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Schools and Education General Discussion
Anyone's child do Kindergarten twice?
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Anonymous
| He is in public school. |
Anonymous
| Parents make decisions that they think will be best for their children. We don't need to be critical of those who have different ideas about education and who have very likely consulted with professionals before making decisions for their children with special needs. It's also important to recognize that delays in different areas are often neurological and that a year of maturity can make a difference for the development of motor skills, speech/language, memory, etc. |
Anonymous
You are incorrect to make such a blanket statement. Not in every instance, but yes, time does allow for neurodevelopmental maturity. Child development is a process. |
Anonymous
More correctly, I should have said neurodevelopmental maturation. |
Anonymous
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Anonymous
Whether or not you agree that certain children should be held back, and there's conflicting research as to whether or not it's beneficial, a span of 15 months is definitely not inconsequential for children between birth and approximately twelve years of age. |
Anonymous
conflicting bc people keep trying to justify that an extra year is good for kids but yet, the data shows otherwise? |
Anonymous
So a 12 month age span in a typical classroom is "definitely" fine but a 15 month span is "definitely not inconsequential." OK, got it. |
Anonymous
It is a process but as the person who made the original statement, I meant it to criticize the idea that kids will automatically be more mature/have more ability with an extra year under their belt. If this was the case, the youngest kids in a grade (and there always will be someone who's the youngest) would automatically be struggling and failing compared to their peers and yet this is not the case. It just depends on the kids -- we know plenty of "young" kids at DS's school who are head and shoulders above the older kids. |
Anonymous
| How can a kid fail kindergarten? |
Anonymous
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Here's a recent paper that looks at kids that are held back a year.
http://www.econ.wisc.edu/workshop/ELApril4.pdf |
Anonymous
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A similar article was recently mentioned in another thread. Here's the conclusion drawn by the author of that article:
"Schools must adjust their programs to fit the new profile of their students – larger age spans and greater differences in size and capability perhaps. This can be done well if the school and its teachers resist the temptation to simply accelerate their program and truly reframe their curriculum and methodologies to fit the needs of the students they have. If this is accomplished, students can have the best of all possible worlds." Wow, don't we all want the best of both worlds? To the private school parent, you have the choice to look around and find the school that best fits your needs. To the public school parents, there should be some confidence/trust among the non-neurotic parents that we live in an area of some of the best public schools our tax dollars can buy. Send your child to K when you think is best for your child and allow the K teacher to do his/her job. |
Anonymous
You're being "flip" with someone who works with these kids every day. I never said that a 12 month age span is "definitely fine." Even that degree of an age difference can create some pretty major discrepancies in performance. Increasing the number of months' difference can make the differences even more pronounced Not necessarily but can. |
Anonymous
The concern regarding much of the research is that the children they're monitoring are often retained because of learning issues. Yes, they're also more likely to drop out of school or not perform as well as their peers--not necessarily because they were retained but because school was very hard and discouraging for them. In other words, they might have dropped out or earned lower grades anyway. |
Anonymous
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The abstract for the paper at
http://www.econ.wisc.edu/workshop/ELApril4.pdf talks about evidence showing serious problems caused by holding students back. "We present evidence that the often-cited positive relationship between kindergarten entrance age and school achievement primarily reflects skill accumulation prior to kindergarten, rather than a heightened ability to learn in school among older children. The association between achievement test scores and entrance age appears during the first few months of kindergarten, declines sharply in subsequent years, and is especially pronounced among children from upper-income families, a group likely to have accumulated the most skills prior to entry. These patterns cast doubt on the effectiveness of raising kindergarten entrance age as a policy tool to raise achievement, particularly among disadvantaged children. We also find that having older classmates boosts a child's test scores but increases the probability of grade repetition and diagnoses of learning disabilities such as ADHD. This latter finding suggests that relatively advanced peers can prove detrimental to a child's outcomes that are determined by teachers' and administrators' comparisons of one student to another." |