There's a link on the 60 Minutes site to the full segment. The research on the "pro" side was Malcolm Gladwell's incremental / snowball advantage theory and a paper by a woman researcher (forgot her name). An academic on the other side scoffed and said that the research is split.
I was going to say the same. I do wish that they'd interviewed the lady who wrote
this article. She said in the article that the research mostly pointed toward no lasting benefit from being older.
I, too, have late summer/early fall kids who started young. My youngest had a child in her K class who was on his second year of full-day K and who was very advanced academically (as a result of the two years of K or b/c he was very able, I don't know). She has friends who turned 7 in K b/c they were redshirted. She was six weeks shy of five at the start of K.
The main areas where I find that this bothers me are related to:
1) Teachers (at least ones I've met) often confuse high achievement with giftedness. Having kids who are this much older in the early grades exacerbates this problem IMHO and it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
Six and half year old kindergarteners may be better readers or appear much more mature. They are tracked into high achieving groups, chosen for enrichment pull outs, etc. like the 60 minutes segment mentioned. At the elementary where dds started, those early pull outs consisted of essentially test prep for the tests used for GT ids later. Not surprisingly, this increases the odds that these kids will be placed in GT placement later which increases the problem with the GT classes not being designed for gifted kids b/c they are filled with so many kids who have learning needs that are not quite the same as those of gifted kids. See
this article on the difference btwn the needs of gifted kids and high achievers for what I'm getting at.
2) My dds are being, probably fairly, compared to kids who are older than they. However, there are parents who get around this too. For instance, my oldest who was 12 at the start of 9th (late bd combined with grade skip), has entered contests like writing contests where she is compared with much older kids b/c they are based on grade. When she did talent search, she registered using her actual grade. There are parents, though, whose kids are either in their appropriate grade or redshirted and then subject accelerated in many subjects (and sometimes by more than one grade in math) and whose kids participate in things like talent search or contests by the younger grade they are in although they are enrolled in similar classes to kids in the older grade.
As I've said before, though if the choice is being compared to much older students and being placed appropriately educationally or appearing even more advanced because dd is placed inappropriately, I'll take the former over later.
