Did you redshirt your August girl? Why or why not?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'm really interested in if ANYONE has regretted waiting a year

Bueller?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP, I think DCUMs anti-redshirt contingent largely consists of crazy hypocrites, having seen many of these threads. These are not rational people.

+1

Hateful nut jobs with nothing better to do than worry about what other families are doing.

What's hypocritical about sending your kid on time and wishing that other parents would do the same? I put my money where my mouth is--my kid's birthday is very close to the cutoff, and she went on time. So far as I can tell (based on classroom birthdays), so did her classmates. Which is good--it means that the teacher is dealing with kids within a one-year, not an 18-month, age range, and can have developmentally appropriate expectations for the class in terms of behavior and academic abilities. Seems pretty rational to me.

Yet I'll bet you either use private school or moved to a fancy school district. I bet you supplement outside of school. I bet you wouldn't dream of sending your child to a high school with a large number of disadvantaged kids. Ask yourself what has a greater societal impact on other kids. Or have you never thought of that in all your self-congratulatory smugness?

You anti-redshirt posters get yourselves tied in self-congratulatory knots over redshirting but can never point to a single well-run, peer-reviewed study over an large population cohort that shows all the (imaginary) harms you come up with, let alone multiple studies that duplicate the approach and results. Yet there is literally 60 years of well-documented research on the impact of school population segregation and access to educational resources that you happily ignore.

You froth on about redshirting, as far as I can tell only because it feeds your ego because God knows you can never produce any large body of rigorous research to support your ranting, but you would never take the concrete steps you could take to actually positively impact others, since you seem to care ever so much about how other people's educational decisions impact others.

Put your money where your mouth is, as you say. Or did you not actually mean it?

Hypocrite.

You'd lose those bets. Ask yourself why you're so invested in this that you repeatedly accuse people you don't know anything about of hypocrisy. I didn't make a single comment that could fairly be described as ranting or frothing, and I didn't say one nasty thing about parents who redshirt. I certainly hope that you aren't representative of parents who do, though. You're not much of an ambassador for your cause.

+1. PP is vicious and just hysterical.

I also don’t see where an honest person sees a parent paying for private or paying for the expense to move as the same as a competitive redshirter mom. How the hell is that the same? In the first two scenarios, you typically pay a real cost to try and honestly create an outcome. We can’t afford private so we don’t. We could afford to move to our best zoned area so we did, and we also accept that nothing is a straight line or certain. A mom who holds back a kid who has no areas of concern highlighted by an educated third party like a ped, teacher, or therapist is a cheat, and she knows it, and THAT’S why she’s screaming at you.

No, as I said in a different post, I just hate hypocrites. I didn't redshirt. You just don't like the fact that it's obvious you are a hypocrite.

You really enjoy name-calling. It’s not hypocritical for me to live in a nicer home that we pay for, in a district that does well. I have a youngest in class and roles with it. We PAID for our home. We didn’t lie, to ourselves or anyone else, about anything. We didn’t claim our child couldn’t follow rules set for our zoned school. Be your age and stop name-calling. I did not do anything wrong, or to disadvantage another family or child.

What's amazing about this post is that I don't think this person could have been a better demonstration of the hypocrisy of DCUM's anti-redshirt posters if she'd tried. I almost wonder if it's a satire, except sadly I don't think it is.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP, I haven't read the rest of the thread, but I feel like the following PSA should be posted to all redshirting threads on DCUM:

Anyone who says that studies show that redshirting is vastly helpful or harmful to students (either those redshirted or those not redshirted) is wildly exaggerating the available research and their opinions should be disregarded.

For all the ranting and froth the topic causes, there aren't very many good, rigorous, statistically valid studies about redshirting. Often when people say "studies say," you need to ask them for the exact cite, and they usually can't provide it, or when they do, it turns out they're outright wrong about the studies. Ask for cites, if people start babbling about "the studies," and read them yourself.

In general, publications in social science journals are analytically weaker than those in medical journals and don't go through the same level of peer review, so judge them accordingly.

