose daughters are in kindergarten and third grade at Horace Mann School, a private school in the Bronx. "A kid who is older for that year may have a bit of an advantage on the field." Parents who have read Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers are well aware of the Canadian hockey study he cites, which found that the number of players who made it to professional hockey leagues was disproportionately composed of people who were the oldest in their grade. "I had parents say to me, 'Don't you want Holden to get a sports scholarship?'" recounts Korbey. "But I would say, 'He is four years old and I don't even know what he's good at.'" What's more, parents see it as a good thing socially if their boys have an extra year to grow, so they won't be shorter than the girls in their class down the road. "People were seriously concerned that Holden would drive later than everyone else and wouldn't get to go on dates," says Korbey.
"People were seriously concerned that Holden would drive later than everyone else and wouldn't get to go on dates," says one parent.
But the incentives to push back boys often work in the opposite direction for girls. Parents don't necessarily want their girls to undergo body changes while their classmates are still playing with American Girl Dolls. "Many parents don't want their girls to be the tallest and hit puberty first," says Aimee Altschul, a doctor in Fairfield, Connecticut who has two daughters (whom she did not hold back) in pre-kindergarten and first grade.
But in New York City, where admissions for private kindergartens resemble the Ivy League crush, "Generally, the parents don't have this decision to make," says Spinelli. Boys with July or August birthdays "just don't get in." Of course there are always exceptions, and some four-going-on-five year olds do make it through the interview process with the maturity of, well, a six year old. But those are the exceptional few.
Kristina Dell is an editor at Newsweek.com and runs the education website. Previously, she wrote for TIME magazine. Her stories have also appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and Reader's Digest.
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