My parents sent me to school 1.5, really 2, years early. I can confirm I'm not particularly successful. The factors in Malcolm Gladwell's hockey story apply to everything, not just sports.
when looking at sports. those that are almost one year older perform better. ex someone born 1 january vs someone born 31 december competing against each other because they are born on the same year. you see this high up in ages. it would suprise me if one year of extra development wouldnt affect academic performance too. i know all kids are different but on avarega just a few month can make a difference, especially at young age
I'm so glad my parents decided to send me to school (a lackluster public high school in the rural midwest with asbestos and underqualified teachers that hated their jobs) a year later, I _hated_ school, and enjoying one more year of a normal childhood was all the more valuable.
When I finally got to school, I was bored out of my mind though. I taught myself how to read, and my classmates were still sounding out words at a painfully slow pace. I could solve addition problems mentally, and my classmates were counting with their fingers. I finished the worksheets right away (within 30 seconds), and my classmates couldn't tell basic shapes apart in the fifteen minutes of time they had to do the worksheet.
My IQ was tested at above the 0.1% percentile, and the school refused to identify me as academically gifted so that they wouldn't have to spend the money (as obligated by the state for "gifted students") on enriching me, so the administration "trained" the teachers to say that I was bright but not gifted. It eventually came down to my parents having to threaten them with a (no contest) lawsuit because there was such a disparity in the results of the IQ test that my school gave me and the IQ test that a local, nationally renowned psychologist gave me.
Of course, I had to sit around and wait for my classmates to "catch up," and the teachers wouldn't even let me read other books or get ahead. Some of the stories we read had Spanish translations, so I learned the Spanish. I'd literally just tap my foot and watch the clock go from 8 AM to 3 PM every day. Terrible. They wouldn't even give me more books to read (how hard is it to just toss six year-old me a book and let me go "off task"?).
Schools excel at pulling the highs down to average and fail at pulling the lows up to average. I've seen so many examples of this by now I'm happily surprised every time there is a contrary one.
What sticks out to me from all these stories, and ones I've heard before, is that maybe 20-35 kids to a class and annual changes to curriculum aren't necessarily the optimal learning environment. There's nothing special about a year for human development, it's just a common long-term time measurement. If instead of measuring academic achievement by years we measured it in 90 day periods (quarters), would that not possibly solve a lot of the problems presented here? You wouldn't have to worry about getting your child into school early or waiting for the next year, and possibly paying thousands of more dollars for daycare or preschool where it's not subsidized (and that does factor into a great many people's decision making process), and if your child got held back, they wouldn't be a full year behind everyone else.
It seems odd that we still let nature dictate the schedule to this degree, and that so little thought seems to go into why.
This is something I wonder about in a much more general way. So many things we take for granted are dependent on planetary orbits and lunar cycles that have absolutely nothing to do with each other.
Our whole sense of time is so steeped in accident and tradition that hardly anybody ever stops to ask questions such as 'why is it that we get paid per week or per month' and 'why is it that the earth revolving around the sun once' makes X, Y or Z happen which is not related at all?
The degree to which accidental items shape our economies and perceptions is odd, to say the least.
Just FYI, percentile is the percentage of people lower than you not higher. So someone really smart would be in the 99th percentile of IQ and someone really stupid would be in the 1st percentile.
For two of my children, my spouse and I decided to send them early because they missed the cutoff by a few months. Our reasoning was, we could either give them an extra year of preschool childhood, or post-school adulthood, and we decided the latter was more valuable.
From an academic standpoint, both children were able to excel. There was no question they were smart enough to start school.
But one child was shy, and not socially adept. And I think we made a mistake with that one. That child is the smarter of the two, but is not doing so great as an adult.
The other was both socially and intellectually gifted as a preschool child. That child is still in high school, and is thriving both academically and socially, and has very specific, ambitious goals for college and career.
Gender indicators in this post have been left out deliberately. I realize they could be germane to the discussion, but I left them out for the sake of privacy.
Thank you for sharing your story. Last year, I and my wife deliberately decided to minimize applications to schools with my kid who seems to have similar social/academic tendency as your first one. We applied one school where such kids could also be thriving, and ended up not getting accepted. She would need to go to a school this year, and within a year, my kid became much more mature than a year before, and we & people around her think the delay was probably good for her. Just wanted to add my anecdote.
I think that the fact that one of your children was naturally shy is the real issue.
Shy people tend to have difficulties that non-shy people don't have.
I could be wrong of course, but that's what I believe, as a shy person who on account of my birthday started school about a later than average.
I also have siblings who are utterly different to me and who are high achievers etc.
I think its more nuanced than that. I am very shy, but I think have done okay largely through being ambitious, which cut through shyness at key times. A lot of people I work with are the same story I think
True, there are lots of factors at play. All things being equal though I believe shyness is a hindrance to being successful both socially and professionally in the conventional sense.
As a shy introvert myself whose even been suicidal in years past, I'm thoroughly aware of the obstacles it presents. However, since becoming a personality researcher, my views have shifted to viewing it more as a net positive for a lot of things, and it's certainly less of an uncommon opinion these days:
That being said, there are a variety of other character traits that play a role in how different people reach success, thus part of the issue is simply the interpretation of "success" itself, because quite often we look to very specific examples of successful people (e.g. Steve Jobs) or paths, that don't suit our personality taits nor strengths at all, and set us up with unrealistic expectations for ourselves.
Success comes in all forms, shapes, and sizes, so there should be no reason to let certain traits limit us on the hunt for success, when the game is largely about filtering out the noise and focusing on paths and pursuits that actually play to our strengths, instead of ones that make us perpetually anxious and stressed out.
Also shy but I realised fairly early on (early 20's) that you can't be entirely shy and function in a society with people that mostly aren't so I cultivated the ability to overcome it for nescessary tasks but honestly most of the time I'm happier in my own company with a book than out with my friends.
I hear a saying a while back and I'm murdering it but "Introverts recharge by themselves and extroverts recharge with other people" and that is me, in small stints I can be gregarious and outgoing but within a short period I just want to be on my own again, I find it tiring.
Same. Weird stuff also bothered me like not being able to drive when everyone else could or not being able to drink when everyone is going to the bars. You're not even allowed in sometimes.
I seem to remember reading that while the younger kids were disadvantaged during school, they made up for it later and overtook their peers. Presumably because they were used to working harder.
Sure, it seems a lot could go wrong. Unfortunately I could not readily find the article in question again (damn you, Firefox bookmarks manager). Instead I found one in German that said kids who are schooled at a younger age have a significantly higher rate of ADD diagnoses, suggesting they are being misdiagnosed because of their younger age.
Biggest mistake I made as a parent was sending my late-birthday (October) daughter to all day junior kindergarten here in Ontario before she was 4. The gov't has switched the program here to all day, and Ontario has an unusually early start for kindergarten (3.5-4). She was intellectually way beyond her peers (reading at 3) but emotionally and physically unable to handle the no-naps, no-hugs, lining-up, sitting-still atmosphere of a public school.
