It’s been a few years, but I’m pretty sure both our kids could read multi-syllable words entering first grade and had spent a lot of the summer reading on their own.
It seems like that one year difference will get kids tracked with “the smart kids” and that gap will likely widen rather than narrow over the years.
It’s not catastrophic, but it does seem like it’s at least relevant, and possibly important.
My kids did not. Nor did most of their classmates. Had that be expectation, I would be much more likely to let them wait one year over pushing early reading. Or would not harm them, but would make everything easier.
I don't know, imo people who worry about whether kids are tracked smart are more likely to push them to learn everything too soon.
But the actual big issue with kids that go to school sooner then ready is not that they don't look smartest. It is that they look troublemakers due to being unable to focus as long as needed, they play instead of paying attention, get into trouble as a result. It does even out after some years, but still implies very crappy years for both kid and parents. Ability to stay on task makes massive difference in how long and stressful homework is.
We should treat the tracking and gap as a problem and fix it.
Not by holding anyone back mind you, but by making sure every kid has the opportunity to make the most of the huge amount of time they spend in school.
One of my kids was reading 500 page novels (not difficuly ones, but, like, later Harry Potter books) before 2nd grade. Another will be lucky to do that by 4th grade (which would still be “early”). The kids track themselves and there’s little school can do to speed them up. They can sure slow them down, though—our earlier reader regressed for most of kindergarten.
It's better to just accept that kids are different. It's not a problem that some kids run faster than others. It's not a problem that some kids are interested in art and others are interested in cars.
I like programming. Others detest it, but like cooking. Viva la difference.
I mean, while running definitely have genetic component, right kind of training makes massive difference. In world where running would matter, I woud expect the adults to try to figure out when and how train them.
Same for art actually. If art mattered more, we would cared about making kids like it and teaching all kids to draw.
Of course training makes a difference. But if you don't win the genetic lottery, you're never going to be in the 1% that are good enough to make a living at it. Not a chance.
Me, my coordination is poor. It takes a lot of training for me to even get to the point where most people start. But it doesn't matter to me, as I'm good at things other people are bad at, and fortunately I enjoy doing those things and people pay me to do it.
Nobody would pay me for my athletic ineptitude, my musical disability, or my artistic malfunction. And so what. Viva la difference.
The comment I replied to was speaking about 1st grade placement having trajectory. My point is that this being true is a failure of the educational system. Each kid should get their best outcome regardless of whether they enter 1st grade on that track or not.
Elsewhere you say that kids don't need to learn those things until age 6, so parents don't need to worry about prioritizing it.
Here, the concern is that if the kids learn them around age 6, their trajectory could be permanently altered-- never having a chance to catch up even if capable-- because of the system's tracking of learners.
The reason is simple - elementary school teaches kids at such a glacial pace there is no problem for kids catching up who started a bit late.
For example, I missed the first half of 4th grade. The teacher proposed that I be held back a grade because of all that I missed. My mom put her foot down and said no way. The teacher was skeptical, but within a few days it was abundantly clear that I hadn't missed anything at all. The 4th grade class simply had not perceptibly advanced in 3 months.
P.S. when going through my dad's papers after he passed a few years ago, I ran across report cards from before first grade. They all thought I was "slow". People should just lighten up about academic performance before age 6. It doesn't mean anything for the vast majority of kids. I wouldn't even worry about it until 3rd grade.
OK, so say that in the argument above, because I think you were misunderstanding the other party.
I think it varies a lot by school system. There are places-- mostly lower income, disadvantaged places-- where joining a higher track again is very hard.
> The teacher proposed that I be held back a grade because of all that I missed. My mom put her foot down and said no way.
This kind of advocacy is often missing, too.
> The 4th grade class simply had not perceptibly advanced in 3 months.
Good curriculum has looping, where you hit the same kind of topic from different angles separated in time. I'm teaching bright kids in middle school, and I'm finding that you need to hit something about 3 times before even the bright kids will retain and be able to minimally apply it. (With the exception that every now and then something will be interesting enough that a few students will go and figure out everything about it on their own).
Looping means that if kids miss a bit it'll generally be OK (there won't be huge perceptible gaps in knowledge/ability).
That's absolutely crazy. The school I teach at (I teach middle school, but there's an associated high school and elementary) has some kids doing times tables early in 1st or 2nd grade, but after 3rd grade it is done.
By 7th grade, everyone is in pre-algebra or algebra, and we're looping back over properties of operations and exponent rules, even though everyone, especially in algebra, should know them already.
(uh... except for 11x12 and 7x8, which are for some mystical reason impossible for some to remember).
The public school I was in-- algebra I was not offered in 7th grade, but we were definitely not doing times tables in pre-algebra in 7th.
> (uh... except for 11x12 and 7x8, which are for some mystical reason impossible for some to remember).
