cdnhockeymom

@Govsparent, I retrospect, even if my son had not been an athlete, repeating was an excellent choice. As I said, he had completed all required sciences, math etc when he repeated junior year but he did not have to repeat any of those. He took advanced courses for the following two years and took many more APs than if he had not repeated. He also has an extra year of maturity and confidence. No regrets!

classicalmama

Unless you've heard it directly from the parent, I wouldn't ever assume a kid is a sports repeat. You'd look at my kid, for example, and think that it was all about sports--but it wasn't. It had a lot more to do with determining when said child is ready to make the major life commitment of living away from parents and home for two-thirds of the year--a pretty huge leap for many young teens and not one to take lightly.

GMTplus7

I wish we were aware of "repeating" as a possibilty when DS went thru the application process. Not sure he would have availed himself of the opportunity, but would have been good to understand it as a viable option.

ChoatieMom

Please don't throw anything, but even now that I see the "reasons" for repeat and have had some time to think about it, I can't help but see these do-overs as just another misguided strategy to give some kids a leg up over others, causing further disparities in the levelness of the playing field (although I'm not just referring to athletes, and I'm not including repeats for true remedial purposes as GovsParent posts). Of course, I can see that leveling the playing field is precisely what this strategy is designed to prevent. If you extend this logic, perhaps a kid should be allowed to repeat EVERY grade plus a post-graduate year. Can you imagine how well-prepared your 22-year-old freshman would be to mow over mere 18-years-olds in the college academic and athletic arenas? (Not to mention how happy those boarding school tuition offices would be for those FP repeats.) LCMamma's observation is a distressing one. At worst, non-remedial repeats seem to me to be a system-approved form of cheating; at best, an elitest luxury. (Quick, duck!)

ChoatieMom

@classicalmama: If DC is not ready to leave for BS in 9th grade, logic would say (to me) to enter later in 10th or 11th when s/he is ready, not repeat until all the emotional/developmental planets align (if they ever do). Yes, I know it's harder to get in to BS in upper grades when there are fewer slots but, again, repeating just seems to me to be a positioning game.

DAndrew

Choatiemom, I think sooner or later you'll accept the fact with less resentment that BS are full of "loopholes" one can take advantage of. Maybe learning to play with the system is a learning process designed by the school?

ChoatieMom

How utterly sad.

wcmom1958

Choatiemom: no need to duck (not from me, anyway) as I was thinking the same thing but couldn't think of a way to say it as well as you did. As the mother of a young-for-his-grade athlete we have always been surrounded by redshirts and felt ambivalent. Of course, we want him to have every advantage but he has always excelled academically and redshirting him for athletics didn't make sense. He still sometimes mentions that he is "always the youngest" even though technically he is within the cutoff dates for his grade -- and this is irksome.

I suppose all of this falls under the umbrella of "new ways to compete in a global economy." After reading Timothy Egan's column in the NYT this morning, who can blame any of us for increasing anxiety -- and competitiveness.

mountainhiker

We just attended a Ten Schools Admissions Organization reception and this topic was discussed as part of the Q&A session.

One of the admission reps talked about the “maturity and readiness” issue, and pointed out that most schools have more “supports” in place for 9th graders than they do for 10th graders (required study halls, more oversight by residential staff and academic advisors, a lighter overall academic load). If a child comes from a less-demanding academic environment, or hasn’t yet developed good time-management skills, than repeating 9th grade can be the best way to put them on a path toward success. 10th graders are expected to be able to “hit the ground running,” and not all kids are ready to do that, for a whole host of reasons.

I’m not convinced there’s much of an academic “leg-up” in the case of 9th grade repeats. I understand that most schools place a student in math and foreign language classes based on their current level, as determined by placement tests. And if a student “repeats” freshman English, it’s doubtful that the course that they take in boarding school will be exactly the same as the one they took at their previous school. They’ll most likely be reading different texts, and writing different essays, than the ones they did before. As for science, I doubt my child would want to re-take a science course that had already been taken, when the school offered a long list of other interesting science courses.

i think it’s a very child-specific, and family-specific issue. I expect that all of us parents are making decision based on what we think is in the best interest of our own unique child.

classicalmama

I actually see where you're coming from Choatie Mom, though my thinking takes me in a different direction...not throwing any of those frost-bitten tomatoes in my garden, I promise .

But I do think it's unfair to label all repeating as getting a leg up over the next guy (I'm thinking about what my kid needs, not how he'll compare to others) or as elitist (FA parent here, struggling mightily to pay for four years of bs--three years would have been WAY easier financially). Of course, my kid isn't a repeat--just a late summer birthday--and I suspect you're writing more about the kids coming in one or two years, rather than months, older.


Anyway, I still just don't see that even a true repeat matters that much--but maybe that's because Exeter is bigger than most schools and the classes are so diverse in SO many other ways. In a dorm with 9th to 12th graders, there's such a wide mix of ages and maturity levels that no one person sticks out as way younger than the rest. And from what my kid tells me, kids simply don't do better or worse academically because of their age--I watched a younger prep confidently rework a repeat prep's incorrect solution in a math class myself. I'll agree that there's sometimes an athletic advantage to being older.

But just to expand the discussion a bit and to throw my own potentially duck-worthy thought into the ring: What about people (like me) who think that both academics and athletics have been pushed way too early in the past decade or so? Some of us start our kids in school later because we don't see how kids benefit from, say, everyone learning to read in kindergarten instead of first grade--or the "smart" kids learning algebra in sixth grade instead of eight.

I have a kid whose brain wasn't ready to read until he was seven. Perfectly good brain, but had I sent him to school instead of homeschooling him, he would have been labeled as Title 1/special ed. forever. In my classroom, too, I see lots of middle-ability kids who have been irrevocably harmed by that push toward early achievement.

So I'll argue that I think my kid was, in fact, exactly in the right place coming in to 9th grade having already turned 15, given (in my view) the unnecessary and sometimes harmful acceleration of academics in recent years. It certainly wasn't an easy year for him.

At any rate, guess I just don't see why younger=the moral high ground here.

muf123

There is another reason, sometimes mentioned on CC, why a student may repeat. I know of a few cases when the family decided to repeat jr. to a top BS to have a better chance to gain acceptance. I even know of a family that was asked by the school if they would consider a repeat grade since the grade they were applying to was full. It happens but I think in most of these cases, as classicalmom explains, every family has different reasons for the good of the child. I wouldn't look at any family considering these options as gaming the system.
Heres another way to look at this: In a few years our kids will be in college and there will be an array of age groups in their class rooms. After that, they will be in the job market and there will be another rainbow of age groups. Life is not a level playing field and everyone is an individual.

DAndrew

Well, muf123, a 12 yr old vs a 14 yr old repeater and a 32 yr old vs a 34 yr old don't mean the same thing in terms of the age's role, but your point is valid in that "life is not a level playing field". As long as it's a fair game in the current system, you can't blame the game players. And I don't mean all repeaters are game players - many of them do live by the "ideals" as stated in your and classicalmama's posts. As a matter of fact, one doesn't have to be a repeater to play games.

ChoatieMom

Just to be clear; I didn't label all repeats as using the system to get a leg up. I specifically said that I was excluding repeats for remedial purposes, meaning kids who are emotionally and academically disadvantaged compared to their peers (not yet ready for prime time). For those kids, repeating would only (hopefully) bring them up to par, so there could not be any unfair advantage there. Life certainly is not a level playing field, but I do have to question the prudence of these institutions we so admire allowing and even sanctioning some of the gaming that is obviously being played. Perhaps someone can address whether or not BS have an equally rigorous process for examining, qualifying, and accepting/rejecting repeat applicants on the basis of their "need" for repeating. My suspicion is that they consider that a family decision (ay, there's the rub) and continue to allow this unqualified option because it doesn't hurt and often benefits the school. I'm also wondering how BS repeats compare to public school repeats. I'd never heard of repeating except in the context of having academically failed the previous grade.

And, classicalmamma--hurray for your comments regarding the ridiculous early acceleration of academics and athletics. In kindergarten, my sole concern was that DS love walking into that brick building every day. Period. I just wanted him to love going to school, even if it was just to take a nap. (Imagine my surprise to discover that naps were no longer on the kindergarten agenda!)

creative1

There is a downside to repeating that I've seen. By the time a student is in his (repeating is more prevalent among boys) senior year, the repeater will often be 19 and occasionally 20 years old by graduation. From my observation, older kids bristle more at the rules and restrictions of boarding which can lead to discipline problems. Although boarding schools typically give seniors more freedom than those in younger grades, it isn't the freedom that those living at home come to experience by the same age e.g. no cars, curfews, no partying on the weekends, etc. I'm not saying this always happens but I have seen it happen more than once.

Then there are also the risks of underage dating and all that implies. Massachusetts laws are particularly strict in this regard.

Periwinkle

I don't think the playing field is ever level at these schools--they recruit exceptional children worldwide. Your child may be on track to be the top of his class in his local public high school, but find he has to work to be average at BS. Repeating a year won't make a student better at math. It may allow him to take the next class in the sequence. If he repeats, he'll get a grade bump for that year, because it's review, but that bump won't last. There are students who have not repeated who arrive in 9th grade ready for calculus.

You do your child a disservice if you frame his boarding school career as a dog-eats-dog competition for the top spot. Serious stress can result if you demand he try to best kids who are geniuses, who arrive with top-notch preparation. The top prep schools do not rank their students. The first Parents' Weekend introduces many parents to the wonders of tough grading.

In my opinion, it would help many children if they were allowed to repeat a grade. The public school's insistence on placing children into grades by age, not ability level or achievement, is o.k. for many children, but for some it's the wrong approach.

Many private feeder schools once ended in 9th grade. The students would begin in boarding school in 10th grade. If you look at historical patterns, at one time the 9th grade was relatively small. Boarding is challenging. In some ways, it seems the default public pattern (4 years in high school) has influenced parental expectations, even in the private sphere. The parents want their children to have the "full high school experience," but might feel better about sending their children away at 15 rather than 14.

In any event, repeaters are more likely to be male than female. A year of physical growth can make a difference on the playing field for a boy. I don't think it creates a large academic advantage, but I think for a few lucky boys, it can create an athletic advantage. Some schools field teams with PG students. The difference between a 19 year old PG and a 15 year old sophomore can be significant.