She would have been better off with another year of her daycare centre.
That interesting, in Northern California where I am it seems like preschool is not much different than daycare, other than they also try to do some educational segments. For example, my children went to a daycare and preschool combination school, where they moved them to a different "class" each year (much less formal, named dragonfly, butterfly and firefly classes), and the closer they got to kindergarten, the more education material they would include (usually just letter/number recognition). That said, it was still a very relaxed, environment, and they still took naps, got hugs, etc.
My mistake, I misread it as preschool. Yes, kindergarten here is more structured and in the public system (and is what preschool is supposed to ease them into). For my youngest, we were lucky to get in on a pilot program to pre-kindergarten (transitional kindergarten), which they offered for children that missed the age cutoff by 3-4 months. It was still offered by the public school, but was in-between preschool and kindergarten in activities.
The length is still short though, as is normal kindergarten, so they're only at school for about 5 hours.
These kind of studies tend to be riddled with methological errors. For instance, one of them found (as usual) that autumn-borns had lower grades than spring-borns. However, once adjusting for the parent's education level, the results were opposite.
This is for me, the big issue and the reason why these kinds of studies have begun to just fly under my radar. When a couple of decades of "research" in various fields adds up to, "Flip a coin, any coin..." something is off. Mind you, any attempt to bring this up to people involved is met with more than just hostility, and usually a mixture of exasperated condescension and and accusations of unfair standards. If you press, it usually comes down to, "Doing the best we can," which is nice for gymnastics, but less so for published research.
>If you press, it usually comes down to, "Doing the best we can," which is nice for gymnastics, but less so for published research.
If "doing the best we can" is too low of a standard for research, then it's all garbage. Yes, there are many problems with some of the research out there, but you deal with it, not ignore it all. The purpose is to reduce uncertainty, not "get the right answer".
You're absolutely preaching to the choir here, but I don't know how to communicate that sentiment to people for whom it isn't gospel, without them getting really huffy about it. Being gentle doesn't help, they're too defensive most of the time.
Doing-the-best-we-can science is valuable. But we should be careful about turning it into policy. I'd rather stick with tradition than very uncertain science.
not surprising, very similar to Gladwell's hypothesis about star hockey players being born in the months of January - February. Students a year older than other students have a huge competitive advantage.
Especially in the early years of life, when the 11 month difference between a January baby and December baby in a class might be 1/5 to 1/10 of the child's life. That's a huge advantage, physically, intellectually and socially, for the older child.
Personally, I am glad I went a year early. It means I started college a year early, and was ahead of all my peers by that point in time. I pushed hard in school, and I finished and entered the work force really early, jump-starting my career. All that even with taking two years off in the middle of my college years.
If skip enough years of school, you can graduate college early and start your career at only 20, and then you don't have to go to happy hour with your colleagues.
In general, programmers (and similar individuals) do not have the best experiences during elementary and high school.
Why wouldn't you want to get to the stage where you have freedom to make your own decisions, to control how you spend your time, to earn and spend your own income, as quickly as possible?
It will. Probably what will happen then is people trying to game the birth month to have the oldest child in a particular year. By 'game' I simply mean planning the birth in a way that attempts to get it at the right time, if possible.
It's like what Malcolm Gladwell said about hockey. A lot of good players are born earlier in the year. When they start playing, they are the oldest and the biggest of the group, and therefore can excel. Same with school, the Jan-Apr babies are just that much more ahead and it continues throughout school. If everyone pushed back a year, those same early babies would still have the same advantage.
The advantage may not be entirely relative. Some may be absolute. If everybody starts school at six instead of five, nobody will have an "advantage" but everybody will do better.
I always thought it would be interesting to look at birthdate and correlate against other items.
Based on news stories and personal observation in various datasets, there is a lot more sex going on in the holiday season and dead of winter, as births spike July-September. Late night activity starts slowing down in February. I've always been curious if kids born in these peaks get less attention, are more likely to be unplanned, less likely to breastfeed, are more miserable in the heat, etc.
When I started schooling, parents used to send kids to school at around 4 years. Now, kids see teachers as early as 1 and half years of age. This is ridiculous.
We did an experiment and sent our youngest to school when she was 5 years old. She was home schooled using some apps and books - in her own time and depending on her mood. Now, her teacher says she's one of the brightest in the class, a quick learner filled with creativity.
Can you recommend any good apps/books/websites for home schooling? I'd very much like to find a (paid, preferably) website that has excellent video presentations followed by exercises and tests.
I used a number of free apps for pre-schoolers available on Google Play Store to teach basic English skills (words, rhymes, counting) and simple maths. Haven't bought anything fancy.
Worth noting that TFA does not actually say what the headline says. Rather it talks about teaching less _Arithmetic_. This is something I've thought would be a good plan throughout my kids progress through the elementary and middle school phases. I'd try teaching algebra much earlier, in place of all the Arithmetic that can be done with a computer, and needs some knowledge of algebra to understand anyway.
As someone about to have a kid this is quite interesting. My personal experience - I took a break from college for a few years (well, five) and when I came back I felt more emotionally and socially mature than I was when I first joined. I was also older than all the kids using college as their first out-of-house explore-the-world experience. It made my whole experience that much more rich and enjoyable and worthwhile.
I think it's important for kids to learn the fundamentals in school correctly. If delaying my kid a year helps them feel and be more mature and adept to handle school, I'm for it, and maybe I'll also give them that gap year or two after high school to see the world and explore it a bit before they get ready to tackle the books in college.
I think another dimension of this whole thing does boil down to the natural nature and tendencies of the child. Would also recommend everyone to watch "The Beginning of Life" on Netflix if you haven't already, a very eye-opening perspective on kids, education, and how living situations differ for kids around the world, very eye-opening.
I seem to fall into both categories. I started kindergarten at age 4 and went three years; my mother used a private kindergarten as a kind of daycare. I started first grade at age 7. I learned to read in first grade almost instantly and was reading children's novels, not picture books, in just a few months. My brother, by contrast, who followed the same academic path, taught himself to read around age 4 by looking at comic books that I was buying. (This was all in the early '60s.)
Academically I did so-so. Less of a problem with ability than boredom. I got into a good college solely on my standardized test scores. In college I had a B average.
One advantage that I remember from being a year older than my classmates was that I was considerably larger. I was large for my age, and a year older to boot. Despite being bookish and a nerd, before that was considered a good thing, no one would mess with me. Plus I went to kindergarten with, and was friends with kids that were up to two years older.
A lot of that faded away as we all got older and the differences evened out. But the main advantage, in retrospect is that I always considered my self an outlier. I didn't need peer support to be interested in things and didn't really care much about what everyone around me was doing. I expected to do the unexpected. I got into computers and computer graphics in the late '70s when no one had even heard of such a thing. I was playing with the internet long before it became a thing, or was even very useful. I started my own business a year out of school was doing entrepreneur type things until I hit forty.
