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Our education system has this funny quirk of grouping kids by birth date - rather than, say, intellectual ability or achievement or interest.

But developmental pathways are as individual as kids themselves.

And so there's a perpetual back-and-forth about whether to put certain kids in school a grade behind or ahead of their actual age.

Recently we covered the research on "redshirting," or the practice of starting kindergarten a little late. That researcher concluded that it's usually better to go ahead and enroll kids as soon as they're old enough. For one thing, they will earn more money on average over a lifetime with that head start into the workforce.

Now comes a big study to say something different: Holding kids back at third grade when they don't meet the academic standards will give them a boost in achievement, by some measures. And, it doesn't affect their likelihood of finishing high school.

Nationwide, about one in 10 children must repeat at least one grade, and they tend to be disproportionately low-income or come from minority groups. Following on the stereotype of the too-tall kid crammed into a too-small desk in the back row, previous research has looked at the potential downsides of grade retention: stigma, peer group mismatch and reduced expectations from teachers.

This study adds a counterbalance: If students get proper help and attention, they may be able to improve on low performance, given a little extra time.

Guido Schwerdt of the University of Konstanz in Germany, Martin West of Harvard, and Marcus Winters of Boston University, followed the fates of almost a million Florida students who were in third grade in 2002-2003. That year, in the wake of the federal No Child Left Behind law, the state put in a policy that all students who missed the mark on the third-grade state reading test would be automatically left back and given remediation. A total of 16 states plus the District of Columbia have such a rule.

The authors compared Florida students who just passed the reading test with those who just missed it and were held back. They looked at their test scores for eight more school years in reading and six more in math, plus high school transcripts and graduation figures.

The students who were held back did better in the first few years. Over time, the effects faded, but they still had higher GPAs and took fewer remedial courses in high school.

Ultimately, though, there was no discernible impact on high school graduation rates. This is significant, because being overage for one's grade has long been considered in itself a risk factor for dropping out.

As Harvard's Martin West notes, "the results are mixed - and therefore disappointing for the policy's proponents, especially since holding students back is costly." On the other hand, he adds, the worst fears of critics were not borne out by the results.

It's important to note here that not every student who scored too low was held back. English language learners and special education students, for example, were generally promoted anyway, and teachers have discretion to promote general education students who they think can succeed in the next grade.

West says what he really wonders about is why the left-back students, who make demonstrable academic gains, still do no better when it comes to high school graduation. "The big question for me is what happened in high school such that better preparation did not translate into improved outcomes."

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Study: Holding Kids Back A Grade Doesn't Necessarily Hold Them Back

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Our education system has this funny quirk of grouping kids by birth date - rather than, say, intellectual ability or achievement or interest. But developmental pathways are as individual as kids themselves. And so there's a perpetual back-and-forth about whether to put certain kids in school a grade behind or ahead of their actual age.

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In his 2008 blockbuster, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell makes the case that a person's age relative to his or her cohort is a key predictor of success. That is, the older you are in relation to your peers, the more likely you are to perform at an elite level in sports, to excel in school, and even to attend college. We see this principle applied in college athletics when coaches "redshirt" freshman athletes, allowing them to practice with the team but not play in official games. Redshirting gives younger athletes an additional year to develop skills and extends their playing eligibility, since colleges allow these freshmen five years to attend and compete.

On the other end of the student age spectrum, many parents of preschoolers have bought into this concept, choosing to delay their child's entry into kindergarten for a year-a practice known as academic redshirting. Their justifications parallel those of college coaches: these parents believe that their children need that extra year to develop the necessary skills and maturity to succeed in kindergarten. A redshirted child is a year older at kindergarten entry and thus becomes one of the oldest in his class and remains so throughout his school years, enjoying the presumed advantages of age.

