Red-shirting kindergartners: Study casts doubt on academic benefit of starting a year late

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The practice of red-shirting — having students start kindergarten a year late — appears to have returned to historically normal levels after a post-pandemic bump.

And the students who started kindergarten late in the aftermath of COVID now perform similarly to their slightly younger classmates on standardized tests, according to a new analysis from the testing company NWEA.

The analysis released Tuesday comes amid ongoing concerns about the academic preparedness and progress of young students.

Separate studies by NWEA and other testing companies have found that students who weren’t even in school yet during the pandemic are struggling academically compared with their pre-COVID counterparts. The reasons are not well understood, and theories range from parental stress to missing preschool learning experiences to increased screen time.

Red-shirting refers to the practice of having children whose birthdays are near the cut-off date start kindergarten a year later. This makes them the oldest rather than the youngest students in their class and is widely believed to confer academic and athletic advantages.

Megan Kuhfeld, director of growth modeling and analytics at NWEA, said she wanted to find out if all the chatter about red-shirting in the media and in her social circles showed up in the data.

Kuhfeld discovered it did not.

Most years between 2017 and 2025, a little less than 5% of kindergarten students started school a year late. (Another 1% to 2% were older than their classmates because they repeated kindergarten.)

The exception was the 2021-22 school year, when 6.4% of kindergartners started late. But that increase quickly subsided. Last school year, just 4.4% started late.

NWEA used data from three million kindergartners who took the company’s MAP growth assessment for younger elementary students. This sample comes from schools all over the country but may not be nationally representative.

The typical red-shirted student is a white boy who comes from an economically comfortable household. That hasn’t changed over time. Rural communities have the highest rates of red-shirting, and they saw the largest increase during COVID. Roughly 9% of rural kindergartners started late in the 2021-22 school year.

Students in high-poverty schools have the lowest rate of red-shirting but also experienced notable increases during the pandemic.

Asian American students have consistently low rates of red-shirting, and that didn’t change during the pandemic.

Students who start kindergarten late posted higher test scores in kindergarten than their younger peers, with the gap equivalent to 20% to 30% of a school year’s worth of learning, NWEA found. However, by third grade, that gap evaporates.

Kuhfeld said there could be a number of reasons for this. Teachers tend to teach toward the middle of the pack, and where they differentiate, they tend to focus more on students who are behind. Students who start out ahead of their classmates might also grow bored and not do as well later, she said.

“Holding kids back is not going to undo the COVID impact,” Kuhfeld said.

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.