Research Suggests Redshirting May Be Harmful

More and more parents are electing to keep their children out of school until they’re 6 years old. The practice, known as “redshirting,” is the academic equivalent of the allegedly middle-school aged behemoth with a mustache who plays for a Little League team. More than being a reaction to a child’s specific developmental needs, many parents see it as a way to give their kids an edge in school. But it could be far from a harmless practice. It turns out redshirted kids don’t do as well as on-time kindergarten entrants later in life.

Estimates from the National Center for Education Statistics suggest that about 6 percent of kindergartners’ parents in the 2010-11 school year reported holding their children out of school longer than school guidelines recommend, while another 6 percent repeated their kindergarten year. (It is surprisingly difficult to find agreement on the numbers for this, but the NCES figure uses parents’ reports, which may be a more reliable metric of intentional delays. Separately, NCES reported that about 9 percent of kindergartners were older than 6 years old in the 2010-11 school year, and a 2008 Harvard research study put the 2004-05 share of more-than-6-year-olds at closer to 16 percent.)

Though we write a lot on Early Ed Watch about ensuring academic work is developmentally appropriate for students, the research actually suggests that 6-year-olds entering kindergarten don’t see much benefit from that additional year of maturity, as compared to their on-time classmates. In fact, the 2008 Harvard study, The Lengthening of Childhood, found that redshirting has contributed to a number of systemic research problems in examining the K-12 system. In particular, longitudinal views of grade retention, college enrollment, and gender balances in college enrollment have been thrown off to some extent by redshirting.

But beyond research, it seems redshirting also has some serious implications for the students in question. A recent New Yorker article compiled much of the research on children who began school a year late, and it is not a pretty picture:

• A study of Norwegian children born between 1962 and 1988 found that the children who began school late had lower IQs and lower earnings than their on-time classmates.
• A study of all Swedish children born between 1935 and 1984 showed lower lifetime earnings for those who started school later.
• The 2008 Harvard study argued that more students might not graduate because they could quit school before finishing, and more students would have lower lifetime earnings as a result of entering the workforce a year late.
• A 2007 analysis of the data from a Tennessee research study known as Project STAR revealed that older kindergartners had no edge over their younger classmates, and in fact, scored lower on achievement exams in kindergarten and middle school, were more likely to have been held back by middle school, and were less likely to take college entrance exams. Meanwhile, younger students actually lapped their older peers, demonstrating higher academic achievement.

Even though the evidence doesn’t seem to support redshirting, parent support for the practice remains. For some, it’s because of the increasingly academic atmosphere of kindergarten classrooms. With the rise of No Child Left Behind and the Common Core State Standards have come higher expectations for kindergartners. As in the later elementary and secondary school years, teachers are cramming more work into the day to get through their material. More states are offering full-day or extended-day kindergarten programs, but many students are expected to learn the same material in only a fraction of the time.

According to some media reports, though, parents don’t always hold back their kids because they are concerned their little ones aren’t ready for school. Actually, for some, it’s because parents think redshirting will give their kid an advantage over other students, allowing their child to get ahead in school. And the research suggests these ultra-competitive parents are overwhelmingly wealthy with white, male children, and they’re often concentrated in wealthy, white schools – an unsurprising confirmation of the luxury of opportunity among high-income families.

So as teachers, principals, and policymakers are working to improve classroom opportunities for kindergartners, redshirting practices are worth at least a passing thought. Parents who purposely keep their kids out of school an extra year may be doing them a disservice. And schools will be responsible for the academic consequences.