(A downside is that I would often get bored with something _before_ it became a thing, and would have moved on to the new shiny before something got viable.)
These days I'm involved in education, university level and adult education, and it's interesting to see the mix in student's ages at the other end of the education cycle. Older students, especially those that have been out of school for a while, are much more motivated and serious about their subjects. I suspect there is quite a bit of selection bias here, as those not serious aren't likely to try and get more education. But I also see some younger students who are delighted to suddenly be in a place where they can take their education seriously and stretch their abilities.
Reminds me of the 90s UK sci-fi comedy series "Red Dwarf" and the bitter cowardly Rimmer whose alternate reality self was held back a year in school and now is a daring, heroic test-pilot [0].
> They taught multiplication, but none of them knew that multiplication is used to find the area of a rectangle. Their most common guess was that you add the length and the width to get the area.
Am I the only one reminded of fizz-buzz by this sentence?
The huge elephant in the room is the our education system isn't built or designed to be in the best interest of children. School does a few things very well - it frees parents from needing to be available for their children during working hours, it conditions students to accept obedience-based hierarchies, and it makes it much easier for bureaucracies to interact with the public as a whole. None of these are central needs of children.
If holding your children back for one year is good, how about twelve?
Totally agree... there is a misunderstanding about the problem. In fact, the education system is not flexible enough to adapt to the children's mental age. And, therefore the education system as it is designed is causing damage to a group of students.
A solution might be delay 1 year to enroll the children. Another solution is to subdivide the admission to 2 or 4 times per year or ideally grouping students by maturity level and personalized education.. but I guess the cost might be prohibitive.
Why are we age segregating in the first place? Most of what that does is make it easier to administer a classroom, manage the teacher responsible for it, and develop a standard syllabus for it.
Most people are in no position to teach their kids appropriately. If you have a highly motivated, well educated stay-at-home parent it can work great of course.
Otherwise, yes, there is incredible untapped human potential wasted in today's schools, unfortunately.
You're kind of assuming the conclusion - that children must be educated. If someone needs to learn something in order to meet their needs or fulfill their desires, there's hardly a force in the world that can stop them from picking stuff up. If it doesn't meet their needs or fulfill their desires, then why are you trying to make them learn it anyways?
Setting up an environment that allows children to learn is ridiculously easy. Food, shelter, freedom to explore and experiment, other children and adults to interact with and discover things, more detailed resources if they end up needing math or something to solve a problem, and so forth. Primary schooling costs something like $200k total per student, and this expense could buy a lot of child-focused structure.
200k sounds wrong. I have my children in private school and it costs about $25k each per year. Assuming that the private school is profitable, to get to $200k would need a lot of explanation. Sure, amortization of the mortgage for school grounds, etc, but that won't make up the difference.
$200k over twelve years, or ballpark of $16k/yr. Quick Google research says that this is on the higher end of public school expenditure levels, but not unheard of.
Typically schools get between $4-8k/pupil/yr. Rich neighborhoods get more, owing to the greater property taxes collected and the ratio of local/state/federal (approx 50/43/7 in CA). Rich ones have a lot of other resource advantages but that's a discussion for another place.
Critically, there's an big economies of scale advantage in schools relative to homeschooling. Resource specialization has advantages. Just spitballing, I'd imagine the curve would show it's at least 2-3x cheaper to provide an equivalent education to a student at a mid-sized school relative to a student in a 5-student homeschool environment, and probably 5x+ for single student - obviously depends on the parent's earning capacity and skill as a teacher. The argument for homeschooling is almost never about cost though, due in part to this enormous disadvantage.
> Rich neighborhoods get more, owing to the greater property taxes collected and the ratio of local/state/federal (approx 50/43/7 in CA).
Usually not. School funding is not allocated at the "neighborhood" level but instead the county level. There is almost no difference between per student funding between the richest and poorest counties: http://hechingerreport.org/the-gap-between-rich-and-poor-sch... ("I keep specifying 'state' and 'local' funding because the picture gets more complicated when you factor in federal funding. Once you do, almost all of the funding gaps disappear.").
You can argue that poorer students should get more funding than richer ones to help equalize other gaps. I'm not sure I agree with that. Most of that money would go to middle class teachers and administrators. I bet those kids would be better off if you just wrote them a check (or put the money in a trust fund that would then pay them an extra couple of hundred dollars every month for the rest of their lives).
You're partially right, depending on laws around allocation schools in rich neighborhoods may not get more money. But they often do, and by a lot.
There are also differences at the neighborhood level. We see that in California quite a bit.
> A yawning gulf separates even school districts serving students from similar demographic backgrounds. For example, in 2009-10, the latest data available, per-pupil revenue was $14,076 in Palo Alto versus $7,679 in Milpitas, both unified districts serving K-12 students. But clearly, affluence counts: In San Mateo County, the Woodside elementary district took in $18,894 per student, while Millbrae elementary got $7,362 per student. [1]
The latter example is a 2.5x difference in funding, within the same county. This is in part due to some local support in Woodside [2] but its more than just that. The gaps are huge.
I disagree about not equalizing gaps, because there's one scarce resource here that isn't even discussed: quality teachers. By default, quality teachers are more likely to want to work in nicer communities, and we don't need to compound that by offering to pay them less (sometimes far less) to work in underprivileged schools.
Meanwhile, giving undereducated kids money instead of education is a great way to fulfill the old adage 'a fool and their money are soon parted'.
The California situation seems totally bizarre. Where I grew up (D.C. suburbs), the situation is exactly the opposite: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/report-finds-... ("Petrilli said the study found that Arlington and Fairfax counties spent more money to serve students who attended schools with a high percentage of students who are eligible for free and reduced-price meals, a federal indicator of poverty. Other districts did not, he said.").
Similar where I live now in Maryland: https://conduitstreet.mdcounties.org/2016/04/26/chart-shows-.... Baltimore City, among the poorest, spends the second most. Surrounding Baltimore County, which is much wealthier, spends substantially less. Montgomery County, the richest in the state and a suburb of D.C., spends about the same as Prince Georges County, a much lower income county next door.
I would assume that this is due to Prop 13, which limits local property taxes to 1% of assessed value, which means that municipalities have to drive up the price of land if they want to collect more revenue. In most other places without these limits, the actual amount of property tax is more or less the same regardless of whether you live in an expensive or cheap city, and the latter just have higher rates to collect the revenue they need.
At first I thought you meant for the entire education, but primary school is not 12 years. So I thought you meant per year. Even covering primary school, your figure of $200k is off. If you meant all of schooling, including middle and high school, then it's closer.
The average public school in the United States spends $11,000 to $12,000 per student per year. Assuming a modest 4% return on investments, that adds up to just about $200,000 in thirteen years (K-12).
