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News Flash: Same-age children aren't all the same!
March 18, 2004Conventional wisdom says that children are developmentally identical. All three-year-olds have the exact the same capabilities as all other three-year-olds. Being that all children are identical, all five-year-olds should be in kindergarten, and all six-year-olds should be in first grade. Under no circumstances should a six-year-old be placed in second grade.
Absurd, right?
Any living human being who's been within an arm's reach of children know that the preceding is a bunch of baloney. Children are most emphatically not developmentally identical. You've got your early bloomers and late bloomers, bean sprouts and bean poles, pre-verbal, verbal, and late-talkers, crawlers, walkers, and runners. By the grace of Mother Nature, kids are all over the map, which is a pretty good thing.
Enter school administrators.
Educrats can't abide all these bell-curve straddling kids all over the place, they need to set some policy! So they usually say something like "if your kid is six years old, we'll place the little bugger in first grade." Nice and neat, tied with a bow.
In broad terms, the bigger the school system, the more entrenched the bureaucrats, and the more farcical the lengths to which bad policy will be defended. Parents enrolling their bright young children in school are often given the run-around (or even worse: a quick "no") when trying to place their youngsters in a grade level other than the proscribed norm.
So if six-year-old Johnny is intelligent and precocious, and is fully capable of second grade work? They'll stick him in first grade anyway.
No, no, no, you protest, Johnny blew away his standardized tests, with percentiles in the 90s! Can't he enroll in second? Nope! It's off to first grade with him!
But he was reading at a third grade level in first grade! Um, you seem like a nice lady and all, but F-I-R-S-T spells "First," as in First Grade for your little Johnny!
Hey wait a minute, you shout, Johnny's already finished first grade at another school and is halfway through second! He's just transferring into the system as a current second grader!
The educrats' response? He's six years old, you say? What part of first grade don't you understand?
This would make for some comedy if it weren't such a real-life tragedy. Education News documents this week the efforts of a New York City teacher (on medical leave) to place her son in second grade. Even though he matches the description of our fictional Johnny above, young Francis Riviera is very real, and has in fact done quite well in second grade at a private school.
When his mother tried to transfer him into public school, the educrats insisted on placing him in first grade. The assistant principal of the local school said, in regard to placing children by ability, "We don’t do that here, we go by age."
Quick, someone grab the ClueBat!
Fortunately, Francis' mother contacted the press. With this big Klieg light shining on the staggering boneheadedness of it all, the school district finally respected the mother's wishes, and reversed their earlier decision.
While Francis may now continue his second-grade studies, we wonder how many other bright children are out there bored to tears in classrooms below their level, without the power of the press behind them?
His case was extraordinary because he'd already completed most of second grade (at a private school) when the all-knowing school district declared he was fit for first grade. But what about children who're not transferring? The problem rears its head when kids first start school, or more accurately, when parents attempt to enroll their children in school. We've known of parents of very bright four-year olds being refused even consideration for Kindergarten, purely due to age.
On a tangential note, recall the big flap over social promotion in the third grade, where schools routinely promote kids even when they've not mastered the material. Imagine someone suggesting to these schools that they promote only those kids who've mastered that year's set of knowledge and skills. The response?
"We don’t do that here, we go by age."
Good timing, since I'm about to start looking about the prospects of getting my daughter into kindergarten a year early... I guess the prospects don't look so good...
Zach March 18, 2004 07:57 PMMany feel that there are two things to look at: the academic level of the student and the social or maturity level of the student. Some reports I have seen say that for the early grades, it is the social level that should determine which grade the child should be in. (I don't necessarily agree.) Also, now that many schools are going to all-day Kindergarten, they are changing the rules so that the kids have to be 5 by the beginning of the school year, rather than by the end of the calendar year.
Schools also don't look favorably on any parent who wants to place their child early or skip grades based on academic level. They feel that the social maturity level of the child is more important. However, don't expect them to evaluate your child as to their maturity level. The bottom line is that the schools don't want to make exceptions. They want to treat everyone same. You will hear them tell you that all kids average out the same by about fourth grade even though little Suzie can read in Kindergarten and little Johnnie doesn't know the alphabet at that time. The first time I was told this, my reaction was that they averaged out because little Suzie didn't get the education she could use. I have seen this in practice. Kids come into first grade knowing everything that is going to be taught. They make little or no progress.
Zach, you are interested in "getting my daughter into kindergarten a year early," to which I say, "Know any good forgers?" You might even be able to make up birth certificates with a good quality laserprinter. (Kidding! Just kidding!)
Actually, when you go to enroll the kid, if they verbally ask how old she is, just say "she's in her fifth year" and I betcha a nickel some kindergarten staffers would swear you just said she's five.
