Blog note: I hope to reach out to some contributors who have unique insights into the boy troubles. Here’s the first, from University of Alaska professor Judith Kleinfeld, founder of The Boys Project, pictured here (I chose this picture, because here in Washington it’s 95 degrees, and this makes me feel cooler). Kleinfeld sent me this offering on redshirting, which means holding back a child (almost always a boy) a year to “mature” before heading off to school.

……………………….

  Some parents are catching on to the problems with boys and giving their boys “the gift of time” by redshirting them. Who are these parents? You guessed it—Asian, White, and parents who are better educated and higher income. Their sons now start school a year later, when they are more developmentally ready to deal with the demands of reading and sitting still in the first grade.
But minority boys don’t get this redshirting. Since they can legally drop out of high school a year earlier, they are more apt to join the ranks of men without a high school diploma. Minority boys are thus even more apt to end up in the group with dropping wages, higher unemployment, lower marriage rates, and poorer health.

See:  The Lengthening of Childhood, by David Deming, Susan Dynarski 
Abstract:

Forty years ago, 96% of six-year-old children were enrolled in first grade
or above. As of 2005, the figure was just 84%. The school attendance rate
of six-year-olds has not decreased; rather, they are increasingly likely to
be enrolled in kindergarten rather than first
grade. This paper documents this historical shift. We show that
only about a quarter of the change can be proximately explained by changes
in school entry laws; the rest reflects “academic redshirting,” the practice
of enrolling a child in a grade lower than the one for which he is eligible.
We show that the decreased grade attainment of six-year-olds reverberates
well beyond the kindergarten classroom. Recent stagnation in the high
school and college completion rates of young people is partly explained by
their later start in primary school. The relatively late start of boys in
primary school explains a small but significant portion of the rising gender
gaps in high school graduation and college completion.
Increases in the age of legal school entry intensify socioeconomic
differences in educational attainment, since lower-income children are at
greater risk of dropping out of school when they reach the legal age of
school exit.

Tags: redshirting

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 20th, 2008 at 5:34 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.