26 July 2023

Should boys be routinely "redshirted" in grade school ?

Excerpts from an interesting article in The Atlantic:
The idea of a delayed school start—often referred to as “redshirting,” a term borrowed from athletics—got a burst of popular attention in 2008, when Malcolm Gladwell presented evidence in his book Outliers that children older than their classmates do better on academic tests and in life generally.

The value of a later start, which many teachers and administrators call “the gift of time,” is an open secret in elite circles. And it’s a gift overwhelmingly given to boys. In the past few months, I’ve interviewed dozens of private-school teachers, parents, educational consultants, and admissions officers, largely in the D.C. metro area. I learned that a delayed school entry is now close to the norm for boys who would otherwise be on the young side. One former head of an elite private school who now consults with parents on school choice and admissions told me, “There are effectively two different cutoff dates for school entry: one for boys and one for girls.”..

The reason little boys wear almost all of the red shirts is not mysterious; the fact that boys mature later than girls is one known to every parent, and certainly to every teacher. According to a Rand survey, teachers are three times more likely to delay entry for their own sons than their own daughters. The maturity gap is now demonstrated conclusively by neuroscience: Brain development follows a different trajectory for boys than it does for girls. But this fact is entirely ignored in broader education policy, even as boys fall further behind girls in the classroom.

On almost every measure of educational success from pre-K to postgrad, boys and young men now lag well behind their female classmates. The trend is so pronounced that it can result only from structural problems. Affluent parents and elite schools are tackling the issue by giving boys more time. But in fact it is boys from poorer backgrounds who struggle the most in the classroom, and these boys, who could benefit most from the gift of time, are the ones least likely to receive it. Public schools usually follow an industrial model, enrolling children automatically based on their birth date. Administrators in the public system rarely have the luxury of conversations with parents about school readiness...

Once boys begin school, they almost immediately start falling behind girls. A 6-percentage-point gender gap in reading proficiency in fourth grade widens to an 11-percentage-point gap by the end of eighth grade. In a study drawing on scores across the country, Sean Reardon, a sociologist and education professor at Stanford, found no overall gender difference in math in grades three through eight, but a big one in English. “In virtually every school district in the U.S., female students outperformed male students on ELA [English Language Arts] tests,” he writes. “In the average district, the gap is … roughly two-thirds of a grade level.”..

But I believe the biggest reason for boys’ classroom struggles is simply that male brains develop more slowly than female brains—or at least those parts of the brain that enable success in the classroom. The gaps in brain development are clearly visible around the age of 5, and they persist through elementary and middle school. (As Margaret Mead wrote of a classroom of middle schoolers: “You’d think you were in a group of very young women and little boys.”)..

Lastly, they found that the younger classmates of redshirted children suffered no negative consequences. If anything, they wrote, there were modestly positive spillover effects. That’s one reason to believe that girls would only be helped by this shift—having more mature boys in classrooms would likely improve the learning environment. In schools with high rates of delayed school entry for boys, such as the private schools in the D.C. area that I examined, the girls appear to be doing very well...

There is one major drawback: Delaying school entry would put pressure on parents to provide child care for another year. This is no doubt one reason low-income parents are less likely to redshirt their children now. In my view, any large-scale redshirting program would need to be paired with public investments in child care and pre-K. 
That's a long excerpt, but there is lots more info at The Atlantic.

22 comments:

  1. So glad I don't have kids, so I don't have to worry about all this misogynistic bullcrap.

    (Yes, misogynistic, because the boys are getting another advantage)

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    1. Applying science in order to put boys in a more equal position is misogyny? It seems to me, to not do so would be misandry.

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    2. There is no such thing as misandry. If only.

      Boys are in the privileged position. And they're getting a benefit. So misogyny.

      Calling this misandry is like saying enslaved people benefited from slavery because they learned something.

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    3. On the contrary, misandry fuels a significant percentage of feminist activism. Secondly, privilege mostly follows money. No one would claim that a Chelsea Clinton or a Paris Hilton is less privileged than any boy, white or black, born into poverty in the modern era. (And for that matter, this is not a modern phenomenon; compare the life of Queen Victoria with chimney sweeps--99% male--many contracting cancer of the genitals from creosote exposure. Or any industrial setting we might explore, right up to today, when 95%+ of "on the job" fatalities and injuries are still visited on men, mostly poor men.) Thirdly, something like 75% of university degrees, at all levels, are now obtained by women. Boys and men are clearly falling behind. There's no sense in living in the past--or an imagined past. Fourthly, I can't follow the logic in the slavery claim.

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    4. "In the past quarter-century we exposed biases against other races and called it racism, and we exposed biases against women and called it sexism. Biases against men we call humor."

      WARREN FARRELL, LA Times, 1986

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    5. Warren Farrell has been trying have an honest conversation for decades. A large swath of the public prefers a dishonest conversation.

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    6. BicycleRider, that quote applies nicely to standup comedians, but can you name a couple instances in real life of systemic biases against men???

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    7. Systemic bias against men permeates the media. Watch any sitcom from the last fifty years. But on the more serious side, who is still doing 99% of the dirtiest, most painful, most dangerous jobs? If there was no bias, we'd see 50% women hot-mopping roofs, working in mines, oil drilling, fishing, lumber, etc. Even more serious: Did you notice that men could not leave Ukraine, while women and children were free to go? Who still dies in war? Who is required to register for the Selective Service in the US? If there's no bias, why are women getting 75% of college degrees in the US? I could go on...

