Reply to Why is redshirting so rare if it's so advantageous?

Forum Index » Schools and Education General Discussion

Reply to "Why is redshirting so rare if it's so advantageous?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Some people say that it gives the child one less year to work and earn money - it leaves them at a disadvantage. [/quote]

But someone who does better in school will go to a more prestigious university and get a higher-paying job. In the long-run, someone who starts a prestigious career at 22 is going to be much better off financially than someone who starts a mediocre career at 21.[/quote]

Except that there is not much evidence that being older gets  you that better job. In fact there's a reasonable body of evidence that having to hustle to keep up with the older kids as a younger kid in the class, they ended up surpassing them.   But as others have already said, only 1%ers can afford the extra cost of a year of daycare/being out of the workforce to mind a child.  I know a woman who was induced to have her early September due date baby in August so they wouldn't have that extra year of daycare.
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/youngest-kid-smartest-kid[/quote]

It would be quite the poor decision to pay for an extra year of daycare AND be wrong about redshirting being advantegeous.
[quote]
When a group of economists followed Norwegian children born between 1962 and 1988, until the youngest turned eighteen, in 2006, they found that, at age eighteen, children who started school a year later had I.Q. scores that were significantly lower than their younger counterparts. Their earnings also suffered: through age thirty, men who started school later earned less. A separate study, of the entire Swedish population born between 1935 and 1984, came to a similar conclusion: in the course of the life of a typical Swede, starting school later translated to reduced over-all earnings. In a 2008 study at Harvard University, researchers found that, within the U.S., increased rates of redshirting were leading to equally worrisome patterns. The delayed age of entry, the authors argued, resulted in academic stagnation: it decreased completion rates for both high-school and college students, increased the gender gap in graduation rates (men fell behind women), and intensified socioeconomic differences.

As it turns out, the benefits of being older and more mature may not be as important as the benefits of being younger than your classmates. In 2007, the economists Elizabeth Cascio and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach decided to analyze the data of Tennessee’s Project STAR—an experiment originally designed to test the effects of classroom size on learning—with a different set of considerations: How would the relative class composition affect student performance? Their approach differed from most studies of redshirting in one crucial way: the students had been assigned totally randomly to their kindergarten classrooms, with no option for parents to lobby for, say, a different teacher, a different school, or a class in which the child would have some other perceived or actual relative advantage. This led to true experimental variation in relative age and maturity. That is, the same student could be relatively younger in one class, but relatively older in another, depending on his initial class assignment. The researchers discovered that relatively more mature students didn’t have an academic edge; instead, when they looked at their progress at the end of kindergarten, and, later, when they reached middle school, they were worse off in multiple respects. Not only did they score significantly lower on achievement tests—both in kindergarten and middle school—they were also more likely to have been kept back a year by the time they reached middle school, and were less likely to take college-entrance exams. The less mature students, on the other hand, experienced positive effects from being in a relatively more mature environment: in striving to catch up with their peers, they ended up surpassing them.[/quote][/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics