September 2017: Student Liaison Report
Children who start school at an older age do better than their younger classmates and have better odds of attending college and graduating from an elite institution, writes correspondent John Ydstie for NPR News, citing the results of a new National Bureau of Economic Research study.
“Many parents already delay enrolling their children in school, believing they’ll do better if they’re a bit older,” one of the study’s authors, Northwestern University economist David Figlio told Ydstie. “It’s sort of ‘academic red-shirting,’ using a term that originated in college athletics and refers to recruits who are held out of games for a year.”
The study focused on differences between Florida children born just before and after the Sept. 1 cutoff date for starting kindergarten.
According to Ydstie, that means the youngest children in any class were born in August and the oldest in September of the previous year. Figlio and his co-authors found that, on average, demographically similar September-born children performed better than their younger August-born classmates through their academic careers.
Ydstie writes previous studies also have concluded that older children do better in school, but there still were questions about whether the advantage continued beyond a few years. This new research found that the advantage extends through college.
In the NPR interview, Figlio said that if you look at test scores, the achievement gap could be equivalent to about 40 points on the 1,600-point SAT. The age a child starts school also could affect college attendance and graduation rates, writes Ydstie. Among families in the middle socioeconomic group, the older, September-born kids were 2.6% more likely to attend college and 2.6% more likely to graduate from an elite university.
On the downside, August-born children were 1% more likely to be incarcerated for juvenile crime. Figlio said these are not “massive differences,” but he says they are “meaningful.” Figlio told Ydstie the study’s most surprising finding was that the gap between August- and Septemberborn children occurs at all socioeconomic levels and is not easily closed, even in high-income families.
The Florida birth and education data allowed the researchers to compare the performance of Augustand September-born children in the same families. Even in high-income families, said Figlio, there was a gap in achievement between children who started school at a young age and siblings who started when they were older.
Figlio said that surprised him because he thought high-income families would have the resources needed to close the gap among siblings. Although he believes there’s no clear remedy to the problem, Figlio said he believes educators and officials should look for solutions.