Reply to My son's kindergarten class has several 7 yr olds in it.

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[quote=Anonymous]There's a difference between being developmentally delayed by a learning disability and being developmentally behind your age cohort (especially in a private school with selective admissions) with respect to some particular skill/capacity -- I thought that was implicit in the "wide range of normal" comment, but maybe it would help if I spell it out more explicitly.

Reading readiness happens at a range of ages.  A kid can be very smart and still not ready to read until he's 8.  But when he's ready to read at 8, he'll learn to read as quickly and as well as equally smart kids who read at 6.  It's like physical growth spurts -- obviously, kids have them at different times.   It's not like the kid who has the earliest growth spurt will always be the tallest.  The normal range of  the onset of puberty in boys, for example, is 9-14 -- it's not a single year.  And if you treated the average age (11) as the measure of normalcy, you'd end up pathologizing a helluva lot of kids with no real developmental issues.  When nature's full of variation, it's worth thinking about when and where it's worth creating overly rigid norms.

Schools have a variety of ways they can deal with the phenomenon of natural variation.  They can put all the kids of the same age together and make school a miserable experience for the kids not yet ready to do the work (and for the kids who are ready to do much harder work).  They can differentiate instruction either by tracking or within a single class.  They can sort kids by readiness/ability within a slightly broader age band (e.g. 2 years vs. 1 year).  They can combine various aspects of these approaches.

I've got no problem with the wider age band approach.  My kid, who was not "red-shirted," hasn't suffered from the fact that others were  And I don't see how/why she could have.  By contrast, I did see a problem (primarily but not exclusively for the kid in question) when a boy who was the right age (and quite smart) but not developmentally ready was in her PreK class.

My sense, especially since the metaphor is borrowed from sports, is that whether you accept or reject the practice probably relates to how you look at schools.  I'm an educator so I look at them as places whose primary function is to foster learning.  From that perspective, the practice makes lots of sense.  If, by contrast, school's primarily an arena for competition I guess some people will resent any practice that helps some other kid but doesn't benefit their own.  I just don't think it's such a zero-sum game.

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