Home schooled kids largely miss out on lot of things. The quality of education (surprisingly) is irrelevant here. The major thing that school enables is socialization, ability to interact with other kids, form friendships, face/become adversaries, collaborate, strategize interactions and so on. All these social aspects would play much larger role in their lives than any formal subject they learned. In ancient times, this would been naturally enabled as parents go on doing their duties and kids in the village play/work together all day. In modern times, school is usually the only available close approximation.
We home school our kids and I cannot disagree more strongly. I'm not sure where this myth that home schooled kids miss out on socialization comes from. We don't lock our children up at home.
My daughter (16) is outside the home for: piano, spanish, voice lessons, horse riding, and acting. She currently helps TA kids at a local community theater. This is not to mention the time she spends with her friends.
My son (14) is outside the home for: piano, spanish, soccer. And also to play with his friends.
I went to public school. My kids are much more socialable than I was at their age. The social environment at public school is nothing like the real world and I'm glad to have my kids skip it.
I notice that the activities you describe your kids doing are, for the most part, structured. How do you know they are socially adept or sociable? Will they freak out once on their own? I have 15 nieces and nephews from 2 sisters. Both home schooled through elementary school and one did it for all of k-12. The k-12 homeschooled kids were done a great disservice by their mom. She has b.s. degree in accounting and is in no way qualified to teach kids.
I guess my pint is that our anecdotes cancel each other out but I'm curious to know why you think homeschooling is benefitting your kids. Why do you think you are qualified to teach them the variety of subjects one learns in high school. Why do do you think they are more successful being homeschooled?
> the activities you describe your kids doing are, for the most part, structured
It wasn't an exhaustive list of their days.
> How do you know they are socially adept or sociable?
You'll have to take my word for it.
> Why do you think you are qualified to teach them the variety of subjects one learns in high school
We're both college educated. My wife has a masters degree. We use outside/online resources to fill in subjects outside our expertise or that we don't have time to learn ourselves first. My daughter is taking a college level chemistry class. Next year (11th grade) she'll be taking classes at community college. We have both kids take standardized tests each year to measure their progress against their peers.
But honestly, I don't know what your HS teachers were like, but I think I had maybe two competent teachers in my HS. It's not a high bar to beat, no that we'd stoop so low.
I know you believe they are sociable. But how do you know that when seemingly most 9f their activities are structured? Would they adapt well if the structure wasn't there?
I'm assuming you've never taught high school. I haven't either. I do have a lot of experience teaching in higher ed though. I was recently paired with a high school teacher and visited his classroom. I doubt I could teach high school. It's easy to denigrate them but apparently they didn't do too bad with you.
Personally I think think it's absurd for soneone to think that they can teach without any training. There are outliers and seemingly you are one of them. Though you'll never know if you were a benefit or hindrance to your childrens' education. They are clearly successful so it's bit important whether or not it is because of your teaching or in spite of it. One thing is certain though. Your experience is not normative. What you've done has been successful but is it replicable for anything beyond a small percent of families? I'm skeptical.
> I know you believe they are sociable. But how do you know
You keep asking this. It's an absurd question. I'm their parent. I see them every day. I watch them interact with other kids. I see my son stand up for the next door neighbor younger brother against his older brother. I see my daughter keep the peace at a sleep over party with a dozen friends and wildly different personalities. Besides that, you imply that public school confers sociability to children, an assertion with which I disagree. I'll go further: my kids have friends who are both "schoolers" and homeschoolers, and as a rule, it's the home school kids who are more polite, more sociable, more well adjusted.
> but apparently they didn't do too bad with you
I have done okay in spite of high school, not because of it. They were the worst years of my life.
> Personally I think think it's absurd for soneone to think that they can teach without any training.
My cousin is a special ed teacher, and an excellent one at that. She teaches in D.C. I couldn't do what she does, and I haven't claimed that anyone could.
Home schooling is a different situation. It requires dedication on the part of the parent (like doing anything well of course), but it's not that hard. There is a wide variety in how parents approach home schooling, from unschooling at one end, to very disciplined like a traditional school taught at home at the other end. We're somewhere in the middle. Our kids have a lesson plan each year. They have a daily check list of items. We leave it up to them to manage their day. Here's today's:
I'm writing from experience, not just about my own kids, but having family who are teachers and having been involved in the home school community as well as reflecting about my own experience in public school and that of my siblings. I never claimed home school was for everybody, but I think you over estimate its difficulty and give way too much credit to public schooling. I think you underestimate how much time is wasted in public school, and completely discount things like bullying and cliques. My K-12 school years were an awful social environment filled with horrible kids and mostly disinterested teachers, and were nothing like the real world.
> They are clearly successful so it's bit important whether or not it is because of your teaching or in spite of it.
This is condescending to the point that I feel like you're trolling. I have nothing else to say.
We're not zealots. And not that it matters, but our decision to homeschool has nothing to do with religion.
Both kids went to Montessori and my daughter started first grade public school, where she went from loving school to starting to lose her joy of learning. My wife decided she could do a better job, and she has.
I can't speak to anyone else's experience, but for our family it was the right decision, and I'd place my kids' education and socialization against anyone's.
If a parent has the time, home-schooling can be a real boon to a child's education. Consider: I can't teach a class of 30 as well as a trained teacher. Perhaps I can't tutor one-on=one as well as a trained teacher.
But I can tutor my one child, better than a trained teacher can teach them in a class of 30. That's the real comparison. In a 5-hour elementary school day, if the teacher did nothing but tutor students serially they'd each get 10 minutes. I can beat that in the first half-hour of a home-schooled day.
Its no wonder that home-schooled kids often outstrip their public-school mates. My buddy's 14-year-old was ready for college (admitted to State college) because of this. It wasn't just that he was very smart and motivated. Its about the attention and monitoring that can be accomplished.
A century ago there was another name for home-schooling: it was called 'schooling'. Until public education got invented, it was pretty much the only way.
Yes, I agree with this. And still it doesn't work for all parent/child combinations. We know a few folks who home schooled for a few years but then the kids went back to public school. Sometimes the parent and child didn't have good chemistry. Or one kid wanted to run track and there weren't good opportunities outside school. Or the parent dedided they weren't suited for it.
We've been lucky. We don't need two incomes. My wife as it turns out is a good teacher and she enjoys it. Our kids are good students and enjoy home schooling. We live in a community with tons of educational resources available outside the home.
>I'm not sure where this myth that home schooled kids miss out on socialization comes from.
From the public school establishment, mostly. I'm sure you can find worst case examples of kids who've spent the last five years in the family living room, but I've never met home-schooled children who weren't better socialized than their public school counterparts. The big drawback of traditional schooling is the children are all the same age, which prevents them from modeling their behavior on more mature children.
I was home schooled the whole way (k-12) and have missed out on nothing. None of my peers know I was home schooled, and when they do find out, they all react with surprise.
My next line is,
> I know, hard to tell, right? Ever since I stopped tucking my jeans into my socks, no one guesses that I was home schooled!"
