...Most parents have the best intentions for their child and have to make decisions that will impact the rest of their lives. In Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell discusses redshirting and how it affects the American education system. Redshirting is when parents have the choice to hold their kids back another year before kindergarten to have their child avoid being the youngest in class. Parents are arguing whether or not redshirting gives children an advantage or disadvantage when it comes to their education, as it is a decision that affects their whole 12 years of school. Redshirting should be supported because it allows children to mature and develop before attending school. Researchers studied test scores of elementary school...
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...have positive effects on their future. In Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success, he discusses the positives of redshirting and how statistics prove it is worthwhile. The idea of redshirting stems from parents concerned about whether their child is ready for kindergarten. This concern is common among many parents because their decision could help, or hurt, their child in the future. Redshirting should be allowed in the American education system because it provides kindergartners more time to develop physically, emotionally, and socially. Redshirting is a benefit because it can help students be more prepared for the difficulties ahead of them in education. At the beginning it may not be apparent how being one of the oldest in a person’s class can be a benefit, but in Outliers: The Story of...
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...Doing what is best for a parent’s child can come with both positives and negatives. In Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success he discusses how in Canada they hold back kids a year to benefit how they play for a sport in the elite league, They say that the older they are the better they get at the sport. Redshirting is when a parent holds back their child a year before putting them in kindergarten, hoping that it will help them be smarter than their peers. Redshirting should not be allowed in education because there are more negatives than positives. Redshirting causes problems for some children, and they end up behind. They discovered that “it’s hard for a five-year-old to keep up with a child born many months earlier”. But most...
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...When Peers Are Not Equals: The Relative Age Effect in the Classroom Abstract Relative age effects are differentiated experiences amongst children in the earliest years of primary school resulting from both a single, yearly cut-off date and an escalation of curriculum replacing socialization with skill acquisition activities as early as kindergarten before maturity differences by age have evened out. Implementation of three cut-off dates per class and the creation of individual student developmental planning reduces the potentially long lasting effects associated with relative age differences. This study aims to determine the existence of, and potential long lasting effects associated with, relative age differences. A background on the evolving framework of early elementary curriculum to that of a factory model emphasizing the development of the whole over the individual is included to underscore the ripe conditions for relative age effects to manifest themselves. If nothing is done, relatively younger students will continue to score noticeably lower in reading, math, and science testing throughout elementary and middle school. Pre-university program participation in high school and college enrollment will remain lower, on average, among the relative youngest. Lastly, implications for educational policy, administrations, parents, and teachers are evaluated. What if the date of someone’s birthday was a gift in it of itself? Suppose this gift was manifested...
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