The only large population studies (that I know of) that somewhat concern redshirting have to do with the studies on relative age effect and ADHD diagnosis. To summarize at a very high level, those studies link an increased probability of diagnosis of ADHD and/or prescription of ADHD medications with being younger in the class. The studies occur across populations that both do and do not redshirt. If you want to review the studies yourself, here's a meta-analysis of the studies; you can get to some of the individual studies through this meta-analysis. Not all studies found the same degree of impact, and not all studies were of the same level of rigor, but you can evaluate yourself. Also, to be clear these studies were not about redshirting; however, if you have a concern about ADHD you should consider talking to your pediatrician.

It pains me that this even has to be spelled out, but based on lots of observations of DCUM's redshirt discussions, it does need to be spelled out: private schools can redshirt as much as they want, because they can set their own admissions rules.

A follow-up point to the point above: if you do not like a private school's policy on redshirting, you do not need to apply to that school. To most people this is obvious but years of reading DCUM has taught me it is not obvious to everyone.

Public schools vary in their rules with respect to redshirting; it doesn't make sense to talk in general about "the rules" with respect to public schools because they vary by state and in some cases by districts.

Cutoff dates vary by state. Again, this does seem to be misunderstood on DCUM.

Go to the actual studies cited in popular media rather than the popular media articles themselves; the studies are usually easily available. You can decide for yourself if you want to make a decision based on about a questionable sample of students from a specialized Italian university or not.

Redshirting discussions on DCUM attract a lot of truly crazy people. Evaluate your feedback accordingly.

In the end, you know your child. It's not "not having faith in them" to redshirt. It's not "putting your ego ahead of their needs" to not redshirt. Anyone who says that nonsense (and there are a lot of them on DCUM) should just be ignored as they are likely not great parents themselves.

If you encounter someone who is wildly anti-redshirting but sends their child to private school, moves to an expensive school district, hires outside tutors, or who engages in outside academic enrichment, they're probably hypocrites and you should ignore them.

If you encounter someone who is wildly pro-redshirting but who doesn't support the right of kids to enter school early to the same degree as they might delay, they're probably hypocrites and you should ignore them.

Other than citations to studies, you're probably not going to get a lot of use out of these discussions given the crazies that they tend to attract. Evaluate them accordingly.

HTH.

I disagree with some of what you're stating as fact, when there really aren't facts to substantiate your claims. For example, what do you base your claims re: social science journals on? I've published in both social science and medical journals. Medical journals often have a higher impact factor if they are read and cited by a wider audience, but there are also some not very prestigious medical journals. However, I've often found more detailed peer review from social science journals--Ph.D.s educated in statistics and research methods are often sticklers and ask for extensive revisions before a paper is suitable for publications. I still work in research, and review the work of Ph.D.s and M.D.s every day. I don't find social science folks to be less rigorous at all.

I also disagree with your claims about posters who are "crazy" or "not good parents"--this sounds just as extreme as the posters it's meant to criticize.

I think it is widely accepted that in general social science journals are less rigorous. Of course there are weak medical journals but overall my understanding is that as a generality, that is the case.

PP here and I disagree that this is widely accepted. "Social sciences" spans a wide variety of fields, from sociology to public health to economics to psychology to political science. I don't think such a sweeping generalization is very meaningful, and I've only ever seen it stated here. Again, as someone who has recent pubs in these journals, I have not found it to be true that social sciences journals are "analytically weaker" (not exactly sure what that means) than medical journals. It really just depends on how scientifically rigorous the journal is, irrespective of discipline.

[Anonymous]

Two concrete instances where, having sent my August birthday DD "on time", had a negative social impact:

1. She was invited to go to summer camp with a few girls from her K class. She is not able to join because the camps require you to be 6 yo AND have completed K. (E.g., some Fairfax county camps, Arlinging P&R and Dynamic Gymnastics camps). They don't follow the school cut off. She's really sad about this.