My point is this: I believe you are experiencing a selection bias. When someone that you meet is very poorly socialized, you might dig a little to try to understand why. If this person was homeschooled, you add a tally to the "homeschooled && poorly socialized" count.
Repeat enough times, and you might have many, many marks in that box.
The problem is, when you meet a well-socialized person, you are less likely to _also_ dig and find out if that person was home schooled or not.
It may also surprise you to learn that in many home schooling communities, especially today, there is heavy emphasis on "socializing", and the kids can often learn things that public schoolers cannot.
As an example, I was able to begin working when I turned 16. I didn't work tons, but I was available to work in hours other kids were not, so I was always working around adults. I quickly refined how to interact with adults and learn from them.
Public schools segregate kids by age, so the only adults they interact with are teachers/administrators, not adults in more "peer" relationships.
As someone who spent all of my formative years in relatively good public schools, and had mostly positive experiences all the way through, I would actually have to say that socialization is one of the strongest aspects of home-schooling. The peer dominated socialization of public schools can quickly degenerate into "Lord of the Flies" type behavior, especially as class sizes grow.
My hypothesis is that with home schooling, assuming that the kids aren't cloistered in the home, the result is simply that they have more exposure to seeing adults interacting with each other as adults, and therefore are more accustomed to that form of interacting.
When I was young the home schooled kids did seem a bit off, but by the time I got to college the trend seemed to that they were consistently more mature and "ready" for the adult world than average.
That said, I would not tell people to home school unless they were prepared for it. Kids can still have positive experiences at public school; it just depends on the kid.
Socialization is for pets. I just ran around the forest and played Runescape for my single digit formative years. I did not learn to read until I was 11. To call my childhood homeschooling would be offensive (to me), school is the whole thing I was trying to avoid. I was home though. I played sports and chess with other people my age and older. I missed nothing but the cynicical, pluralistic burnout one gets attending school. And as an adult, I would not say I am missing anything social skills wise, other than that pathological desire to be normal school people have. Mimesis begets external validation begets emptiness.
Your comment really resonates with me. I've been very involved with a few schools and many teachers. I've presented classes to students. I've become friends with teachers. Sadly, the more I see, the less I like. You are absolutely right when you say that the classrooms aren't there for the students' best interests. One of the links below says "It’s a betrayal of our children and of our country’s future.".
To quote one particularly honest teacher, "your child is a slow processor and extremely gifted. He's F*. The education system doesn't cater for children like yours". She (like me) has an autistic child. I wasn't cross with her at all. In fact, I deeply respected her honesty.
My other child is very active. If you've done any reading, you will know that many modern teachers do not like active children. These kids are energetic, they ask too many questions, they are disruptive, won't sit down for long periods and no matter how much they're punished, they just won't shut up. My child has been marginalised by three teachers. I confronted the worst offender who broke down and cried when I told her how my child had responded to her bullying. She admitted it and in her own words "grossly mismanaged the situation". Yet, I respect her honesty (she's one of the few who would admit to it). My active child undulates between an A grade student a C grade student depending on the compatibility with the teacher. However, my child has said that he's getting tired of the sexism from the teachers and I expect it to start impacting the effort he puts in.
The education system has become more sexist than it ever was in my lifetime. World University Rankings show that girls, only in recent years, are 30% more likely to graduate than boys, and that's expected to grow much larger. Nobody is asking WHY the drastic change! How many times have you heard someone like the New York Times say flippant comments like "boys suddenly think education is girly" or "boys suddenly are thick as two planks" as an attempt to explain a radical shift in performance by gender? We also hear manipulative terms like "girls _outclass_ the boys". If it were the other way around, it would be called "discrimination", "marginalisation", or a "sausage club" (to quote an Australian Education rep in the Daily Telegraph - below).
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/ucas-figures-gende...
I have included a link to one of the few excellent articles on Australia's prejudiced education system. They interviewed a representative from Australia’s school curriculum - a top science professor, Michelle Simmons, who condemned the Australian education system for totally failing students,
Australia has ramped up its gender bias in education significantly in recent years. The result, according to the article is...
"In less than 20 years, Australia has fallen from the fourth in the world for reading to 13th, according to an OECD report. We were once sixth for maths, but now we’re 19th."
You will see almost the same downward trend in the UK and the US (who we copied for their gendered education policies).
They had my interest until they quoted the Gladwell Hockey spec.
Maturity and age are correlated but not causal. I could easily believe that success in school is strongly correlated with maturity (I have observed that students that are less mature than their peers are disciplined more often and teased by their peers, both have a strong correlation with poor scholastic achievement) and that children whose maturity is lagging their peers, will do better if they are only started in school when their maturity supports it, however I have also observed that children seem to be maturing at later and later ages.
Given the preponderance of evidence of children in the 19th and 20th century demonstrating much higher levels of responsibility and maturity at a younger age[1] it seems that there is more at work here than just 'age.'
Finally, in the study[2] doesn't break it down across socio-economic groups rather, from their abstract : " We estimate the causal effects of delayed school enrollment using
a "fuzzy" regression-discontinuity design based on exact dates of birth and the fact that, in Denmark,
children typically enroll in school during the calendar year in which they turn six. We find that a one-year
delay in the start of school dramatically reduces inattention/hyperactivity at age 7 (effect size = -0.7),
a measure of self regulation with strong negative links to student achievement"
I'm going to guess that the physical number of years a person has at the start of their school career is not as big an impact on whether or not they have self control issues as the parenting impact on the first 5 - 6 years of their life.
[1] It is also possible that immature children in the 19th and early 20th century simply died early.
I whished I would have been with older classmates, I connected much better with those a year ahead. I also was boored from the 2nd year of elemantary school onwards.
However I don't remember the extra kindergarden year and how nice it probably was compared to school. I'd guess this was more important, but I'm not sure. After all it's 1 year (an important year though, becuase childhood is so very important), against 13 years that might have been better.
Finishing school a year earlier I don't see as a benefit. It took me extra year after school to really know what to do further anyways.
Ugh. We have lots of people in our area into the whole red-shirting thing, where parents send their kids later and later, then bitch about kindergarten not being 'academic' enough for their enormous child who is 1-2 years older than the other kids.
I seem to recall that most studies show the advantage of this practice fades over the years. As the article suggests, class is heavily correlated here with the practice (more likely to be able to afford another year of childcare).
Both my wife and I skipped a grade in elementary school. Neither of us had any issues and were both successful academically as well as in our careers. I was both the class clown and a frequent bully (not something I'm proud of) so being a year younger than everyone didn't make me less social or vocal.
I met someone who was the youngest in his grade and he wished he was held back.
Read an article about NHL players with late birthdays few years ago.
Majority of NHL players have late birthdays. It means kids that are just slightly older than teammates by just a few months have advantage over early birthday team mates. This advantage helps them advance over younger ones (just by a few months) through their young hockey career and eventually to NHL career.
