Let's say you have a child. A child who could be entering kindergarten in a week or two. A big day, that. 1st day in kindergarten. Lots of thoughts of growing up, of your little child's first steps to a legitimate independence from you.
But, let's also say that you have a few other thoughts on your mind about these kindergarten steps. Thoughts informed by Malcolm Gladwell's latest bestseller Outliers, and the Canadian hockey teams he describes in its pages.
Based on those thoughts, should you hold your child back a year, start kindergarten 12 months from now? If that sounds like a ridiculous question, I invite you to read on to see why some parents are not only taking that question seriously, but answering it with a decisive and strategic, "Yes!"
Also, some news bits, some funny bits, and an update on traveling to Ohio, all this and more, after the fold...
The Greeks of old had a different idea that they called paideia. This was education conceived as creating a cultured person who would be a mature citizen and leader. Imagine if our focus in education was on the person rather than the things studied. We'd be concerned that a student grow up and learn how to deal with life and help others deal with it as well. This education has two purposes: self-ripening and leadership. -Thomas Moore, essay titled, "Redefining Education: Cultivating the Soul"
Nature vs Nurture? HA! Try DNA vs Time!
For nearly a century, beginning in the middle of our Civil War, intelligence had been considered genetically predetermined. Galton, Spearman, Terman, and a host of other serious men of science staked their professional work and reputations on this fact. Institutions, government policies, and economic decisions all came to be based on this single assumption. Too bad for them, and for every 4 year-old who's ever taken an IQ test to determine their school placement, they were wrong.
Turns out, the configuration of your DNA may be less important than the configuration of your star chart.
That's right. Kossascopes notwithstanding, the date of your birth in the calendar year may have much more do with your academic and athletic success than you, or many of us, and certainly not Galton, Spearman, and Terman, ever surmised. But not so, that clever Malcolm fellow.
In Outliers, the latest (about 1.5 years old now, but still getting attention) book by Malcolm Gladwell, we learn that Canadian youth hockey leagues set their cutoff date for participation in each season's competitive team play on January 1st.
This is similar to a school district declaring that any child interested in starting kindergarten in the upcoming school year must be 5 years old before January 1st.
One of the funny things Mr. Gladwell reports is that the best players on the best youth hockey teams in Canada are not only the lucky recipients of great hockey-dynasty genes. They are also darned lucky to be born under the right sign. Now, this idea is not originally Gladwell's. His particular genius lies in the repackaging and popularizing of others' statistical and scientific inquiries.
And this idea has some interesting statistics behind it.
Hockey and the Three R's
With a cutoff date of Jan. 1, a child born on January 2 has an enormous physical advantage over one born on December 31. The Dec. 31 child has one day to prepare himself or herself for the cutoff date. The Jan. 2 child has 12 months to prepare for the cutoff date.
Or, as MG wrote, "In any elite group of hockey players - the very best of the best, 40% of the players will have been born between January and March, 30 percent between April and June, 20 percent between July and September, and 10 percent between October and December" (p. 23). He then explains how this time advantage transduces itself into the invisible material advantage that results in others observing that player's performance and concluding, "Wow! He's just a born natural..."
What happens when a player gets chosen for a rep squad? He gets better coaching, and his teammates are better, and he plays fifty or seventy-five games a season instead of twenty games a season like those left behind...and he practices twice as much as, or even three times more than he would have otherwise" (p. 24).
The majority of children chosen for the elite teams are born in January, February, and March. And then the cascade of societal, familial, and external resource (nutrition plays a role, I suspect - the best players in our sports are put on strict diets at early ages, too) allocation kicks in. He grows up, and the rest of us celebrate how lucky he was to have been born with great genes because the assumptions of Galton, Terman, and Spearman have been such bedrock common sense in the Western world that we don't even think of considering the advantages of having been born 11.95 months earlier than the competition.
Now, let's look at what this means to a parent of a 4 year old child who just read Malcolm's book 2 months before the cutoff for kindergarten.
To Hold or Not to Hold, That is the Dilemma
Our parent, as reported in the NYT, says to herself,
"If he’s older, he’ll have the strongest chance to do the best.”
Hers is a popular school of thought, and it is not new. “Redshirting” of kindergartners — the term comes from the practice of postponing the participation of college athletes in competitive games — became increasingly widespread in the 1990s, and shows no signs of waning.
One of the reported results is that 17% of kindergarteners in 2008 were 6 years old or older. Many classes have children in them 18 months older than the children who were born a few days before the cutoff and whose parents followed the "rules" and entered them on schedule. This could result in teachers feeling more pressure to accelerate material, or raise the bar, for the older more capable students (yes, I recognize the big unproven assumption there, but it is foundational to Gladwell's analysis, and to many of these parents as well) in the room while the on-age-level, younger, students are ahem left behind.
