Do private school families start their kids a year later?
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Anonymous
I'm the one who was asking the "how many?" question. I apologize, but I'm not totally understanding you. I thought you were saying in your earlier post that there are multiple kids in your daughter's grade who are 2 years older than your daughter (and so 11 months older than the grade's August cutoff). But now it sounds like you're not totally sure how old the other kids are, and you're referring to Summer and Spring redshirts (who would be a lot less than 2 years older than your July-birthday daughter). Maybe I took your original post too literally. When you wrote earlier about "kids in her class [who] are up to 2 years" older, were you really speaking just generally about Spring/Summer redshirts who are only 2-5 months older than the August grade cutoff? If I misunderstood you, that's my fault. Thanks for the clarification. |
Anonymous
This is based on a discussion in Boys Adrift by Leonard Sax. He cites to a 2007 study done by NIMH in which brain imaging was performed on a group of children over a number of years to map progressive development. One of the findings noted in the study was the different development trajectories in boys and girls. In particular, areas of the brain develop in a different sequence and tempo. For example (although multiple differences were found), the pace of the girls' development in the parietal gray matter -- associated with integrating information from sensory modalities -- was roughly two years ahead of boys' development in the same area during early years. The children were followed from age 3 to age 27. |
Anonymous
| Ok 12:51 two years is a stretch but kids who are 15 plus months older than her is not. I am thinking about kids who for 3-5 months will be two "years older" than her. Sorry I can't give exact statistics but I found anecdotally when I talk with parents whose kids have spring/summer birthday's that it was fairly common that they held their kid back. |
Anonymous
This is not my experience. Teachers at my child's independent school teach above grade level (at least in the lower school) and children are expected to meet those standards. This would be fine, were children not held back for not meeting those standards. It is not expected or appropriate for all 5 year olds to be fluent readers. But if the expectation is that children leave K reading fluently, you have parents who retain children in K or otherwise delay their promotion to first grade because the expectation is that First Graders are reading fluently from the beginning of the year. So parents make choices based on the school environment and expectations, and these are not temporary choices. A child retained because he's not yet a fluent reader doesn't get to "return" to his age-appropriate grade once his brain has made those connections, even if it would be the most appropriate thing for his academic development. Yes, each child is different, and schools should support that. (The public schools in my area are actually worse about the reading fluency issues than the independent schools are. They will retain a child who is not reading fluently, whereas in the independent schools a parent can refuse the "recommendation" that the child be retained.) |
Anonymous
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PP at 13:17 -- this study?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2040300/ According to "Boys Adrift", this study shows that " If you teach the same subjects to girls and boys in the same way, then by the age of 12 or 14, you will have girls who think "geometry is tough" and boys who believe "art and poetry are for girls." " (see http://www.singlesexschools.org/research-brain.htm) But it doesn't show that. It also doesn't show that "the language center of a typical boy's brain at 5 looks like the language center of a typical girl's brain at 3". For one thing, the graphs start at age 7. For another, "the parietal lobe integrates sensory information from different modalities" comes from Wikipedia, which goes on to add "particularly determining spatial sense and navigation". So not "the language center". (For what it's worth, Leonard Sax plays fast and loose with the science. Here's an entertaining read: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003487.html) Anyway. |
Anonymous
| My child attends an independent school with a "Pre First Grade" classroom. Approximately 1/4th - 1/3rd of each Kindergarten class goes to "Pre First Grade" instead of moving on to First grade. Those are typically the children with summer birthdays, and some spring birthdays. |
Anonymous
Different poster here. Lise Eliot's book "Pink Brain, Blue Brain" made a similar point about how Leonard Sax and some of the other "boys are from Mars!" writers distort the research to fit their preconceived theories. IIRC, she has a whole chapter where she catalogs their misstatements. FWIW, when I read some of the studies cited by NurtureShock, I discovered Po Bronson similarly distorted some of the underlying studies to support his argument that intelligence tests are unreliable. The studies he cites all say that intelligence tests are less reliable for young children then for older children, but they also say that even for young children, the intelligence test results are significant. However, for younger children, the test results should be verified more closely and repeated often. But NurtureShock represents that reasonably nuanced position as "Intelligence tests are bunk!". I suspect many writers do this. They know the more splashy thesis will sell books or magazines, so they skew the studies to support that more splashy thesis. |
Anonymous
| 13:17 here (posting at the gate on my phone so cut me some slack). I appreciate your taking the time to read the NIMH study. As I understand your blogger's point, Sax overstates the sex-based differences found in the study. Fair enough. I am in no way a scientist, just reasonably literate. Poking holes in anyone's science is easy to do. However, if the logical leap you are suggesting is "Sax overstated the differentials in the NIMH study, therefore male and female brains are exactly alike", I do not think your blogger or the NIMH team would agree. Sax explored a number of theories for why boys have done poorly academically in comparison to girls over the past 30 years. He was looking for answers, one of which was that there are inherent biological differences. I think the NIMH study and, frankly, common sense, support this. The fact that Sax assigns more significance to the NIMH study than your blogger doesn't invalidate his theories for me. |
Anonymous
PP at 14:42 here -- my point actually was not "Sax overstated the differentials in the NIMH study, therefore male and female brains are exactly alike". My point was that when you look at the scientific papers that Sax cites to support his claims, those papers -- at minimum -- do not say what Sax says they say. As for "inherent biological differences", I second the recommendation of the PP at 15:01 for Lisa Eliot's "Pink Brain, Blue Brain". |
Anonymous
| ^^Lise, not Lisa. |
Anonymous
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"mixed age clasroom" is fine if you are Laura and Mary Ingalls. Having a mixed age classroom in 1st grade is ridiculous.
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Anonymous
15:01 here again. Eliot's position (IIRC) is that although boy & girl brains are different, the difference is incredibly small and not nearly enough to justify major differences in how they are treated in education and other aspects. She thinks the differences society sees between boys and girls are mostly nurture, and less nature. Indeed, Eliot proposes that to the extent some researchers find physical brain differences, some of those brain differences may have been caused by the plasticity of brains responding to boy/girl feedback early in life. But getting back to the underlying point ... even if boys are neurologically capable of learning just as quickly as girls, it often seems obvious many of them do not progress as fast as girls in the early years. Although different researchers present different opinions on whether that's driven by nature or nurture, the differences between those researchers is really moot for deciding whether boys should be held back when they are struggling. FWIW, I personally have no problem with parents choosing to hold back a boy who they think is not ready for the social/academic challenges of school. If they think it's going to help the child, I've got no reason to question their decision. |
Anonymous
Yeah, but holding back a summer-birthday boy is not creating a "mixed age" classroom in the mold of Little House. In a "normal age" classroom, the oldest kids will be about 84 months old at the beginning of the school year (7 yrs old). A summer-birthday child who gets into the class will be about 85-87 months old (1-4% difference). A spring-birthday child will be 88-90 months old (5-7% difference). That's not much difference at all. When people criticize redshirts, they invariably point to the 13-18 month age spread between the youngest child in the class and the oldest redshirt child. But most of that age spread is just the normal 12-month age spread that is unavoidable in any classroom, regardless of redshirting. The marginal difference from redshirting is tiny. |
Anonymous
| 16:30 again. In a "normal age" 1st grade classroom, the oldest children will be 84 months old, and the youngest will be 73 months old. That's an 11-month spread (13% difference), which is far bigger than the additional spread created by most redshirting. |
Anonymous
No way to eliminate toxic Nellie Oleson from this classroom. 
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