Do ALL kids start school at the right time?

A growing body of research shows doing school enrollment on a once-only-each-year basis might not be in the best interests of students. The resulting age spread between the youngest and oldest students in each Kindergarten class is actually rather large, and there are indications that the difference really does matter for kids.

Not long ago, my wife and I enjoyed reading a best-selling book by Malcolm Gladwell called “Outliers.” It is all about people we think are exceptionally successful and how they might have come to be that way. There are interesting chapters in the book stretching from discussions how Bill Gates got to be so skilled with computers to how the best professional Canadian hockey players are mostly born in just a few months out of the entire year.

Gladwell pays considerable attention to education in several places in his book. He discusses, for example, how the KIPP Academy charter schools moved away from the traditional public school model to provide a more effective education for their students.

Gladwell also points to something else, and it involves the fact that those Canadian hockey players are all born during only a small portion of the year. Basically, kids born during those few months become the oldest in the by-age organized youth hockey leagues in Canada. As such, they have an advantage of almost a year of extra growth and development compared to younger kids who fall into their same age category. Generally a bit bigger, stronger and more developed, those “older” kids tend to get more coach attention, which results in better skills and more playing time. Which results in more coach attention as these kids further mature.

In other words, even when we talk about a single year group, age apparently really matters.

That got me thinking about our traditional, one-size-must-fit-all public education system.

Kids generally have to start school with their age counterparts. This means each incoming class of Kindergarten students actually has an age dispersion of a full year. Some kids enter essentially as old four-year olds. Others are old five-year olds. In terms of relative age, the older kids in the class are actually about 20 percent older than the youngest. That’s a pretty big difference.

But, I wondered, is there evidence that difference matters for more than getting the edge in Canadian hockey leagues?

Not long ago, I got at least part of an answer, which relates to children who get diagnosed as having Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). The information comes from the psychcentral.com web site in an article titled “Kids’ Age on Starting School Can Impact ADHD Diagnosis.” The article indicates that the very youngest children in each entering school class have an increased risk of being diagnosed as ADHD. According to the article, “immaturity may result in characteristics/behaviors labeled as ADHD.”

Another study from Clemson University found essentially the same thing pertains more generally, saying:

“Even when controlling for the variables of gender, race, socioeconomic status, and disability, the analyses revealed that the youngest students did not perform as well in reading and math as their school entry peers through the fifth grade. A separate analysis indicated that the youngest students were also less likely than their school entry peers to be in the expected grade (fifth) during the fifth grade collection.”

Yet another study titled “Student achievement and birthday effects,” which looked at students in Norway, finds: “The youngest children…face a significant disadvantage in reading compared to their older classmates.”

Finally, this article raises additional concerns when children are born prematurely, which even further spreads the effective development age among nominally same-aged kids. This article concludes that “school year placement and assessment of ex-preterm infants based on their actual birthday (rather than their EDD) (that is the Estimated Delivery Date) may increase their risk of learning difficulties with corresponding school failure.”

So, I now have a question: Should Kentucky consider a different way to start students in our school system, perhaps having two class starts per calendar year, for example? There are some tough logistics challenges to doing this, but kids might be suffering needlessly under our current year by year only enrollment policies.

Here’s another thought based on the fact that school enrollment is compulsory: Could failure to create a more rational enrollment policy for our public schools come to be viewed as age discrimination? Could that entail legal consequences – maybe very expensive ones – for the school system? There certainly seems to be a body of research out there that might support such legal action.

But, most importantly – does our current, one-size-must-fit-all school enrollment policy serve students well? Can we do this better?