Letters to the Editor
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Why I'll be unschooling
I was infuriated by that article. While I commend the author for illuminating the practice and varying definitions of what "readiness" for kindergarten is, depending on the motivations of who's doing the defining, I think she completely missed a crucial point: we have an educational system built on pitting children against each other.
"Redshirting" not only widens the achievement gap between rich and poor, but between the biggest and the smallest children, the more confident and the quieter, the oldest and the youngest. And it broadens opportunities for teachers to further coddle the oldest, more able kids, to the express disadvantage of the younger and more awkward. The saddest, most sickening part of the article for me was to read quotes from teachers admitting that they enjoyed the older kids in their classes more because they were easier to deal with.
Redshirting makes something "wrong" with both the red-shirted kid--stigmatizing him for not being ready for kindergarten at the typical age--and the younger ones, because it makes their normal 5-year-old developmental levels a disadvantage.
That it's even possible for parents to cheat the system like this to advantage their kids to the detriment of others should be an alarm that our system is NOT designed to give each child an individually appropriate education, but rather to make sure that the strongest beat the weakest in an ever more complicated contest for teacher approval, test scores, etc.