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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I have no plans to redshirt. But I have a few thoughts

1) I can understand why people with notably immature children just shy of the cutoff redshirt. My son is a January baby, so he's on the older side (this is DC, 9/30 cutoff) and he felt just barely ready for PK3. If he was an August or September baby, I honestly don't know what we would have done. He walked late, he talked late, he potty trained late. The transition to PK3 was really rough on him at 3.5. This past spring he just was not ready, full stop. My daughter, on the other hand, is an August baby, and I have absolutely no qualms about sending her next year. She's honestly closer to ready now (at just over 2) than my son was when he'd just turned 3. Kid are different, and if you happen to have a slow to mature kid with a badly timed birthday, that really sucks and I feel for you.

2) There's huge class issues here. Especially in DC. Yes, our daughter will be ready, but if she wasn't? We'd honestly still probably have to send her. We can't spend $20k on another year of childcare when it's not absolutely necessary and there's a free option, whether it was best for her or not. So you've got to consider that side of it, too.

3) A lot of people just redshirt for the advantages and/or for not wanting their kid to be the youngest, and that's crappy. Someone has to be the youngest, suck it up. [/quote]

Fully agree with all of this. I'm not anti-redshirting, but the way it plays out sometimes is, yes, unfair. And to respond to another PP -- of course other things are unfair. The world is not unfair. But redshirting is distinct from other aspects of unfairness in education, in that it's pretty easy to set a policy that makes redshirting hard, or makes it easy. It's really hard to address the impacts of income inequality on kids in public schools. But redshirting? It's pretty easy to create a policy that is anti-redshirt except in cases of developmental delays.[/quote]

Question: would you support a ban on outside activities like Russian School of Math? Because those supplemental programs have a far more negative impact on poorer kids in a classroom than redshirting and they are also discretionary. [/quote]

They don't have a negative impact.  Any parent who wants to supplement can with free resources online or even workbooks from the dollar tree.  We have one of the youngest and they did have significant developmental delays and one thing that helped was sending them so they'd have peer modeling. [/quote]

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