The argument for the compounding effects of physical advantage relative to peers is a lot stronger than the supposition that parents would happen to have children on certain months.
Unless you conduct a study where you divide peer groups blindly and send some early and send some later, it is just a (educated) guess this is the reason.
Otherwise, you can just walk trough data sets until you find one that meets your conclusion.
116 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 160 ms ] threadWhen I finally got to school, I was bored out of my mind though. I taught myself how to read, and my classmates were still sounding out words at a painfully slow pace. I could solve addition problems mentally, and my classmates were counting with their fingers. I finished the worksheets right away (within 30 seconds), and my classmates couldn't tell basic shapes apart in the fifteen minutes of time they had to do the worksheet.
My IQ was tested at above the 0.1% percentile, and the school refused to identify me as academically gifted so that they wouldn't have to spend the money (as obligated by the state for "gifted students") on enriching me, so the administration "trained" the teachers to say that I was bright but not gifted. It eventually came down to my parents having to threaten them with a (no contest) lawsuit because there was such a disparity in the results of the IQ test that my school gave me and the IQ test that a local, nationally renowned psychologist gave me.
Of course, I had to sit around and wait for my classmates to "catch up," and the teachers wouldn't even let me read other books or get ahead. Some of the stories we read had Spanish translations, so I learned the Spanish. I'd literally just tap my foot and watch the clock go from 8 AM to 3 PM every day. Terrible. They wouldn't even give me more books to read (how hard is it to just toss six year-old me a book and let me go "off task"?).
Schools excel at pulling the highs down to average and fail at pulling the lows up to average. I've seen so many examples of this by now I'm happily surprised every time there is a contrary one.
It seems odd that we still let nature dictate the schedule to this degree, and that so little thought seems to go into why.
Our whole sense of time is so steeped in accident and tradition that hardly anybody ever stops to ask questions such as 'why is it that we get paid per week or per month' and 'why is it that the earth revolving around the sun once' makes X, Y or Z happen which is not related at all?
The degree to which accidental items shape our economies and perceptions is odd, to say the least.
From an academic standpoint, both children were able to excel. There was no question they were smart enough to start school.
But one child was shy, and not socially adept. And I think we made a mistake with that one. That child is the smarter of the two, but is not doing so great as an adult.
The other was both socially and intellectually gifted as a preschool child. That child is still in high school, and is thriving both academically and socially, and has very specific, ambitious goals for college and career.
Gender indicators in this post have been left out deliberately. I realize they could be germane to the discussion, but I left them out for the sake of privacy.
https://youtu.be/85s9wJlzkrk
That being said, there are a variety of other character traits that play a role in how different people reach success, thus part of the issue is simply the interpretation of "success" itself, because quite often we look to very specific examples of successful people (e.g. Steve Jobs) or paths, that don't suit our personality taits nor strengths at all, and set us up with unrealistic expectations for ourselves.
Success comes in all forms, shapes, and sizes, so there should be no reason to let certain traits limit us on the hunt for success, when the game is largely about filtering out the noise and focusing on paths and pursuits that actually play to our strengths, instead of ones that make us perpetually anxious and stressed out.
I hear a saying a while back and I'm murdering it but "Introverts recharge by themselves and extroverts recharge with other people" and that is me, in small stints I can be gregarious and outgoing but within a short period I just want to be on my own again, I find it tiring.
She would have been better off with another year of her daycare centre.
I'm not a fan of it, but for lower income families it may actually be a god-send.
The length is still short though, as is normal kindergarten, so they're only at school for about 5 hours.
If "doing the best we can" is too low of a standard for research, then it's all garbage. Yes, there are many problems with some of the research out there, but you deal with it, not ignore it all. The purpose is to reduce uncertainty, not "get the right answer".
Edit: Not to mention that if you want to publish "tradition", don't call it "science".
What happens in the "end"?
Why wouldn't you want to get to the stage where you have freedom to make your own decisions, to control how you spend your time, to earn and spend your own income, as quickly as possible?
How has any of this made you better off? You make it sound as if "taking two years off" in your late teens/early twenties is a major issue.
Personally, I wish I would have seen more of the world after high school and before college.
(See Kramer in Dojo as the obligatory Seinfeld reference)
Based on news stories and personal observation in various datasets, there is a lot more sex going on in the holiday season and dead of winter, as births spike July-September. Late night activity starts slowing down in February. I've always been curious if kids born in these peaks get less attention, are more likely to be unplanned, less likely to breastfeed, are more miserable in the heat, etc.
Birthdate heatmap: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2145471/How-common...
We did an experiment and sent our youngest to school when she was 5 years old. She was home schooled using some apps and books - in her own time and depending on her mood. Now, her teacher says she's one of the brightest in the class, a quick learner filled with creativity.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201003/wh...
I think it's important for kids to learn the fundamentals in school correctly. If delaying my kid a year helps them feel and be more mature and adept to handle school, I'm for it, and maybe I'll also give them that gap year or two after high school to see the world and explore it a bit before they get ready to tackle the books in college.
I think another dimension of this whole thing does boil down to the natural nature and tendencies of the child. Would also recommend everyone to watch "The Beginning of Life" on Netflix if you haven't already, a very eye-opening perspective on kids, education, and how living situations differ for kids around the world, very eye-opening.
Academically I did so-so. Less of a problem with ability than boredom. I got into a good college solely on my standardized test scores. In college I had a B average.
One advantage that I remember from being a year older than my classmates was that I was considerably larger. I was large for my age, and a year older to boot. Despite being bookish and a nerd, before that was considered a good thing, no one would mess with me. Plus I went to kindergarten with, and was friends with kids that were up to two years older.
A lot of that faded away as we all got older and the differences evened out. But the main advantage, in retrospect is that I always considered my self an outlier. I didn't need peer support to be interested in things and didn't really care much about what everyone around me was doing. I expected to do the unexpected. I got into computers and computer graphics in the late '70s when no one had even heard of such a thing. I was playing with the internet long before it became a thing, or was even very useful. I started my own business a year out of school was doing entrepreneur type things until I hit forty.
(A downside is that I would often get bored with something _before_ it became a thing, and would have moved on to the new shiny before something got viable.)
These days I'm involved in education, university level and adult education, and it's interesting to see the mix in student's ages at the other end of the education cycle. Older students, especially those that have been out of school for a while, are much more motivated and serious about their subjects. I suspect there is quite a bit of selection bias here, as those not serious aren't likely to try and get more education. But I also see some younger students who are delighted to suddenly be in a place where they can take their education seriously and stretch their abilities.
Am I the only one reminded of fizz-buzz by this sentence?
If holding your children back for one year is good, how about twelve?
Otherwise, yes, there is incredible untapped human potential wasted in today's schools, unfortunately.
Setting up an environment that allows children to learn is ridiculously easy. Food, shelter, freedom to explore and experiment, other children and adults to interact with and discover things, more detailed resources if they end up needing math or something to solve a problem, and so forth. Primary schooling costs something like $200k total per student, and this expense could buy a lot of child-focused structure.
