Re: study of red****rting (late entrance to kndergarten)

In article
<8b5cfd78-60fc-4886-a4f8-b55aebc0f60c@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
Beliavsky says...
>
>NBER has a new study on the effects of red****rting. The abstract is at
>http://papers.nber.org/papers/w14124
and the full paper at
>http://www.nber.org/~dynarski/Deming_Dynarski_Childhood.pdf
. Overall
>the authors appear negative about it:
>
>"We show that the decreased grade attainment of six-year-olds
>reverberates well beyond the kindergarten classroom. Recent stagnation
>in the high school and college completion rates of young people is
>partly explained by their later start in primary school. The
>relatively late start of boys in primary school explains a small but
>significant ****tion of the rising gender gaps in high school
>graduation and college completion. Increases in the age of legal
>school entry intensify socioeconomic differences in educational
>attainment, since lower-income children are at greater risk of
>dropping out of school when they reach the legal age of school exit."

Yep.

This is just the latest of a long line studies about red****rting (whether
by
delayed entry or holding back in an early grade) that shows it is
ill-advised,
short-sighted, naiively conceived, and does *not* work.  I went through
looking
into this back when my son (now 15 and doing fine in high school and
looking
forward to college) was recommended for retention in second grade.

Red****rting and retention is forever.  Parents think of their big boys
having a
leg up on somewhat younger boys in the s****ts field or the playground;
teachers
think of the slightly misfit kid in an early grade fixing himself in and
extra
year then assume he'd be flying along swimmingly the next decade or so. 
But
what's really happening is that little 5 to 7 year old turns into a
bearded and
bored junior high and high schooler out of step with his younger grade
peers. 
And a 19 or even 20 year old in his senior year when all this peers are in
college or have jobs, and the pull of the real world is pretty strong.

And he either would have caught up anyway as a slightly behind second
grader may
just have been waiting for some development that would have landed him
just fine
had he gone on, or he's a kid that needed some ongoing extra help that
*isn't*
provided by having one grade's worth of curriculum run by him a second
time.

Banty