Inequalities, Tame and Savage

For my summer class I just read Shirley Brice Heath's lovely book Ways With Words, the story of two working-class communities in the Carolinas.  She looks at the way parents raise children, and at how those children fare in school.  Her book was much on my mind as I read Elizabeth Weil's article in Sunday's NYT magazine, on holding kids out of kindergarten, or redshirting them.

Schools excel, I think, at teaching kids to be like other kids.  They pick up each other's slang; they learn each other's games; they try on each other's values.  But schools routinely fail, IMHO, at meeting the needs of kids who don't want to be, or aren't able to be, like other kids.

I read Weil's article with incoherent fury bubbling in my head.  I have been trying for a couple of days now to articulate why it made me so angry, and I think there are two related reasons from different sides of the special-needs spectrum.  The backdrop, as always, is the NCLB nonsense that drives me nigh unto apoplexy, but I'll mostly spare you that rant except to ask why (oh why oh why oh why) are we wasting so much classroom time and taxpayer money on the preparation for and the completion of standardized tests that measure mostly how successful a child will be at standardized tests?

I cannot read about kids who are either old or young for their class without lugging my own bias into the picture:  I have a summer birthday and I didn't go to kindergarten.  This meant that I graduated from high school at 16, college at 20.  It meant that junior high felt like a three-year sojourn in the sizzling cauldron of Satan's own refectory (not that I was bitter or anything).

When my oldest son was approaching kindergarten, we opted to homeschool because he was ahead of the curve academically and a bit behind it socially.  I expected that this combination in a conventional classroom would lead to his spending much of the year in trouble; homeschooling allowed us to foster the growth of both his heart and his mind.  That angle is missing from Weil's article, as far as I can see.  Yeah, the redshirted kids are confident.  Aren't they bored, some of them?  When they spend their first academic year studying things they've already figured out, doesn't that teach them that school is a snore?

I don't have personal experience with schools that prioritize gifted education.  I do have ample experience with schools that regard support for the smart kids as a frill.  Some smart kids entertain themselves.  Some try to blend in; some make trouble.  It strikes me as a staggering waste of human potential to keep kids sitting quietly in their seats for six hours a day, 180 days a year, while they are bored out of their skulls.  What happens to kids who spend years being told implicitly that they're too smart for learning?  If they're even older when they enter kindergarten, it only amplifies the boredom factor.

Mostly, though, those kids will get by.  I'm not so sure about the kids at the other end of the spectrum.  For lower-income families, schools are a crucial source, if not the only source, of services for special-needs kids.  Federal law requires schools to provide those services starting at age 3, but [SLP horror stories typed out and deleted here] it doesn't always work out that way.  It often gets easier in kindergarten, when the teachers join with the families in saying, Hey, we've got a problem here.  Should we really be lengthening the time these families spend in limbo?

At the agency where I work, we talk every week about the school district dropping the ball with families transitioning out of early intervention services.  The middle-class families can ask their lawyer pals to write letters saying, "Actually, providing these services is a federal mandate and not a serving suggestion.  Are you going to get it in gear or pay for this kid to receive services privately?"  The lower-income families are a lot less likely to have lawyer pals, a lot less likely to navigate the appeal process successfully if services are denied.  Lower-income families with preschool-aged special-needs children are seriously underserved, and delaying school entry for their children will only exacerbate the problem.

Here's the thing:  maturation helps in a lot of areas, but sometimes kids need intervention and not just time.  Symptomatic lead poisoning is not a self-limiting problem.  A genetic predisposition to language problems does not resolve spontaneously in an impoverished* environment.  And kids who struggle with spoken language may well struggle with reading, in ways that simply will not improve on their own.  It compounds the harms these kids face if we use arbitrary timelines to keep them out of school.

*"impoverished" meaning "not providing adequate language stimulation," as distinct from "poor"

This is too long already and I haven't even touched on the biggest question:  what about family culture?  That's why I kept thinking about Shirley Brice Heath's book, with its careful descriptions of working-class families and their parenting practices.  I have been sitting here for ten minutes trying to condense a hundred pages of her book into a couple of sentences, and I guess it boils down to this commonsense observation:  if you grow up in a community where dropping out is the norm, you are far less likely to succeed in school.  You can spend another year at home, but it won't teach you that "I see Emma and Ella sitting quietly with their hands in their laps" is code for "So sit down and quit fidgeting before I yell at you."  Another year might provide you with the brain development to map phonemes to letters a little less effortfully, but you probably won't have any more books in your apartment and your mother probably won't have any more time to sit down and read to you.