Critically, there's an big economies of scale advantage in schools relative to homeschooling. Resource specialization has advantages. Just spitballing, I'd imagine the curve would show it's at least 2-3x cheaper to provide an equivalent education to a student at a mid-sized school relative to a student in a 5-student homeschool environment, and probably 5x+ for single student - obviously depends on the parent's earning capacity and skill as a teacher. The argument for homeschooling is almost never about cost though, due in part to this enormous disadvantage.
Usually not. School funding is not allocated at the "neighborhood" level but instead the county level. There is almost no difference between per student funding between the richest and poorest counties: http://hechingerreport.org/the-gap-between-rich-and-poor-sch... ("I keep specifying 'state' and 'local' funding because the picture gets more complicated when you factor in federal funding. Once you do, almost all of the funding gaps disappear.").
You can argue that poorer students should get more funding than richer ones to help equalize other gaps. I'm not sure I agree with that. Most of that money would go to middle class teachers and administrators. I bet those kids would be better off if you just wrote them a check (or put the money in a trust fund that would then pay them an extra couple of hundred dollars every month for the rest of their lives).
There are also differences at the neighborhood level. We see that in California quite a bit.
> A yawning gulf separates even school districts serving students from similar demographic backgrounds. For example, in 2009-10, the latest data available, per-pupil revenue was $14,076 in Palo Alto versus $7,679 in Milpitas, both unified districts serving K-12 students. But clearly, affluence counts: In San Mateo County, the Woodside elementary district took in $18,894 per student, while Millbrae elementary got $7,362 per student. [1]
The latter example is a 2.5x difference in funding, within the same county. This is in part due to some local support in Woodside [2] but its more than just that. The gaps are huge.
I disagree about not equalizing gaps, because there's one scarce resource here that isn't even discussed: quality teachers. By default, quality teachers are more likely to want to work in nicer communities, and we don't need to compound that by offering to pay them less (sometimes far less) to work in underprivileged schools.
Meanwhile, giving undereducated kids money instead of education is a great way to fulfill the old adage 'a fool and their money are soon parted'.
[1] http://www.mercurynews.com/2012/02/26/some-california-school...
[2] http://www.almanacnews.com/news/2015/12/01/woodside-elementa...
Similar where I live now in Maryland: https://conduitstreet.mdcounties.org/2016/04/26/chart-shows-.... Baltimore City, among the poorest, spends the second most. Surrounding Baltimore County, which is much wealthier, spends substantially less. Montgomery County, the richest in the state and a suburb of D.C., spends about the same as Prince Georges County, a much lower income county next door.
I have close family members who have been home-schooled and they are very well rounded adults.
My daughter (16) is outside the home for: piano, spanish, voice lessons, horse riding, and acting. She currently helps TA kids at a local community theater. This is not to mention the time she spends with her friends.
My son (14) is outside the home for: piano, spanish, soccer. And also to play with his friends.
They also both regularly take extra curricular classes. Just one example: http://ccee.unc.edu/youth-new/classes/bolin-creek/
I went to public school. My kids are much more socialable than I was at their age. The social environment at public school is nothing like the real world and I'm glad to have my kids skip it.
I guess my pint is that our anecdotes cancel each other out but I'm curious to know why you think homeschooling is benefitting your kids. Why do you think you are qualified to teach them the variety of subjects one learns in high school. Why do do you think they are more successful being homeschooled?
It wasn't an exhaustive list of their days.
> How do you know they are socially adept or sociable?
You'll have to take my word for it.
> Why do you think you are qualified to teach them the variety of subjects one learns in high school
We're both college educated. My wife has a masters degree. We use outside/online resources to fill in subjects outside our expertise or that we don't have time to learn ourselves first. My daughter is taking a college level chemistry class. Next year (11th grade) she'll be taking classes at community college. We have both kids take standardized tests each year to measure their progress against their peers.
But honestly, I don't know what your HS teachers were like, but I think I had maybe two competent teachers in my HS. It's not a high bar to beat, no that we'd stoop so low.
I'm assuming you've never taught high school. I haven't either. I do have a lot of experience teaching in higher ed though. I was recently paired with a high school teacher and visited his classroom. I doubt I could teach high school. It's easy to denigrate them but apparently they didn't do too bad with you.
Personally I think think it's absurd for soneone to think that they can teach without any training. There are outliers and seemingly you are one of them. Though you'll never know if you were a benefit or hindrance to your childrens' education. They are clearly successful so it's bit important whether or not it is because of your teaching or in spite of it. One thing is certain though. Your experience is not normative. What you've done has been successful but is it replicable for anything beyond a small percent of families? I'm skeptical.
You keep asking this. It's an absurd question. I'm their parent. I see them every day. I watch them interact with other kids. I see my son stand up for the next door neighbor younger brother against his older brother. I see my daughter keep the peace at a sleep over party with a dozen friends and wildly different personalities. Besides that, you imply that public school confers sociability to children, an assertion with which I disagree. I'll go further: my kids have friends who are both "schoolers" and homeschoolers, and as a rule, it's the home school kids who are more polite, more sociable, more well adjusted.
> but apparently they didn't do too bad with you
I have done okay in spite of high school, not because of it. They were the worst years of my life.
> Personally I think think it's absurd for soneone to think that they can teach without any training.
My cousin is a special ed teacher, and an excellent one at that. She teaches in D.C. I couldn't do what she does, and I haven't claimed that anyone could.
Home schooling is a different situation. It requires dedication on the part of the parent (like doing anything well of course), but it's not that hard. There is a wide variety in how parents approach home schooling, from unschooling at one end, to very disciplined like a traditional school taught at home at the other end. We're somewhere in the middle. Our kids have a lesson plan each year. They have a daily check list of items. We leave it up to them to manage their day. Here's today's:
http://imgur.com/bRYpGQr
I'm writing from experience, not just about my own kids, but having family who are teachers and having been involved in the home school community as well as reflecting about my own experience in public school and that of my siblings. I never claimed home school was for everybody, but I think you over estimate its difficulty and give way too much credit to public schooling. I think you underestimate how much time is wasted in public school, and completely discount things like bullying and cliques. My K-12 school years were an awful social environment filled with horrible kids and mostly disinterested teachers, and were nothing like the real world.
> They are clearly successful so it's bit important whether or not it is because of your teaching or in spite of it.
This is condescending to the point that I feel like you're trolling. I have nothing else to say.
Not saying it never makes sense, but I will do a LOT to avoid that being the best option for my kids.
Both kids went to Montessori and my daughter started first grade public school, where she went from loving school to starting to lose her joy of learning. My wife decided she could do a better job, and she has.
I can't speak to anyone else's experience, but for our family it was the right decision, and I'd place my kids' education and socialization against anyone's.
