Reply to Redshirting consequences at Lafayette

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This is all kind of nuts to me because I have a girl who is the very young end of the cut off and I think it would be a disadvantage to stay in preschool. It would make more sense to me if families wanted to do kindergarten twice.

I just don’t buy the idea that it’s definitely better to be older. [/quote]

It’s not. This is why anti-redshirters are insane. They think school is a competition where older is more advantaged 🙄[/quote]

That is the opinion of some people.

While I wouldn't describe myself as "anti-redshirt" (I think it's appropriate in some circumstances) my main issue with redshirting just for immaturity is that all this does is make the next youngest kids "immature" for the grade. So if all the parents of September and August kids redshirt, now July and June birthdays will be youngest and the parents will want to redshirt for immaturity. I think when it becomes a common practice (as opposed to something rare for kids who are actually developmentally delayed, not just young for the grade), it just creates a cycle of anxiety for parents.

To me, the obvious solution to this problem is to make sure kindergarten is designed to serve the needs of the youngest eligible students, assuming normal development. If there's a September cut off date, then K expectations should be appropriate for a child who is 4 at the beginning of the school year. That means that the first few months of K should feel a lot like PK4, but be guiding the kids towards more maturity so that by the end of the year, it feels more like 1st grade. If that's what K was like, it would eliminate the need to redshirt just for maturity, and redshirting would just be for documented delays or where the school has identified a reason why the child would do better in a younger cohort.

The problem is schools making K developmentally inappropriate. The schools set the cut offs, so the curriculum should make sense with those cut offs.[/quote]

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