Time of Year and Year of Time
Outliers goes on to make the case that it not only matters which time of year a child is born, but which year a child is born. Economic depressions create baby-busts, so people born in the 30's enjoyed the advantages of schools and systems that were plumped up from the preceding boom and held extra capacity, and therefore extra attention and resources, for the children of the late 30s and 40s. According to this argument, if the current downturn continues for the next few years, there will be greater opportunities for the children of this cycle than for those of the last decade, or the one before it.
Unfortunately, in my personal analysis I think I'm observing a concomitant shrinking of educational capacity and resources far in advance of the wave of recession-babies predicted by Gladwell to benefit from this downturn upon entering school.
Everything's Political
I highly recommend the Gladwell book, not because I'm completely convinced by his logic or representation of others' scientific work, but because it's a fun read that caused me to think about whether or not I agreed with him, and why, absent of the political-spectrum posturing I so often find myself submerged under. Don't get me wrong, there is politics in this book, all education (and intelligence) is political. However, it is free of the bombast of other media sources that surround our heads like clouds of buzzing, whirring, winged pests. And that, I found refreshing.
You Make the Call!
So, it's registration for kindergarten season. Your daughter was born 3 days before the cutoff of October 1st. Do you get hoppin' on the paperwork and remembering where you put the immunization card you last saw nearly a year ago? Or do you just start hopping on one foot, passing the time by buying Kumon and Singapore Math books, and running drills with her every night after dinner time, so that she'll be clearly stellar by the time her first big school day arrives?
I'd love to know what you think.
Lil. C's birthday falls just a few weeks after the Yonkers cutoff. She'll be 10 months ahead of those born a few days before it.
A Funny Happened on the Way to Ohio
Thanks to NCrissieB for switching up with me yesterday for today, I appreciate that. As it happens with travel and 3 year olds, it seems the more we plan the less goes accordingly to plan. So, we're not in Ohio yet and I'm not sitting comfortably surrounded by family and warm coffee (I don't like it too hot unless my hands are really cold). This is also the reason why I published earlier than the standard target of 7:15 - 7:30am.
Yet. But I will be soon. So, while you read this, I'll still be motoring westward with an expectedly spotty internet connection. I'm publishing before we get back on the road, but as much as I'd like to uphold the MF standard of being here for live discussion immediately after posting, I have to beg the community's pardon and forgiveness for coming back a little bit later to catch up and respond to comments.
I do hope everyone's doing well, though, and that your plans are going, well, according to plan.
TWLTW
- That Thomas Moore essay which I block-quoted from to begin this piece is a beautiful piece of work. I nearly just gave the link to it, made a suggestion to go read it, and left this diary with that alone. It is a real statement of something worth stating.
- I've been saving some of these, and given recent events, needed a smile-inducer. I hope you enjoy the same effect:
And this one could have come straight from Dilbert, but didn't:
- Love the photographs on this site. Truly stunning works of art. If you're a camera-person, you just might find this interesting! I think the 2nd from the bottom is my favorite.
- Turns out the states that have won Race to the Top $$ are all east-coast urban-center states. Oh yes. Except for that one outlier: Hawaii. At least that pattern won't excite the anti-Obamaites.Rural states have great reasons to complain about this, I think. The criteria required greater support for charter schools. That's not possible of many of the districts in your state are spread out over hundreds of square miles and only have enough children in them for 1 or 2 small high schools. Where will the mandate for more private-equity backed charters come to fruition in that soil? Money for kids and schools should not be a competition that leaves out those who need it most.
- Related, in school news, Barack Obama Elementary School opens this month in Prince George's County, Maryland. Picture here via BWD.
- The controversy over the LA Times publishing student test data linked to teachers in their paper's pages just heated up whenArne Duncan said he's going to push for this to be standard practice nationwide. Why don't we publish the number of cavities dentists' patients develop? Or the number of children with lice or ear infections seen by pediatricians in our neighborhoods? Wouldn't that data motivate those professionals to better performance in their assigned duties, too? Wouldn't that data help me make better decisions about where to send my child? (This is a flawed analogy, I admit, but it also reveals some critical truths dismissed by Duncan and the LA Times.) Of course, this scoop was published in...wait for it...the LA Times.
- Shirley Sherrod will not be returning to the Dept. of Agriculture. I think she could/should write a book and go lecturing. I know there's irony in that part about the lecture circuit, but it would be a poetic justice tinged irony.
- Senator Russ Feingold wins the "Most Town Halls This Year" award with 72, one nearly every 3 days.
- Another great Gail Collins essay, this one on suffragism and the long wait for real progress.
- And, talking about Justice, an absolutely fascinating website just recently went up making public and accessible an entire semester of lectures and materials from one of Harvard's "most popular classes," Michael Sandel's Justice. I've only watched 2 of the lectures, but wow, I am hooked. I'm going to be learning from this guy for a long time to come. I've never seen a performance like this outside, maybe, of the Amazing Kreskin on the Letterman show in the late 80's.
What Did You Learn This Week?