My kid had a hard time with 7x8 until discovering the mnemonic that 56 = 7x8 (5, 6, 7, 8).
As for the 11 times tables, you can go all the way up to 18 if you know these two rules:
one-digit number x 11 is the one digit written twice (e.g. 6x11 = 66)
two-digit number x 11 is the two-digit number written again, but with the sum of the two digits written in between the original two digits (e.g. 11x12 = 132)
There is a more complicated rule for multiplying 11 by larger numbers, but most people don't know their 11 times tables past 10 or so anyway.
> definitely not doing times tables in pre-algebra in 7th
In my 7th grade class, they definitely were. Though I suspected that some of the laggards figured out they could avoid learning new material by pretending to not know the tables.
This was definitely happening in high school. Kids deliberately pretended to not understand "molar mass". They managed to derail an entire semester of chemistry class with that.
I do think the expectations now are a bit different than what you were used to-- at least in higher performing schools. Molar mass also was a middle school concept. Everyone graduates HS with algebra, but a very significant fraction make it through 2 years of calculus. More and more is being crammed earlier and school is much more academically intense.
This isn't necessarily in a good way all the time, though. I'm prepping to sub for an 8th grade life science class for a month. It looks like so much is covered. I'd rather cover 3-4 of these topics deeply with an emphasis on concepts and evidence for these concepts than to skip through 20 of them quickly and with so much emphasis on taxonomy and rote.
And several of the graphs in the textbook bug me because the units are clearly not right...
That would imply that high school graduates are better educated than in my day. I find that hard to believe, as standardized test scores haven't improved since what, 1970?
But that's not really my complaint about public schools. My complaint is they don't teach accounting or how business works. These two are fundamental to participating in a free market economy. It's clear to me from reading comments on newspaper articles that very, very few people understand what a profit is or how business actually works.
Ignorance of how basic finance works dooms a lot of people being a lot poorer than they would otherwise be. Teaching some basics here would be a great anti-poverty program - and a very cost-effective one.
> That would imply that high school graduates are better educated than in my day. I find that hard to believe, as standardized test scores haven't improved since what, 1970?
Ages 9/13 on standardized tests of reading/arithmetic are improved, but age 17 has been fairly stagnant. It is somewhat confounded, though, because more people are still in school and tested at age 17 than before-- graduation rates are about 5% higher. And 37% of students are taking at least one AP class which covers subject matter that would previously be taught in college.
Scope and pace of education is increasing, but as your question points out-- it's not clear whether it's really resulting in better outcomes.
> But that's not really my complaint about public schools. My complaint is they don't teach accounting or how business works.
Yup, a whole lot of this is in AP Microeconomics, which is a bit of a rare course to be offered. (I've already decided what I'm teaching for 2021-2022, but maybe I should take this on for 2022-2023).
A lot of the stuff kind of shows up in algebra-- somewhere between algebra I and algebra II depending upon program. Lots of math problems of quadratic optimization where you're given inequalities describing units / raw materials / whatever and a polynomial describing income and an expression describing costs and have to find the maximum profit point, etc, along with analysis of simple and compound interest. But understanding how to do these problems and really understanding the concepts are different matters.
> clear to me from reading comments on newspaper articles
Don't judge humankind from what you read on newspaper articles! :D
The most common confusion I see is people conflating revenue with profits with assets. For example, they'll complain that a company worth $$$$ only pays $ in income taxes. Many people labor under the impression that if a company charges $5 for X, that's $5 in profit.
Anyhow, the two most valuable classes I took outside of college was a 2 week course in touch typing, and a 2 week course in basic accounting.
The accounting class was taught by a guy who said he used to be the the salesman at a car dealership. We got to talking, and he said the biggest problem customers had was failing to understand the finance part of the deal. The wealth of the customer was directly related to his understanding of finance.
The poorer customers always wanted the worst deals. He'd try to explain to them why those were poor options, and their reaction was always suspicion that he was trying to scam them.
By the way, I've had car dealers and bankers try to slip crap by me on the terms. My dad once moved to a new town to take a job, and was negotiating mortgage terms with the local bank. The bank manager went on and on feeding my dad crap, and my dad would just nod. Finally, the manager asked him what his new job was, and my dad relied "head of the finance department at the college." He told me the manager tried to crawl under the table. :-)
> The most common confusion I see is people conflating revenue with profits with assets. For example, they'll complain that a company worth $$$$ only pays $ in income taxes
I agree they get conflated or the articles pick the least favorable comparison. But it's not like this is absolutely broken --- the market values company X (allegedly unprofitable) at $10B but they pay effectively no tax --- could be a legitimate complaint. And people who are upset about things often will make arguments that, when calm, they might know are not strictly true or fair.
Some might even argue that the value of government services they receive are proportional to their asset value, not their income.
> The accounting class was taught by a guy who said he used to be the the salesman at a car dealership. We got to talking, and he said the biggest problem customers had was failing to understand the finance part of the deal. The wealth of the customer was directly related to his understanding of finance.
