Kindergarten 'redshirting' is a hot topic

When other kids their age started kindergarten this fall, 5-year-old Caitlin and Jackson Pilisuk just waited on the sidelines.

The Oakland, Calif., twins were eligible, but their parents and preschool teachers decided they weren't ready "emotionally to deal with the rigors of kindergarten," said their mother, Philippa Barron. So the twins will stay in preschool and start kindergarten at age 6.

Evan Swihart, on the other hand, is happily plugging away in his Walnut Creek, Calif., kindergarten class at age 4.

"After a few days, we got the sense that he's in the right spot after a whole year of worrying and fretting about it," said his mother, Christine.

An estimated 9 percent of children nationally are entering kindergarten a year later than they could, though there's little evidence that children perform better in school if they start late. This practice has become common enough to earn the nickname "redshirting," borrowed from a term used for college athletes who don't play in their freshman year in order to spend the time building their strength and skills.

For kindergarten, boys are twice as likely to be redshirted as girls; whites are redshirted more than minorities, and middle-class and more affluent students are more likely than poorer ones to delay, according to studies by the U.S. Department of Education's statistics center and other researchers. As kindergarten becomes more academic and schools move to full-day programs, whether to redshirt has become a hot topic — and great source of stress — for parents with the means to pay for an extra year of day care or preschool.

The situation is exacerbated in California, because its requirement that kindergartners be 5 years old by Dec. 2 is one of the five latest cutoff dates in the nation. Thus, a single kindergarten class can include old 4-year-olds, 5-year-olds and young 6-year-olds, and many teachers say that creates a developmental gap that is hard to bridge.

But experts worry that redshirting puts low-income students at an extra disadvantage. The children who end up going to school young because their parents can't afford to hold them back are also the ones with the least preparation and lowest rates of participation in preschool, they say. Then those children have to compete with older, better-prepared students whose parents may demand more challenging classrooms so their kids aren't bored.