2. Our swim club uses an August 1 cut off for swimming groups. She'll be grouped with the class below her, rather than her friends from school every single year. It's disappointing that she'll be excluded from being with her classmates.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Two concrete instances where, having sent my August birthday DD "on time", had a negative social impact:

1. She was invited to go to summer camp with a few girls from her K class. She is not able to join because the camps require you to be 6 yo AND have completed K. (E.g., some Fairfax county camps, Arlinging P&R and Dynamic Gymnastics camps). They don't follow the school cut off. She's really sad about this.

2. Our swim club uses an August 1 cut off for swimming groups. She'll be grouped with the class below her, rather than her friends from school every single year. It's disappointing that she'll be excluded from being with her classmates.

These are not a big deal.

You can change the bday for camp. They don’t ask for a birth certificate.
For swimming last summer I asked if my August bday boy could swim up to swim with his friends and it was no problem. And a win win when he did well swimming 8&u in the meets.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Two concrete instances where, having sent my August birthday DD "on time", had a negative social impact:

1. She was invited to go to summer camp with a few girls from her K class. She is not able to join because the camps require you to be 6 yo AND have completed K. (E.g., some Fairfax county camps, Arlinging P&R and Dynamic Gymnastics camps). They don't follow the school cut off. She's really sad about this.

2. Our swim club uses an August 1 cut off for swimming groups. She'll be grouped with the class below her, rather than her friends from school every single year. It's disappointing that she'll be excluded from being with her classmates.

These are not a big deal.

You can change the bday for camp. They don’t ask for a birth certificate.
For swimming last summer I asked if my August bday boy could swim up to swim with his friends and it was no problem. And a win win when he did well swimming 8&u in the meets.

I mean they allowed him to swim with the 9 y/o for practice time.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP, I haven't read the rest of the thread, but I feel like the following PSA should be posted to all redshirting threads on DCUM:

Anyone who says that studies show that redshirting is vastly helpful or harmful to students (either those redshirted or those not redshirted) is wildly exaggerating the available research and their opinions should be disregarded.

For all the ranting and froth the topic causes, there aren't very many good, rigorous, statistically valid studies about redshirting. Often when people say "studies say," you need to ask them for the exact cite, and they usually can't provide it, or when they do, it turns out they're outright wrong about the studies. Ask for cites, if people start babbling about "the studies," and read them yourself.

In general, publications in social science journals are analytically weaker than those in medical journals and don't go through the same level of peer review, so judge them accordingly.

The only large population studies (that I know of) that somewhat concern redshirting have to do with the studies on relative age effect and ADHD diagnosis. To summarize at a very high level, those studies link an increased probability of diagnosis of ADHD and/or prescription of ADHD medications with being younger in the class. The studies occur across populations that both do and do not redshirt. If you want to review the studies yourself, here's a meta-analysis of the studies; you can get to some of the individual studies through this meta-analysis. Not all studies found the same degree of impact, and not all studies were of the same level of rigor, but you can evaluate yourself. Also, to be clear these studies were not about redshirting; however, if you have a concern about ADHD you should consider talking to your pediatrician.

It pains me that this even has to be spelled out, but based on lots of observations of DCUM's redshirt discussions, it does need to be spelled out: private schools can redshirt as much as they want, because they can set their own admissions rules.

A follow-up point to the point above: if you do not like a private school's policy on redshirting, you do not need to apply to that school. To most people this is obvious but years of reading DCUM has taught me it is not obvious to everyone.

Public schools vary in their rules with respect to redshirting; it doesn't make sense to talk in general about "the rules" with respect to public schools because they vary by state and in some cases by districts.

Cutoff dates vary by state. Again, this does seem to be misunderstood on DCUM.

Go to the actual studies cited in popular media rather than the popular media articles themselves; the studies are usually easily available. You can decide for yourself if you want to make a decision based on about a questionable sample of students from a specialized Italian university or not.

Redshirting discussions on DCUM attract a lot of truly crazy people. Evaluate your feedback accordingly.