And that, my friends, raises a host of thorny questions which I am not even going to attempt to enumerate tonight.  Please do discuss if you're so inclined.  I will leave you with one last thought, which is that for five- and six-year-olds, twelve months will always be a significant chunk of time.  As long as kindergarten eligibility spans a calendar year, the Day 1 kids will always be more mature, on average, than the Day 365 kids -- it matters not a whit whether those days are January 1 and December 31, or July 1 and June 30.

To be a kindergarten teacher is to confront every day the breadth of the range of children's development.  It troubles me that schools seem to view that range as something to be compressed, and not something to be celebrated.

Comments

[rachel]

i don't care if this is bad or ungenerous; I'm positively gleeful at your rage. That article and the discussions I've seen made me so furious I couldn't see straight. To pataphrase from a Pat Barker book, seeing their own class as peripheral to the point at issue is a feat of mental agility of which no middle-class parent is capable. One of the many thinsg that drive me up a wall here is the scientification of the process of growing up - the paradoxically magical thinking which leads people (and experts) to reduce everything to numbers: learning is about being so old, having x amount of motor abilities, y percent of development allowing z numbers to be learnt. Even in a classroom of 40 kids exactly the same age, ability levels and maturity will vary wildly - and this may not mean anything; some of those kids will develop suddently and rapidly later, others will stall. The refusal to accept this variety and the desire to reduce it is a mark of impoverished thinking.

[Ariella]

Great post. My opinion is anecdotal, but here it is: I was born in January and went to school in 86, which would have made me five-turning-six during my kindergarten year. I already knew how to read and write, and also knew basic math, and I was fairly bored throughout elementary school.

My school (a private school) allowed me to skip seventh grade, so I graduated from high school at 17, college at 20 (3.5 semesters) and then law school at 24. I'm now 26. If I have kids who are advanced academically (as I was) but socially retarded (ditto) I would NEVER encourage them to skip a grade. I had numerous social problems in high school and didn't hit my stride in college until my sophomore year.

I'm not against waiting to send kids to kindergarten; I would even be willing to home school our children if I thought that was best for them. I do think that waiting to send your kid to school so they will excel at tests is disingenuous and designed to "beat" the curve, and is also unfair to the kids who don't have that advantage.

I never went to public school, so I don't know if it's true, but my mother always said that public schools are skewed towards the slowest kid in the class. I don't think that's as true now as it may have been when she was in school... now I think that maybe they just get "left behind." It is unfortunate.

That article is pretty smug. The line about standardized testing in Third Grade needing to be prepped for in Kindergarten is ridiculous. I guess we can all thank Prez. Bush for his "no child left behind" initiative.

One more anecdote: I have a friend who is a high school chemistry/math teacher in an affluent suburb in NJ. She's been "spoken to" several times by the administration of her school because she "grades too hard" and the kids' parents are getting upset. Apparently the scores her kids get in Calculus and AP Chemistry are too low, and the school was in danger of losing some kind of funding because they hadn't met the prerequisite cut-off.

I think that is just ridiculously backwards logic. If those kids can't get the grades, then they shouldn't be making the tests easier for them; they should be improving the education they're getting in earlier classes. She's refused to make her exams any easier or to grade them more leniently, and I'm pretty sure they're trying to get rid of her at this point. She has tenure, though, so I am not sure what will happen.

[Summer]

This article was sent to my local parenting email list, and I'm pretty sure I'm a big reason why we were sent the link. The person who sent it is the wife of the principal of my son's school, and a week or so ago I had a long talk with her and with another mom who has a kid in the school. Of the three of us, the principal's wife had pulled her sons out of the school's pre-k 4 and kindergarten classes because of maturity issues, the other mom is considering keeping her son in pre-k 4 for another year rather than sending him to kindergarten, and my husband is agitating for our boy to skip pre-k 4 and go straight into kindergarten next year. The four boys in question are all smart kids, and all have been raised in academically rich homes. But of the four, even though my kid is the youngest, he's the only one who has adapted well to the long school day, and he's already met the benchmark for successful completion of kindergarten (he can read and write in sentences). He's also the kid with the lowest energy level, and the least need to exhaust himself running around.