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    8. I will add that Mr. Farrell is not a "standup comedian." He is a political scientist and was an educator at several universities, and author of seven books. He is hardly an anti-feminist. A link to the article for the quote above"

      https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-12-14-vw-3177-story.html

      From Wikipedia:

      "Farrell advocates for "a gender liberation movement", with "both sexes walking a mile in each other's moccasins"

      "When the second wave of the women's movement evolved in the late 1960s, Farrell's support of it led the National Organization for Women's New York City chapter to ask him to form a men's group. The response to that group led to his ultimately forming some 300 additional men and women's groups and becoming the only man to be elected three times to the board of directors of the National Organization for Women in N.Y.C. (1971–74)"

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Farrell

      This interview is also informative:

      https://ifstudies.org/blog/boys-in-crisis-an-interview-with-warren-farrell

      No need to agree with him, but let's not put him in the category of a standup comedian.



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    9. All true, but if Ferrell was slated to speak at my local university, there'd be a shit storm, temper tantrum. The gender charade is quite fragile.

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  2. While I doubt that it's the case, I cannot help but wonder if the "start at the same time" thing is more woke than science? Although Nepkarel thinks it is misogynistic, the fact is that the boys ARE NOT getting an advantage. Rather, they are been leveled with the girls.

    If boys and girls start at the same time, the girls are ready to roll...but not the boys. They wind up bouncing off the walls and the such. And that hurts all members of a classroom, I would imagine.

    I suppose that I will never forget making my 2nd Grade teacher cry. Not because I was evil or the such, but because I was so rowdy. Bless her heart (If you read this, Ms. Parsons (from Meadowlane Elementary School, 1969 to 1972 or so, please forgive me. I loved your soft heart, even though I didn't see it's pricelessness until later).

    If boys and girls start at the same time, it will be several years before the boys demonstrate their superiority. (SMILE)

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  3. Nothing new. It's something that was an option as far back as the 1960s in Minnesota, but it wasn't limited to boys.

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  4. This and infant circumcision could a long way in explaining the inherent rage of young male mass murderers.

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    1. Circumcision causes men to commit mass murder? I'm circumcised and almost 70. When do I start killing people?

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  5. My sons did the opposite, they both have late autumn birthdays that would have made them the oldest kids in their class if we had followed the school enrollment guidelines. They went early to a private kindergarten, where we could get a professional assessment of their emotional and academic readiness for first grade. We only learned of "redshirting" later, but, looking back, my kids would've been really bored if we had delayed school. I really don't see any benefit.

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  6. My younger son's birthday is in mid-September, and the cut-off for school admission was the end of August. We could have chosen to have him start school early, but decided to wait a year. I think it served him well, but it would be difficult to measure the effect. My wife and I both have at least a bachelor's degree and are both professionals, so that probably gives him an advantage over some of his peers. Our older son has a January birthday, but their personalities are so different that it's difficult to compare them.

    One plus on the athletic side is that he will be older going into his senior season of swimming. We didn't consider that when he was young, but I know of parents who did hold back their children in hopes that they would be better athletes.

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  7. Well, the held-back kids aren't really "better athletes", they're just competing against smaller and/or weaker opponents. However, based on my own experience, I believe that delaying school entry for boys who would be on the young side is the better choice. I did the opposite, starting early by going to first grade at a private shcool. I can tell you that, for purely physical reasons, growing up a year younger that all your classmates is hard on a boy. Probably quite a bit harder than it is on a girl, at least until puberty. Then, if you happen to be smart enough to skip a grade, the age difference is that much greater.

    I tried for years to think of some way in which starting young benefited me, and I never came up with anything.

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    1. I was bored as a young boy in school until the 4th and 5th grade, but my mom had actually got me tested to start school a year early. Was the youngest kid in my class until the 8th grade (from kids who had moved in from other states).

      Did the same for my son and he had the added benefit of being unnaturally tall (99% height, 95% weight through all of elementary). So he ended up being the 3rd-4th tallest kid at any given time.

      Only shared advantages being 2 parent home that supported education. No extra schooling or tutoring. I think part of it comes down to what the parents expect of the child and how the school handles children's variability.

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  8. As a woman I would have preferred it growing up if more boys had been redshirted, so boys were our peers, not a immature dweebs. I have no problem with helping boys and not putting them at disadvantage. It's a stupid kind of feminism that sees what is helpful to boys as “misogynistic” and harmful to girls.

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  9. My daughter has a late birthday and in a small school was the second youngest in her grade. We considered holding her back but the research at that time indicated that kids who are young for their grade may have started out "behind" their older peers but their overall outcomes (higher graduation rates and persistence to postsecondary) were better because they had developed strategies to deal with challenges. I have to wonder whether it's not age but the design of schools that does little for boys (ie too much seat time, not enough active play). I'd be curious to see how boys do in outdoor schools or those schools that strongly focus on project-based learning.
    -gem

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  10. I thought the research showed that gains from redshirting did not persist (except for K-12 sports). And it puts kids at a disadvantage in terms of having a full year less earnings. If you're not really into athletics there's no reason to do it.

    My son would misbehave if bored and not challenged. Grade-skipping rather than red-shirting was the solution for that.

    A lot of these "rowdy boys" problems would be solved if culture treated them more like girls and wasn't constantly indulgently saying, "Oh boys will be boys" from the moment the sex is known on the u/s.

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    1. Yes, let's treat men like women while we're at it. All sex differences are learned. Right? (I'm stunned that we're so out of touch with nature. Hell, I can't even treat my cattle dog like a golden retriever. Same species, very different at birth!)

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