In the end, you know your child. It's not "not having faith in them" to redshirt. It's not "putting your ego ahead of their needs" to not redshirt. Anyone who says that nonsense (and there are a lot of them on DCUM) should just be ignored as they are likely not great parents themselves.

If you encounter someone who is wildly anti-redshirting but sends their child to private school, moves to an expensive school district, hires outside tutors, or who engages in outside academic enrichment, they're probably hypocrites and you should ignore them.

If you encounter someone who is wildly pro-redshirting but who doesn't support the right of kids to enter school early to the same degree as they might delay, they're probably hypocrites and you should ignore them.

Other than citations to studies, you're probably not going to get a lot of use out of these discussions given the crazies that they tend to attract. Evaluate them accordingly.

HTH.

I disagree with some of what you're stating as fact, when there really aren't facts to substantiate your claims. For example, what do you base your claims re: social science journals on? I've published in both social science and medical journals. Medical journals often have a higher impact factor if they are read and cited by a wider audience, but there are also some not very prestigious medical journals. However, I've often found more detailed peer review from social science journals--Ph.D.s educated in statistics and research methods are often sticklers and ask for extensive revisions before a paper is suitable for publications. I still work in research, and review the work of Ph.D.s and M.D.s every day. I don't find social science folks to be less rigorous at all.

I also disagree with your claims about posters who are "crazy" or "not good parents"--this sounds just as extreme as the posters it's meant to criticize.

I think it is widely accepted that in general social science journals are less rigorous. Of course there are weak medical journals but overall my understanding is that as a generality, that is the case.

PP here and I disagree that this is widely accepted. "Social sciences" spans a wide variety of fields, from sociology to public health to economics to psychology to political science. I don't think such a sweeping generalization is very meaningful, and I've only ever seen it stated here. Again, as someone who has recent pubs in these journals, I have not found it to be true that social sciences journals are "analytically weaker" (not exactly sure what that means) than medical journals. It really just depends on how scientifically rigorous the journal is, irrespective of discipline.

The gold standard of research are RCT. This is something that can be done for both medical and social science journals. However, I don’t think this can be done in a redshirting study. All research will be somewhat bias I think. Except perhaps the one that looked at ADHD diagnoses and birthdays right before and right after the cutoff. Still I don’t think it says much about the benefits of redshirting (except that you are less likely to get a ADHD diagnosis)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Two concrete instances where, having sent my August birthday DD "on time", had a negative social impact:

1. She was invited to go to summer camp with a few girls from her K class. She is not able to join because the camps require you to be 6 yo AND have completed K. (E.g., some Fairfax county camps, Arlinging P&R and Dynamic Gymnastics camps). They don't follow the school cut off. She's really sad about this.

2. Our swim club uses an August 1 cut off for swimming groups. She'll be grouped with the class below her, rather than her friends from school every single year. It's disappointing that she'll be excluded from being with her classmates.

We are talking about the impact of school segregation and ADHD diagnosis rates across society, and you are worried about whether your six-year-old doesn't have specific friends in her swim class?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Two concrete instances where, having sent my August birthday DD "on time", had a negative social impact:

1. She was invited to go to summer camp with a few girls from her K class. She is not able to join because the camps require you to be 6 yo AND have completed K. (E.g., some Fairfax county camps, Arlinging P&R and Dynamic Gymnastics camps). They don't follow the school cut off. She's really sad about this.

2. Our swim club uses an August 1 cut off for swimming groups. She'll be grouped with the class below her, rather than her friends from school every single year. It's disappointing that she'll be excluded from being with her classmates.

These are not a big deal.

You can change the bday for camp. They don’t ask for a birth certificate.
For swimming last summer I asked if my August bday boy could swim up to swim with his friends and it was no problem. And a win win when he did well swimming 8&u in the meets.

I promise you that both are a big deal to my DD.

Re camp. I provided birth dates to Arlington and the gymnastics studio when my DD was 2. I can't just change it now. She can't attend those camps.

