Ah back to the gaslighting by the entitled privileged trying to maintain their unfair advantage.

Fact- Kids over 1 year younger than classmates are at a disadvantage!!!

DP. I am starting to feel bad engaging with DCUM anti-redshirt posters. They are clearly damaged people. The recent natural law poster in particular really needs help in a way DCUM can't offer. This is a fixation that goes far, far beyond the actual subject of the fixation.

I don't know what it is about anti-redshirting that draws DCUM posters who are struggling emotionally and mentally, but it's obviously a draw for the mentally unwell. I have traditionally read these threads because DCUM anti-redshirters are so weird, so it was a form of entertainment, but especially this recent one seems to have crossed from the "normal" DCUM anti-redshirt weird and maladjusted (but okay otherwise, if severely lacking in social skills and sense) to something really wrong. I am worried about her.

I redshirted my August born son. He's in 4th grade now, and whenever anyone asks him his grade, he says, "I'm really in 5th grade but my mom made me redo pre-k". He just didn't seem ready to leave the cute Montessori preschool that he attended at the time, and he's doing really well socially and academically, so I still think I made the right decision. Also, he's on a highly ranked travel hockey team (not in DC area anymore) and he's totally obsessed, so if he wants to play college hockey someday, he probably would have had to play a year of pg somewhere anyway.

You are proving my point.

What about low income 18 year olds who’s high schools didn’t offer any college level courses or need remediation ? They will start college even more behind the 19 year olds in the same classes who had a post grad year.

Anonymous wrote:Why do some private schools offer “ Post graduate years” then? They believe that submitting 19 year olds to compete with 18 year olds for college admission gives them an edge and they are probably right.

You really are one dimensional on this, anything with an age difference is irrefutable proof of an unfair advantage to you.

You should know some of those “post graduate years” are remedial, the students need to catch up to be able to compete. Some of it is cost as the offered classes are college level but charged at high school tuition level, and others need more time exploring career options before committing to a major. All good reasons.

Why do some private schools offer “ Post graduate years” then? They believe that submitting 19 year olds to compete with 18 year olds for college admission gives them an edge and they are probably right.

Anonymous wrote:It’s not only August babies who are redshirted in the US. It’s more like March - August borns. I think a February born example was given here early.

So if that peer reviewed paper is correct. Spring born redshirting isn’t about appropriately correcting a systematic potential disadvantage to them but going beyond that and increasing that systematic disadvantage on those redshirters youngest classmates.

August/September babies were used as the highest differential test case since in UK the placement rules are generally followed so between those two cohorts there is the largest effect grade vs. chronological age.

Most studies point to redshirting benefitting children that are not developmentally ready for grade level instruction. I believe there is evidence for this.
From here you extrapolate that redshirting gives an advantage to any child that would be held back, and the more redshirting (earlier months, ie Feb birth, or even redshirting for two years) results in a greater advantage. This is not true in my view.

First point that not every child benefits from redshirting. There’s a big difference between holding back boys vs girls. If the same families wanted to just give an advantage to their children you’d expect the rates to be the same but they are 5x higher for boys, which tend to also develop slower, and to perform academically at lower levels.

More redshirting is better. If that were true you’d expect stronger academic performance with more redshirting, but in fact that advantage disappears by the end of elementary school. By your argument, redshirting for 3-4 years would guarantee the child is an academic superstar, that’s just not the case.

You really seem to want your theory to be true, and simply overlook a lot of hard data that contradicts your belief. You are free to do as you please, however given that you present debatable interpretations as absolute truths, you should avoid giving educational advice or criticizing other families educational choices.
Understand that you are presenting only a personal opinion that is mostly contradicted by educational research.

How will increasing the age range narrow the ability level range? It will result in the opposite. High ability older children will be mixed with low ability younger ones so the overall ability range increases and the teacher has to stretch further.

Parents redshirt to give their kids an advantage so they won’t care if their kids are already above average, they will still rationalise that their kid “ needs to be redshirted” so will put them with the younger group..

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I have two boys with June birthdays. I redshirted one and not the other based on their needs at the time. Personally, I think there should be a lot more fluidity in grade placement, and grouping kids based on age leads to a lot of unnecessary work for teachers, too much competition between streets, and strains resource programs.

