Seventeen Percent of Kindergarten Kids Redshirted

[James Horn <ontogenyx@gmail.com>]

>  Seventeen Percent of Kindergarten Kids Redshirted
>
> Does it tell you that something is haywire when almost 20 percent of  
> children are being held back from entering kindergarten for a year  
> because of the irresponsible stupidity of a generation of adults who  
> have ignored everything we have learned during the past hundred  
> years about child development?  From today's Times:
> . . . .Hers is a popular school of thought, and it is not new.  
> “Redshirting” of kindergartners — the term comes from the practice  
> of postponing the participation of college athletes in competitive  
> games — became increasingly widespread in the 1990s, and shows no  
> signs of waning.
>
> In 2008, the most recent year for which census data is available, 17  
> percent of children were 6 or older when they entered the  
> kindergarten classroom. Sand tables have been replaced by worksheets  
> to a degree that’s surprising even by the standards of a decade ago.  
> Blame it on No Child Left Behind and the race to get children test- 
> ready by third grade: Kindergarten has steadily become, as many  
> educators put it, “the new first grade.”
>
> What once seemed like an aberration — something that sparked fierce  
> dinner party debates — has come to seem like the norm. But that  
> doesn’t make it any easier for parents. . . .
> Why have adults running the schools acted so irresponsibly to create  
> kindergartens that are inappropriate for kindergartners?  Because  
> the U. S. Chamber of Commerce has insisted on "accountability" for  
> all public spending on schools, while the sewers of Wall Street and  
> the corporate headquarters continue to stink up the entire country.   
> The Times lead story this morning is about the abandonment of Wall  
> Street by the small investors, who have taken out over $30 billion  
> this year alone from the Wall Street betting windows.
> Investors withdrew a staggering $33.12 billion from domestic stock  
> market mutual funds in the first seven months of this year,  
> according to the Investment Company Institute, the mutual fund  
> industry trade group. Now many are choosing investments they deem  
> safer, like bonds.
> Like many other Americans who were waiting for the Feds to end the  
> casino capitalism, we see nothing done that prevents too-big-to-fail  
> from happening all over again a few years hence when we are even  
> closer to retirement.  I am out of the funhouse, just like so many  
> others with options to not gamble retirement funds on the moral  
> bankruptcy of the greed merchants.  Never to go back, by the way.
>
> Meanwhile, the Wall Street pols and pundits and Rupert Murdochs of  
> the world support the perpetrators who print teachers' names and  
> student test scores in the floundering corporate newspapers that are  
> hoping for a bump in readership in order to stave off bankruptcy.   
> American newspapers sealed their fates when they went to war with  
> Bush and death-worshipping neocons.  That was the Chernobyl for the  
> news biz, and nothing they have done since shows any remorse or  
> change in direction.  Corporate coverups and lack of corporate  
> accountability continue to be a non-story, as megalomaniacs like  
> Bill Gates and Eli Broad are celebrated in the editorial offices for  
> advancing a new era of eugenics treatments in the public-corporate  
> schools for poor children whose parents do not have the option of  
> keeping them home or sending them to Sidwell Friends School.
>
> --
> Posted By Jim Horn to Schools Matter at 8/22/2010 09:29:00 AM