Five Top Trends in Education

What’s Hot and What’s Not In Education Today

By Judy Molland

From holding a kindergartner back a year to lengthening the school day, here are the education trends grabbing headlines and prompting debate as we head into a new academic year.

Academic Redshirting

Are you planning to hold your child back a year? To provide what some believe to be an academic edge in today’s competitive classrooms, many parents are postponing their children’s entry into kindergarten until they are older in the grade than their peers. The practice is known as academic redshirting.

According to a U.S. Department of Education report in 2000, the most recent figures available, about 9 percent of first- and second-graders started kindergarten a year late. Experts say the trend has continued. When this happens, the age gap within one class is often 16 months or more, and that poses a challenge for teachers, who are also concerned that the older children may become bored and act out.

The trend to delay a child’s kindergarten entry, or even have a child repeat kindergarten, began with the ratcheting up of standards in the third grade and above to improve students’ performance on standardized tests. With greater emphasis on test performance, educators have noted, a gradual escalation in academic demands has made its way down the grades – all the way to kindergarten.

Some parents are opting to give their children a leg up by keeping them out of kindergarten a year beyond when they reach the entry age. But not everyone believes that redshirting is a good idea.

“The ones we’re holding out are the ones who need school the most,” says early childhood educator Cami Jones.

Meanwhile, a 2002 study by the National Institute for Early Education found that, on average, older children do not academically outperform their younger peers. Deborah Stipek, dean of the School of Education at Stanford University, also says that her own research has found there are no real social or emotional benefits to being older in a particular grade.