Re swim team. I don't know if they'll let her practice with her classmates and doubt that they'll give me an answer until they see her swim.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Two concrete instances where, having sent my August birthday DD "on time", had a negative social impact:

1. She was invited to go to summer camp with a few girls from her K class. She is not able to join because the camps require you to be 6 yo AND have completed K. (E.g., some Fairfax county camps, Arlinging P&R and Dynamic Gymnastics camps). They don't follow the school cut off. She's really sad about this.

2. Our swim club uses an August 1 cut off for swimming groups. She'll be grouped with the class below her, rather than her friends from school every single year. It's disappointing that she'll be excluded from being with her classmates.

We are talking about the impact of school segregation and ADHD diagnosis rates across society, and you are worried about whether your six-year-old doesn't have specific friends in her swim class?

Do you know how important friends are in elementary school? Being excluded sucks.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Two concrete instances where, having sent my August birthday DD "on time", had a negative social impact:

1. She was invited to go to summer camp with a few girls from her K class. She is not able to join because the camps require you to be 6 yo AND have completed K. (E.g., some Fairfax county camps, Arlinging P&R and Dynamic Gymnastics camps). They don't follow the school cut off. She's really sad about this.

2. Our swim club uses an August 1 cut off for swimming groups. She'll be grouped with the class below her, rather than her friends from school every single year. It's disappointing that she'll be excluded from being with her classmates.

We are talking about the impact of school segregation and ADHD diagnosis rates across society, and you are worried about whether your six-year-old doesn't have specific friends in her swim class?

Do you know how important friends are in elementary school? Being excluded sucks.

Agreed. I think these are helpful, tangible examples

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Two concrete instances where, having sent my August birthday DD "on time", had a negative social impact:

1. She was invited to go to summer camp with a few girls from her K class. She is not able to join because the camps require you to be 6 yo AND have completed K. (E.g., some Fairfax county camps, Arlinging P&R and Dynamic Gymnastics camps). They don't follow the school cut off. She's really sad about this.

2. Our swim club uses an August 1 cut off for swimming groups. She'll be grouped with the class below her, rather than her friends from school every single year. It's disappointing that she'll be excluded from being with her classmates.

These are not a big deal.

You can change the bday for camp. They don’t ask for a birth certificate.
For swimming last summer I asked if my August bday boy could swim up to swim with his friends and it was no problem. And a win win when he did well swimming 8&u in the meets.

I promise you that both are a big deal to my DD.

Re camp. I provided birth dates to Arlington and the gymnastics studio when my DD was 2. I can't just change it now. She can't attend those camps.

Re swim team. I don't know if they'll let her practice with her classmates and doubt that they'll give me an answer until they see her swim.

I’m a rule follower too but I have spoken with Fairfax Park authority and they said just change the birth date so he can be with kids in his grade and it’s not a big deal. Ask around I bet people will be flexible.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP, I think DCUMs anti-redshirt contingent largely consists of crazy hypocrites, having seen many of these threads. These are not rational people.

+1

Hateful nut jobs with nothing better to do than worry about what other families are doing.

What's hypocritical about sending your kid on time and wishing that other parents would do the same? I put my money where my mouth is--my kid's birthday is very close to the cutoff, and she went on time. So far as I can tell (based on classroom birthdays), so did her classmates. Which is good--it means that the teacher is dealing with kids within a one-year, not an 18-month, age range, and can have developmentally appropriate expectations for the class in terms of behavior and academic abilities. Seems pretty rational to me.

Yet I'll bet you either use private school or moved to a fancy school district. I bet you supplement outside of school. I bet you wouldn't dream of sending your child to a high school with a large number of disadvantaged kids. Ask yourself what has a greater societal impact on other kids. Or have you never thought of that in all your self-congratulatory smugness?

You anti-redshirt posters get yourselves tied in self-congratulatory knots over redshirting but can never point to a single well-run, peer-reviewed study over an large population cohort that shows all the (imaginary) harms you come up with, let alone multiple studies that duplicate the approach and results. Yet there is literally 60 years of well-documented research on the impact of school population segregation and access to educational resources that you happily ignore.