Couldn't hurt to try!
chett March 19, 2004 01:13 AMChances are, little Francis will still be bored to tears next year...
markm March 19, 2004 12:09 PMMy Tiny Princess is in first grade instead of Kindergarten this year thanks to her last-minute waiting-list admission to a new charter school. She has a birthday after the district's cutoff date, so the local public school wanted to put her in Kindergarten. This is not surprising, but here's what is:
The principal of this school attends our church, where kids are grouped into Sunday School classes according to the year in which they were born; consequently, Tiny Princess was in a Sunday School class with others who would have been in her first grade class. The principal had the nerve to tell me how Tiny Princess should be in an "age-appropriate" setting when she knew full well that Tiny Princess was downstairs in an "age-appropriate" setting with the very same kids I was being told were too old for her. Later, when the principal wouldn't return my phone calls, we stopped by her house to speak to her about it. She spoke of the need for "social skills" to be taught in Kindergarten. I asked her to give me an example of the "social skills" that were necessary to move on to first grade, and she said "waiting your turn". The entire time, my Tiny Princess was standing quietly next to me waiting her turn to show the lady that she could read her book. When I pointed this out to the principal, she got a little flummoxed and began to wax eloquent about how rare social skills were nowadays and how rude people were. This was supposed to demonstrate the importance of teaching social skills in Kindergarten, even though I'd venture to guess the vast majority of those rude people had been through Kindergarten already.
This principal knew me. She knew my daughter. She knew that I had homeschooled her with a Kindergarten curriculum. We are talking about people who are so entrenched in bureaucracy that they cannot see what is right in front of their own eyes. And the few who can see it feel powerless to do anything about it. In my search for anyone in the district who could find me a route to first grade for Tiny Princess, even those sympathetic to my cause wouldn't dare so much as wipe their noses without permission from higher up the food chain.
Wacky Hermit March 26, 2004 06:22 AMWacky Hermit, the mere fact that your Tiny Princess didn't kick that idiotarian principal really hard in the shin demonstrates to me that she's got all the social skills she'll need to do fine.
I'm not so sure I would have been able to restrain myself.
chett March 26, 2004 04:27 PMHey, Wacky, nice to see you here, too!
I can sympathize. Boy, can I sympathize!
I've got an 8-year-old, in 2nd grade as per age requirements. She tests out in reading at 6th grade level and is working on 4th grade homeschooling math books for fun. In fact, I have her taking them to school to work on after she finishes her basic addition and subtraction classwork. She is bored out of her mind.
In fact, the boredom is getting so bad she is making dumb mistakes because she isn't paying attention. I talked to the teacher, and we got the usual "I'd do something if I could, but since our new principal just finished abolishing grade-level pull-out classes, I don't expect to be able to do anything". Seems this new principal is IN LOVE with the idea of keeping children together in their social groups, which of course meant eliminating pull-out classes by ability. So my 2nd grader, who was working at 4th grade reading level, is now back in a single class with kids who are still struggling with their alphabet.
Yes, the school district has provision for skipping childre ahead by a grade by testing out. Two parents have already tried it and they both got turned down in spite of their kids' stellar performance - the old "they need socialization" crap again. So I'm not even going to bother wasting my time on trying to follow 'the system'.
I've about decided to pull her out at the end of 4th grade (that's when our district switches kids to a 5&6-only middle school) and home school her. She's begging me to homeschool her now. In fact, last year's PTO president at her school just pulled out her daughter at mid-year to homeschool (she was one of my daughter's classmates), and another of her classmates is leaving at end of this year to be homeschooled. Also, one of her close friends at school has a sister and two cousins who are being homeschooled, and the friend will probably do the same next year, too.
Maturity? My daughter is very mature is some ways and in some a typical 8 year old. She spends 12 hours or more a week in the gym working out - she's in competitive gymnastics, USAG Level 5 - and she wants to make Level 7 by end of next year. She's also in a performance team that does gymnastics/dance performances at local schools, charity events (and next month the local Branson-style dinner theater). Most of the kids on team with her at her level are 1-3 years older than her, and her two best friends are both a year older and a grade ahead of her. So don't tell me she can't handle the 'social skills' of being with older kids.
Private school is not a really viable alternative. The Catholic school is not much different academically, and the Christian (Baptist) school isn't much better either, with the drawback of being rabidly fundamentalist, which I do NOT want to subject my daughter to. So I don't see a good alternative in our community other than to homeschool.
In fact, I almost look forward to it. I love teaching, and as a trained scientist and business manager with also a liberal arts background, I don't think I'd have any problems with teaching until I hit college level (and then I used to teach college chemistry, so that's a no-brainer too.) My daughter and I share a love of learning about EVERYTHING, and I'd like to have a chance to look again at things like English literature with the eyes of experience instead of the scorn of teenage angst.
Claire March 30, 2004 02:33 PM