Are you calling my kid average?
Posted on November 9, 2007
Filed Under kids, parenting, education, bat-ass crazy, bitching and moaning, Anxiety |
Yesterday was teacher/parent conference day. The kids were home from school bouncing off the walls and hanging from the banisters as a cold rain fell. I did manage to leave for a half an hour and complete a rather paltry 15 minute idea-share with each of their teachers. As always, the face to face time is too brief. But overall I was relatively happy with the report each teacher gave about my children. And while O and G are happy and well adjusted and extremely competent in all subjects, once again, I left a tad confused. How are my kids, the kids of two academically gifted parents not, themselves, recognizably brilliant. Much to my consternation, it would appear that O and G have, once again, not been selected to participate in the school’s top-secret enrichment program.
While the school administration protects itself from pushy and overly ambitious parents like myself by keeping the enrichment program sort of off radar, I have sniffed it out, have seen past the smoke and mirrors and know it exists. While I can’t quite wrap my mind around the parameters by which these children are selected to participate, I do know that a reading specialist descends upon each classroom several times a week and collects her three or four advanced students to follow her out of the room and down to her reading workshop where they congregate and glow like the chosen.
I am assuming these top tier children are the most accelerated readers and writers in their class. But that’s just a guess as I have not been cleared for de-briefing. Only the parents of the chosen children are given information about language arts enrichment. The rest of us, the parents of the average, are left to wonder and lament and gnash our ordinary teeth.
When I mentioned that I was amazed by our children’s lack of exceptionalness, My Better Half responded with a tired resignation, “Oh, I’m not surprised. They’re gifted, IQ wise, but we didn’t hold them back and all their peers are a year older. They’ll never be able to compete with them.” And I gasped, it all became so crystal clear. He’s absolutely right, not only are my kids young for their class, both having had the misfortune of being born in the summer, but their rule abiding and traditional parents pushed them along, having them start Kindergarten at the legally sanctioned time rather than red-shirting them in preschool. While I knew that many of the children in O and G’s class are a full year or more older than they are, it didn’t occur to me that this might affect how they are percieved by the teaching staff. Aren’t they professionals trained to recognize that 8 year olds cannot be compared to kids who are 9 1/2; and 6 year olds aren’t going to read as well as their 7 1/2 and 8 year old classmates? Aren’t gifted programs supposed to operate on IQ so that age is irrelevant.
I also thought, rather naively, that red-shirted children were held back for a good reason, failure to show Kindergarten readiness being the sole and primary criteria. However, having done some research on the subject and having had my eyes opened by My Better Half, I now realize that perfectly capable and well adjusted children are held back by parents who wish to give them an academic advantage. Instead of letting the chips fall where they may and placing their children of school age in their appropriate class, parents see the additional year of preschool as insurance that there otherwise average children will rise to the top of the class based on age advantage alone.
While I know this advantage will diminish as the children grow and develop and the significant differences in capability sort of fade away as the brain matures, right now, in grade school, the additional year makes all the difference.
So while O and G might be the top students in a class of six and eight year olds respectively, they can’t compete with the children in their classrooms that are already seven and nine by the start of the school year. They just can’t do it.
And feeling frustrated and angry, I can see how the Kindergarten arms race began. I am regretting our decision to send them forth into the world, never having seen any reason to keep them back. Apparently, I should have complied and based my decision on the fact that everyone else was doing it.
According to Steve Sailer who coined the phrase ‘Kindergarten arms race’ back in 2000, about 10% of all preschoolers were being red-shirted at that time. He also suggested that the rate would double by decade. Having done some basic math, using the projections established in the 2000 study, this would means that today, in 2007, about 15% of the kids in grade school have been held back a year. 15% are at a distinct advantage. I suspect that 15% were not struggling or mal-adjusted or unprepared when leaving preschool. It’s just that their parents recognized early that red-shirting their child in a school system of upper middle-class, white students would be their ticket into the language arts enrichment program. Once selected for advanced work, these children are more likely to be recognized as gifted or exceptional in the years to come.
Those of us that believe that Kindergarten starts when you’re five unless there are learning disabilities or emotional problems, the dummies that believe that someone’s got to be the youngest, send our well adjusted and competent kids off to school on time and in doing so, unwittingly set them up to be at an academic disadvantage for much of their school lives.
I will finish my rant by saying that O, who turned 8 in June, has a boy in class who will be turning 10 during the school year. Now I’m off to phone the reading specialist and ask her pointed questions about her contribution to the Kindergarten Arms Race.
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