When most of his friends started school, my son missed the cutoff date by 11 days. He would have just squeaked in if he'd been born on his due date, but instead of being the youngest and smallest kid in his class, he's now the oldest and average sized. And honestly, it's his size that makes me want to keep him with his class, and have him do pre-k 4 next year rather than kindergarten. I've had the experience of being the youngest, smallest, and most academically advanced student in the class, and it wasn't fun AT ALL. I didn't make real friends until high school. I never fell behind academically, but I was miserable. My heart aches at the thought of my son suffering that way, and I've got to think that it would be worse to be the smallest boy than the smallest girl. So far his school is doing a good job of keeping him challenged and growing his skills... this might be one of the few times I have to put my foot down.

[Rosemary Grace]

A little snippet of genius practiced by my elementary school: I was put in the "leftovers" class (as my Mum calls it), a composite class of two grades combined, mostly made up of the youngest from one year and the oldest from the year below, but also with the known problem children, since composite classes were required to have a smaller overall class size.

So we had not 365 days of maturity range, but 730! The youngest kids probably benefited academically by being exposed to materials earlier, but the kids officially in the upper school year were held back by being combined with the lower year. I was in the upper year, very young for my grade, academically advanced, socially not so much. I did ok, but it was problematic, possibly more so than it needed to be.

[Lisa C.]

This is a subject near and dear to my heart, because I have a boy born in early June and should start kindergarten in 2008 at the age of 5 years, 2.5 months. Practically everyone I meed tells me that he MUST be redshirted because he'll be too young to do well in kindergarten.

I want to put him in Pre K this upcoming year to help him learn some of the tacit rules of the classroom (your "hands in laps" example was right on!) so it won't be such a shock for him going into kindergarten. My husband thinks he doesn't need Pre K, but he is basing his opinion on Iranian educational standards and still thinks the first year of school is about arts and crafts and playing games. He was shocked when I told him that our kindergartens are geared toward teaching children to read (I still don't think he believes me!). I feel that if we do not send him to Pre K this year there is NO WAY he will be ready for kindergarten in 2008. My mother (25 years in education) completely agrees with me.

I don't want to redshirt him. He is FINE socially. He is also HUGE, well over the 100th percentile in height and weight. Even if we keep him with his peers he will be one of the bigger kids in his class.

It's frustrating.

[Maria]

I suppose I may earn the ire of the readers here, but as I've been following this debate on the internets since the publication of the redshirting article, I can't stop wondering: why are we treating Kindergarten like 1st grade? Why are we expecting Kindergarteners to learn to read and write? They're not built for this kind of academic expectation, any benefits from early achievements fade away by about 5th or 6th grade. The long school day, the disappearance of recess and imaginative playtime, the expectation that chubby little fingers will succesfully manipulate the pencils…

It reminds me of Harry Chapin's song "Flowers Are Red".

[CJ]

No ire here, Maria. The question of appropriate kindergarten curriculum is huge. No matter what the curriculum is, though, districts have to deal wisely with the kids at each end of the normal curve. That's what was on my mind as I was reading the article.

Take a look at Jody's post for more on the kindergarten curriculum debate -- good stuff.

[Lauren]

This is in part why my children are coming out of school! I finally realized that my 7 year old who has just completed first grade is getting walloped socially and struggling with his attention span more than a tad bit. And I (idiot mother) have been sizing him up to the other boys in the class and saying, "he's immature for his age . . ." BUT! Thank you, CJ, whether he is or isn't happens to be irrelevant considering he is a full year younger than most of the boys in his class (and I was seven at the beginnning of 1st grade, not the tail end!).

Thank you for the knock in the head, now if the sense will settle nicely then we'll be set!

[KatieButler]

This is a subject that I have been turning over in my mind all year, even before the Weil article. Our district moved from a half-day to full-day kindergarten program between my first and second children. The curriculum is markedly more demanding.

My oldest sailed through half-day and would probably done fine in the full-day as well. My son, however, is often genuinely tired at the end of the day, is struggling in some areas. Half-day and the corresponding curriculum would have been a much better fit.

[Lauren]

you've been tagged.

[Sue]

I resonate with so much of what is written in both the post and the comments. I am a January-born woman and spent much of my elementary-education bored--even reading Nancy Drew books under the desk after finishing worksheets in class. (side note: ain't publik educashun GRAND?!) All of this entirely confirms and validates our decision to homeschool. We can tailor our Adventures in Education to our (January-born) son's needs and encourage his growth both academically and socially.

NCLB, as far as bad pieces of education-legislation has little equal. It was Ted Kennedy, however, who wrote the bill, and although the current President bears blame for not rectifying the bad parts of the bill, let's not forget that this is a bi-partisan blunder. And a big blunder it is.