Held back

I've been meaning to blog about a new paper by David Deming and Susan Dynarski, of Harvard's Kennedy School, titled "The Lengthening of Childhood." Now I see Slate's Emily Bazelon has beaten me to the punch -- so here's my quick take.

The paper is about a below-the-radar trend. More and more parents, it seems, are holding off on enrolling their children in first grade -- often at the suggestion of well-meaning teachers. (There's even an ed-world catch phrase: They're giving kids "the gift of time.") As a result, while in 1968, 96 percent of six-year-olds were in first grade or higher, by 2005 the figure had slipped to 84 percent.

Why? In a word, redshirting (a term borrowed from the college practice of keeping athletes out of games their freshman year, to preserve their eligibility for later seasons). Sometimes children are held back in pre-K or kindergarten because they are not deemed ready for first grade's rigors, such as they are. In other cases, the decision is made by ambitious parents, who want their offspring to have an advantage over their classroom peers, a leg up that might carry over into high school. (Did someone mention college admissions?)

One problem for the socioeconomically disadvantaged is that a non-trivial number of teenagers drop out of school as soon as they can (say, at 16). If they started off redshirted, that means they've lost a year of formal schooling. (European countries, in contrast, mandate a minimum number of years students must stay in school, which obviates the problem.) Meanwhile, everyone who is redshirted, rich or poor, loses a year of potential earnings down the road, which has both personal and national economic consequences.

From there, the effects of redshirting get enormously complicated, but the authors seem convinced that the net effects are negative. Read the Slate piece for a fuller account …