You froth on about redshirting, as far as I can tell only because it feeds your ego because God knows you can never produce any large body of rigorous research to support your ranting, but you would never take the concrete steps you could take to actually positively impact others, since you seem to care ever so much about how other people's educational decisions impact others.

Put your money where your mouth is, as you say. Or did you not actually mean it?

Hypocrite.

You'd lose those bets. Ask yourself why you're so invested in this that you repeatedly accuse people you don't know anything about of hypocrisy. I didn't make a single comment that could fairly be described as ranting or frothing, and I didn't say one nasty thing about parents who redshirt. I certainly hope that you aren't representative of parents who do, though. You're not much of an ambassador for your cause.

+1. PP is vicious and just hysterical.

I also don’t see where an honest person sees a parent paying for private or paying for the expense to move as the same as a competitive redshirter mom. How the hell is that the same? In the first two scenarios, you typically pay a real cost to try and honestly create an outcome. We can’t afford private so we don’t. We could afford to move to our best zoned area so we did, and we also accept that nothing is a straight line or certain. A mom who holds back a kid who has no areas of concern highlighted by an educated third party like a ped, teacher, or therapist is a cheat, and she knows it, and THAT’S why she’s screaming at you.

No, as I said in a different post, I just hate hypocrites. I didn't redshirt. You just don't like the fact that it's obvious you are a hypocrite.

You really enjoy name-calling. It’s not hypocritical for me to live in a nicer home that we pay for, in a district that does well. I have a youngest in class and roles with it. We PAID for our home. We didn’t lie, to ourselves or anyone else, about anything. We didn’t claim our child couldn’t follow rules set for our zoned school. Be your age and stop name-calling. I did not do anything wrong, or to disadvantage another family or child.

What's amazing about this post is that I don't think this person could have been a better demonstration of the hypocrisy of DCUM's anti-redshirt posters if she'd tried. I almost wonder if it's a satire, except sadly I don't think it is.

It is amazing. And embarrassing.

[Anonymous]

My kids are June and Nov birthdates so redshirting was never a consideration. Since both kids play travel and HS sports, I come into contact of many of the areas most successful athletes. In my DS and DD HS sports, the most successful athletes going on to play collegiate basketball, soccer and lacrosse are reshirted summer birthdays and early fall birthdays. These athletes are talented in their own right but also benefited from playing up in travel soccer, club volleyball and lacrosse and club volleyball and the extra year of training. This is just anecdotal but probably statistically significant for my small sample.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Two concrete instances where, having sent my August birthday DD "on time", had a negative social impact:

1. She was invited to go to summer camp with a few girls from her K class. She is not able to join because the camps require you to be 6 yo AND have completed K. (E.g., some Fairfax county camps, Arlinging P&R and Dynamic Gymnastics camps). They don't follow the school cut off. She's really sad about this.

2. Our swim club uses an August 1 cut off for swimming groups. She'll be grouped with the class below her, rather than her friends from school every single year. It's disappointing that she'll be excluded from being with her classmates.

These are not a big deal.

You can change the bday for camp. They don’t ask for a birth certificate.
For swimming last summer I asked if my August bday boy could swim up to swim with his friends and it was no problem. And a win win when he did well swimming 8&u in the meets.

I promise you that both are a big deal to my DD.

Re camp. I provided birth dates to Arlington and the gymnastics studio when my DD was 2. I can't just change it now. She can't attend those camps.

Re swim team. I don't know if they'll let her practice with her classmates and doubt that they'll give me an answer until they see her swim.

I’m a rule follower too but I have spoken with Fairfax Park authority and they said just change the birth date so he can be with kids in his grade and it’s not a big deal. Ask around I bet people will be flexible.

Me again but it is also not usually an issue every year for summer swim team - only cut off years such as 8&u, 9-12, then 13 & up