I have written before, or if I haven't I should have, about the craziness of placing children in classes according to their birthdates. I have been known to call this practice "birthday-based apartheid". It is ludicrous. anti-educational and anti-child.
I was sent this article from a UK newspaper, and since we follow the same system here, I think it is relevant and revealing. In essence, if a school or district uses a 1 September birthdate to place children, then you will have students aged 364 (sometimes 365!) days apart in the same grade. At high school or later, this is irrelevant. At pre-school and elementary, this is critical.
The only justification for date-of-birth separation can be that it is quick and easy for a school or district. However, this birthday lottery harms children and makes the job at best more difficult for teachers.
Firstly, physically and physiologically. Children grow and mature at different times and different rates, and an arbitrary system which likely does not allow for this. We have all seen pictures of an Under-10 basketball team with one child who is a foot (or more!) taller than the others. Or the group playing together where one is 20 pounds heavier than the others and another 20 pounds lighter, in other words a 40-pound range. In this case, simple fairness and equity would have basketball teams grouped by height; safety would have wrestling and football by weight.
And every upper elementary teacher has had to deal with the student with surging hormones and raging desire sitting next to another who is essentially still in the realms of soldiers and dolls.
Secondly, intellectually and scholastically. In general, broad-brush terms, young girls are ahead of their male peers in reading, writing, and even reckoning so any general activity would mean one group is bored and another frustrated. Some G1 students are ready for multiple-column multiplication and long division while others are summing single digits to 20.
Yes, a teacher should be able to provide each student with tasks at his/her level, but in reality this does not happen and in reality, extra time and attention is given to those at the "lower" end of the group thus sacrificing the "upper" end. And of course, such extreme differentiation ignores the effects of teacher time and teacher energy.
I am convinced by "Developmentally Appropriate Practice", or DAP, adopted and promulgated by NAEYC, the National Association for the Education of Young Children. In essence, DAP says that we know the developmental stages through which children pass and the order, and that neither vary much. What does vary is the speed : some children pass through a given stage very quickly while others take more time. Some children need considerable support to pass through a stage, others need little to none.
DAP says that the role of a teacher is to know these stage and to identify where a child is and to recognize and provide what s/he needs to pass to the next, ie to develop. Theoretically, in a class of 25 this means 25 individual programs for each and every subject area, which must all be re-calibrated every day.
In real life this is of course not possible and so students are grouped in a school, program or subject. DAP means that students should be grouped according to their developmental stages and developmental needs, and that they should be re-grouped as their stages and needs change. Neither has anything to do with a date of birth.
DAP is highly, highly effective as it combines a program's or school's objectives with each individual student's individual reality. The schedule of the stork does not.
Update I - since I wrote this, a former colleague mentioned differences between premature or very premature births and late arrivals. I do not know anything about this, but it does seem to add weight to the argument that date of birth is irrelevant.
Update II - meanwhile another told me of an Australian student she had. Down there, they start school in February so use a different date of birth for grade placement and when the student arrived in my friend's school, they wanted to put her back a semester. This perfectly illustrates the ludicrousness of grading by birthday. This case was made worse by the fact that the Australian system was several levels above my colleague's state's. The district wouldn't budge so the girl went to a private school.
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