Young 5ives

In reaction to an article in the NYTimes that outlined a growing tendency for parents to hold their kids back in school purposefully in the hopes that they will be on the more advanced end of the academic spectrum and, as a result, more likely to get into a fancy college/be rich I asked my good friend Vera if I should be worried. Oh, BTW, Vera has her Ph.D. from Stanford in Education and travels the world consulting companies and countries on alternative educational methodologies...or something like that. You see we send our kids to public schools and don't buy into holding them back unless they don't seem mature enough intellectually. Her response follows:

Well, it depends on who the “we” is, dunnit?

Written while groovin' to Here I Am (Come And Take Me) from the album “Soul Sides, V. 2: The Covers” by Marcia Griffiths

If it's “we” as a society, we should be worried.

That the social skills and exploration of one’s immediate world have been squeezed out of kindergarten is less the result of a pedagogical shift than of the accountability movement and the literal-minded reverse-engineering process it has brought to the schools.

In a report on kindergarten, the National Association of Early Childhood Specialists in State Departments of Education wrote, “Most of the questionable entry and placement practices that have emerged in recent years have their genesis in concerns over children’s capacities to cope with the increasingly inappropriate curriculum in kindergarten.”

If it's “we” as morally attentive and engaged people, we should be worried.

What’s more, given the socioeconomics of redshirting — and the luxury involved in delaying for a year the free day care that is public school — the oldest child in any given class is more likely to be well off and the youngest child is more likely to be poor. “You almost have a double advantage coming to the well-off kids,” says Samuel J. Meisels, president of Erikson Institute, a graduate school in child development in Chicago. “From a public-policy point of view I find this very distressing.”

.... the last thing any child needs is to be outmaneuvered by other kids’ parents as they cut to the back of the birthday line to manipulate age effects.

If it's “we” as parents of kids with summer and fall birthdays, we shouldn't be worried. Personal story: It was a little bit hard on Isabel to start at 4 (her birthday's in November and academically she wasn't equal to her peers) but I was already then quite disgusted by the redshirting game, and decided to not play it, even--I remember thinking with a certain sense of righteousness and indignation--at my child's expense. Fact is, the children of us affluent and well educated people really do have every advantage, and the statistics represent averages across the demographic spectrum, not the likely outcome for any given child. Ohlone, with the wide age spread, makes relative differences actually less important, since the variety is expected to be so great, and specific skills are less emphasized.

Demographically speaking, any child with a father willing to call on a teacher to discuss if it’s best for that child to spend a third year at a $10,000-a-year preschool is going to be fine.

Thanks for sharing--an excellent article!

Vera