But I can tutor my one child, better than a trained teacher can teach them in a class of 30. That's the real comparison. In a 5-hour elementary school day, if the teacher did nothing but tutor students serially they'd each get 10 minutes. I can beat that in the first half-hour of a home-schooled day.
Its no wonder that home-schooled kids often outstrip their public-school mates. My buddy's 14-year-old was ready for college (admitted to State college) because of this. It wasn't just that he was very smart and motivated. Its about the attention and monitoring that can be accomplished.
A century ago there was another name for home-schooling: it was called 'schooling'. Until public education got invented, it was pretty much the only way.
We've been lucky. We don't need two incomes. My wife as it turns out is a good teacher and she enjoys it. Our kids are good students and enjoy home schooling. We live in a community with tons of educational resources available outside the home.
From the public school establishment, mostly. I'm sure you can find worst case examples of kids who've spent the last five years in the family living room, but I've never met home-schooled children who weren't better socialized than their public school counterparts. The big drawback of traditional schooling is the children are all the same age, which prevents them from modeling their behavior on more mature children.
My next line is,
> I know, hard to tell, right? Ever since I stopped tucking my jeans into my socks, no one guesses that I was home schooled!"
My point is this: I believe you are experiencing a selection bias. When someone that you meet is very poorly socialized, you might dig a little to try to understand why. If this person was homeschooled, you add a tally to the "homeschooled && poorly socialized" count.
Repeat enough times, and you might have many, many marks in that box.
The problem is, when you meet a well-socialized person, you are less likely to _also_ dig and find out if that person was home schooled or not.
It may also surprise you to learn that in many home schooling communities, especially today, there is heavy emphasis on "socializing", and the kids can often learn things that public schoolers cannot.
As an example, I was able to begin working when I turned 16. I didn't work tons, but I was available to work in hours other kids were not, so I was always working around adults. I quickly refined how to interact with adults and learn from them.
Public schools segregate kids by age, so the only adults they interact with are teachers/administrators, not adults in more "peer" relationships.
My hypothesis is that with home schooling, assuming that the kids aren't cloistered in the home, the result is simply that they have more exposure to seeing adults interacting with each other as adults, and therefore are more accustomed to that form of interacting.
When I was young the home schooled kids did seem a bit off, but by the time I got to college the trend seemed to that they were consistently more mature and "ready" for the adult world than average.
That said, I would not tell people to home school unless they were prepared for it. Kids can still have positive experiences at public school; it just depends on the kid.
EDIT: for clarity
To quote one particularly honest teacher, "your child is a slow processor and extremely gifted. He's F*. The education system doesn't cater for children like yours". She (like me) has an autistic child. I wasn't cross with her at all. In fact, I deeply respected her honesty.
My other child is very active. If you've done any reading, you will know that many modern teachers do not like active children. These kids are energetic, they ask too many questions, they are disruptive, won't sit down for long periods and no matter how much they're punished, they just won't shut up. My child has been marginalised by three teachers. I confronted the worst offender who broke down and cried when I told her how my child had responded to her bullying. She admitted it and in her own words "grossly mismanaged the situation". Yet, I respect her honesty (she's one of the few who would admit to it). My active child undulates between an A grade student a C grade student depending on the compatibility with the teacher. However, my child has said that he's getting tired of the sexism from the teachers and I expect it to start impacting the effort he puts in.
The education system has become more sexist than it ever was in my lifetime. World University Rankings show that girls, only in recent years, are 30% more likely to graduate than boys, and that's expected to grow much larger. Nobody is asking WHY the drastic change! How many times have you heard someone like the New York Times say flippant comments like "boys suddenly think education is girly" or "boys suddenly are thick as two planks" as an attempt to explain a radical shift in performance by gender? We also hear manipulative terms like "girls _outclass_ the boys". If it were the other way around, it would be called "discrimination", "marginalisation", or a "sausage club" (to quote an Australian Education rep in the Daily Telegraph - below). https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/ucas-figures-gende...
I have included a link to one of the few excellent articles on Australia's prejudiced education system. They interviewed a representative from Australia’s school curriculum - a top science professor, Michelle Simmons, who condemned the Australian education system for totally failing students,
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/rendezview/feminising-educa...
Australia has ramped up its gender bias in education significantly in recent years. The result, according to the article is...
"In less than 20 years, Australia has fallen from the fourth in the world for reading to 13th, according to an OECD report. We were once sixth for maths, but now we’re 19th."
You will see almost the same downward trend in the UK and the US (who we copied for their gendered education policies).
Compound this with denials from quite a few media publications that there's anything wrong, http://ideas.time.com/2013/03/21/the-boy-crisis-is-it-fictio... [dead] 2bitencryption ↗ hacker news, ladies and gentlemen
Maturity and age are correlated but not causal. I could easily believe that success in school is strongly correlated with maturity (I have observed that students that are less mature than their peers are disciplined more often and teased by their peers, both have a strong correlation with poor scholastic achievement) and that children whose maturity is lagging their peers, will do better if they are only started in school when their maturity supports it, however I have also observed that children seem to be maturing at later and later ages.
Given the preponderance of evidence of children in the 19th and 20th century demonstrating much higher levels of responsibility and maturity at a younger age[1] it seems that there is more at work here than just 'age.'
Finally, in the study[2] doesn't break it down across socio-economic groups rather, from their abstract : " We estimate the causal effects of delayed school enrollment using a "fuzzy" regression-discontinuity design based on exact dates of birth and the fact that, in Denmark, children typically enroll in school during the calendar year in which they turn six. We find that a one-year delay in the start of school dramatically reduces inattention/hyperactivity at age 7 (effect size = -0.7), a measure of self regulation with strong negative links to student achievement"
I'm going to guess that the physical number of years a person has at the start of their school career is not as big an impact on whether or not they have self control issues as the parenting impact on the first 5 - 6 years of their life.
[1] It is also possible that immature children in the 19th and early 20th century simply died early.
[2] http://www.nber.org/papers/w21610
However I don't remember the extra kindergarden year and how nice it probably was compared to school. I'd guess this was more important, but I'm not sure. After all it's 1 year (an important year though, becuase childhood is so very important), against 13 years that might have been better.
Finishing school a year earlier I don't see as a benefit. It took me extra year after school to really know what to do further anyways.
I seem to recall that most studies show the advantage of this practice fades over the years. As the article suggests, class is heavily correlated here with the practice (more likely to be able to afford another year of childcare).
I met someone who was the youngest in his grade and he wished he was held back.
I think it definitely depends on the individual.
Majority of NHL players have late birthdays. It means kids that are just slightly older than teammates by just a few months have advantage over early birthday team mates. This advantage helps them advance over younger ones (just by a few months) through their young hockey career and eventually to NHL career.
Correlation is not causation.
The argument for the compounding effects of physical advantage relative to peers is a lot stronger than the supposition that parents would happen to have children on certain months.
Otherwise, you can just walk trough data sets until you find one that meets your conclusion.