You have no idea how much trouble I've had just getting dealerships to take a check, because they want to play these games.
> Finally, the manager asked him what his new job was, and my dad relied "head of the finance department at the college."
> the market values company X (allegedly unprofitable) at $10B but they pay effectively no tax
It's awfully easy to lose a lot of money. Corporations do it all the time. Take Boeing in the last year, for example. I saw a statistic once that half of American corporations have a loss for the year in a typical year.
It's easy for wealthy individuals to lose money in a year, too. See Donald Trump.
Indeed. My 4th grader is in remote public schooling this year. He crushes the day's work in 30-45 minutes; if anything it's highlighting just how terribly inefficient the scholastics part of elementary school is. (It's also not the primary purpose of K-5, but to the extent that a sliver of it is present, it is indeed glacially slow.)
I think it works similarly as kids who get tracked early into art, music, or a particular sport. The more they do it, the better they get, and the better they get, the more they do it. Then, in addition to the personal satisfaction, they get praise from people they care about, so they continue. Then their closest school friends are all in the earlier-achieving cohort, may have parents with similar feelings about education, etc.
It's not like the schools are saying "you stumbled over your th-words when entering first grade, so no AP English for you 11 years later", but rather that small differences within the kids themselves becoming self-reinforcing. As WB says in a sibling thread, the only way to break the cycle is to slow these kids down, which is antithetical to me (and hopefully everyone who cares about the kids).
I don't think school funding is a significant driver of this. If a group of kids (in loose alliance with their parents) are more focused early on scholastic achievement, those kids will tend to continue to focus more on it (and believe they’re good at it) whether you have 30:2 or 30:6 student:teacher ratios. There's a lot more influence on students and their outcomes coming from outside of school employees than inside it.
The kids are self-tracking at least as much as the school is formalizing it. You could have pretended there wasn’t an advanced math group, just like you can not officially keep score in soccer. The kids still know.
If you don't have low ratios and tracking, you end up targeting the 33rd percentile and seeing:
* Where the lower-third of the class gets with instruction with slightly too difficult material and not quite enough coaching.
* Where the middle-third gets with excessive coaching on slightly too easy material.
* Where the upper-third gets on their own with little help, occasionally bored by and impeded by the path of the overall class.
This is somewhere affluence matters-- if you have parent volunteers showing up and hanging out to intensively coach (under the teacher's direction) the lowest readers and to challenge / help higher readers pick out books... it makes a big difference on how well class time is used. The teacher can aim square for the middle. And the stronger kids get some enrichment and opportunity for further growth.
Why the 33rd percentile? Because a classroom with 1/6th of kids not getting it at all and 1/6th kind-of getting it.. is infinitely more workable than a classroom with 1/4th not getting it at all and 1/4th kind-of getting it.
Most parents just let their kids crank on whatever academics are, and maybe help with a difficult assignment or two... even in affluent schools with involved parents.
But having a couple parents show up to reading time and teachers' aides... makes such a big difference in K-1.
Yes, keep separating the kids, cordon off the troubled ones to shitty public schools, and ignore fixing the real issues: their parents and home life. Raise everyone in their own classful bubble to keep perpetuating status quo.
> On the plus side, I take solace knowing the majority of those gifted students became addicts or suffered severe mental health issues when they realized they weren't that smart, and the rest of the world doesn't think they're special.
That does not actually happen to that often in tracked school systems. Seriously.
Overall, being tracked higher is correlated with better life outcomes and higher life satisfaction. So I don't think the "majority" ends up the way you state.
I think there is a little confusion of what kindergarteners learn. Here's some lessons from the Florida Virtual Classroom which is heavily used throughout the US since most school districts didn't have a virtual learning plan for kindergarten.
Note that where we live, kindergartners are aged 5-6, and 1st graders are aged 6-7.
Kids are also memorization machines. Letters are pure memorization. But kids also forget things fast. Our oldest learned the letters by 2, forgot them, then re-learned them at 4.
That said, everyone develops in different areas at different rates. I definitely think parents tend to push their kids more than they need to. Lots of this stuff is just when the kid is physiologically ready to do it. Pushing them when they aren't ready just adds pointless stress.
My mother taught me to read when I was four (just over sixty years ago). I'm sure it gave me a head start even though it made the first year of infant school (5 to 7) occasionally irritating as I was asked to read what I regarded as babyish texts! Whether it would help all others I don't know but I imagine that it would hardly hinder anyone.
Similar situation, however i think it was quite damaging to my development that i wasn’t surrounded by children or similar levels of learning / development at that stage. I was the only one in my class able to read and essentially had to go amuse myself while everybody else was learning their letters.
To be clear I am glad I was taught to read but regret nobody else was.
But it gives me some idea about why the amount of parents who think starting school a year later might be good idea for their kids.