This makes zero sense. Grouping with large age gaps creates more work as kids with a two year age span are in very different places developmentally. Holding back a June child makes zero sense. I hope you got your child evaluated and into therapy if they were having developmental issues.

Why would kids all be in exactly the same place developmentally just because they are born in the same year?
And, of course, my child was in therapy and all that jazz, which was ridiculous. All he needed to do was get a little older. He is in eighth grade now, and he is doing fine after homeschooling for the last two years. He really didn’t need years of work that was too difficult for him, and would have been much better off if he could have repeated second grade.

On the flip side, my current second grader knows his multiplication tables and can do long division. He really doesn’t need two more years of adding and subtracting. He would be happier doing third or fourth grade work.

There are kids in second grade who can hardly read, and kids who are reading long chapter books and writing paragraphs. How can you say that they are developmentally in the same place? Of course they aren’t. Putting these kids all in the same class together just creates work for the teacher (having to come up with multiple lesson plans) and competition amongst students (where someone has to lose).

Anonymous wrote:It’s not only August babies who are redshirted in the US. It’s more like March - August borns. I think a February born example was given here early.

So if that peer reviewed paper is correct. Spring born redshirting isn’t about appropriately correcting a systematic potential disadvantage to them but going beyond that and increasing that systematic disadvantage on those redshirters youngest classmates.

As a parent of a younger child, its not a disadvantage. It makes my child work harder to compete and shows who is really smart vs. just older. My child has no issue keeping up with academics and is in the highest classes/all A's.

Anonymous wrote:I have two boys with June birthdays. I redshirted one and not the other based on their needs at the time. Personally, I think there should be a lot more fluidity in grade placement, and grouping kids based on age leads to a lot of unnecessary work for teachers, too much competition between streets, and strains resource programs.

This makes zero sense. Grouping with large age gaps creates more work as kids with a two year age span are in very different places developmentally. Holding back a June child makes zero sense. I hope you got your child evaluated and into therapy if they were having developmental issues.

streets = students

I have two boys with June birthdays. I redshirted one and not the other based on their needs at the time. Personally, I think there should be a lot more fluidity in grade placement, and grouping kids based on age leads to a lot of unnecessary work for teachers, too much competition between streets, and strains resource programs.

It’s not only August babies who are redshirted in the US. It’s more like March - August borns. I think a February born example was given here early.

So if that peer reviewed paper is correct. Spring born redshirting isn’t about appropriately correcting a systematic potential disadvantage to them but going beyond that and increasing that systematic disadvantage on those redshirters youngest classmates.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Link with the summary of a study that shows redshirting benefits:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00220671.2014.979909

There are significant advantages but they disappear by the end of elementary school. I would hardly call them massive.

I disagree. The advantage of being the oldest at the beginning sets off a chain reaction that lasts not only through middle and high school, but through college as well. I, for one, don't know anyone who was redshirted who dropped out of college even though many students drop out of college every year. I also don't know one redshirted kid who took longer than 4 years to graduate from college.

The evidence you bring is anecdotal, only a handful of cases, and you don’t control for other variables, like in those scientific studies. Please post a reference on Cambridge/Oxford attendance, I’d like to read it.

DA but

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2011/nov/01/august-babies-top-universities-study

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-21579484

https://ifs.org.uk/docs/born_matters_report.pdf

I would not put much stock in the guardian or bbc articles, they are sensationalist click bait papers. The last one you show us not a peer reviewed paper so some of the claims may not have a strong data backing.

I looked for a peer reviewed version of their work here:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4282424/#!po=0.602410

Read on your own if you have the time, but what I get is that in UK August children perform worse than September born ones, but the effects are small and fade over time. They even cute a study that this effect is not observed in US, likely because of red shirting. So the redshirting takes out of the pool of August babies the ones that are less prepared and then there’s not much of a difference with September ones.

To me the conclusion still stays, redshirting provides small advantage that decrease in time, and it is beneficial only to a small subset of children.

Any child with involved parents and a good preschool should be prepared. The problem is many parents don't want to work with their kids on the basics to get them ready and the play based preschools don't do much etierh in terms of prepping for K.