Preschools and elementary schools often recommend redshirting, asserting that it bestows the "gift of extra time," but parents should take such advice with a grain of salt. After all, a preschool stands to gain financially from the practice, since the school will likely capture another year's tuition. And elementary schools may also have mixed motives: older children are easier to teach and they perform at higher levels, just by virtue of being older. In other words, older children make the school's job a little bit easier.

How should parents decide whether they should enroll their child in kindergarten when he is first eligible or hold him back for a year? In this article, we draw upon our combined experience-Schanzenbach as an education researcher and Larson as a preschool director-to provide some practical, evidence-based advice. Notably, we find that Larson's take on the issue, formed by 14 years of experience with preschoolers and their parents, accords perfectly with Schanzenbach's conclusions based on academic studies: redshirting is generally not worth it.

Despite the weightiness of the decision, rest assured that a child is likely to be successful whichever path his parents choose. We know dozens of families who have redshirted their children and have been perfectly happy with the outcome. On the other hand, in most instances there is a good case to be made for resisting the pressure-not only from schools but sometimes from other parents as well-and sending a child to school when he is first age-eligible.
Why Delay?
We recognize that deciding whether or not to redshirt a preschooler is difficult. Parents want what's best for their children now and in the future, and they have to make the kindergarten-enrollment decision with limited and uncertain information. The concerns that lead parents to contemplate redshirting are most often related to the child's physical, social, and emotional maturity as the parents perceive it. In particular, parents seem to wrestle most with the redshirting decision when they have a son whose fifth birthday falls just before the cutoff date for kindergarten eligibility, which is most commonly on or around September 1. If the child starts kindergarten "on time," he will be among the youngest in his grade; if he is redshirted, he will be one of the oldest.

In terms of physical maturity, it is true that redshirting changes the child's relative height in the kindergarten class. For example, using national data, we calculated that a summer-born boy who is in the bottom third of the national height distribution will be, on average, the fourth-shortest child in a class of 24. If he is redshirted, the height he gains during the additional year of preschool will move him closer to the middle of the pack. On the other hand, if the boy enters on time, he will also tend to gain relative height over the years, and by 3rd grade the odds are only fifty-fifty that he will remain in the shortest third of his class.

Emotional development presents a thornier issue. Parents correctly want their child to be able to walk into his kindergarten classroom with confidence-standing tall, asking questions, developing relationships with the teacher and with other students. If the child's work habits or ability to sustain attention or fine motor skills are less advanced than those of his peers because he is younger, parents fear that the child will be left behind. One challenge here is that the child's skill level in April, when the redshirting decision is often made, is a poor predictor of what his skills will be in September or October, when the school year is underway. Children's development is highly uneven, with bursts of improvement in language, fine motor skills, and other capacities coming somewhat unpredictably.
Who Is Redshirted?
Most parents wrestling with these issues ultimately decide to enroll their child on schedule, as the vast majority of children are not redshirted. Among parents of the kindergarten class that entered in fall 2010, 6.2 percent reported that they delayed their child's school entry by a year, and the share was slightly higher for boys (7.2 percent) than for girls (5.2 percent, see Figure 1a). The rate was higher among highly educated parents (see Figure 1b), with college graduates approximately twice as likely to redshirt their sons as high-school graduates are. The variation by parental education was especially stark for boys born during the summer months: among those with college-educated parents, approximately one in five was redshirted, a rate that is about four times as high as that for summer-born boys with high-school-educated parents. Note, however, that even among summer-birthday boys with college-educated parents, the great majority of them enter kindergarten on time.
The Research
In his analysis, Gladwell overstates the benefits of redshirting to some degree. In fact, a balanced look at the research suggests that while children derive a short-term gain from being redshirted, that advantage dissipates quickly over time.

It is difficult to study the impacts of redshirting because students who are redshirted differ across a host of dimensions from those who start on time. As noted, children of more-educated parents are more likely to be redshirted; separating out the effects of the delayed school entry from those of other characteristics, such as family background, presents a challenge.

No one has conducted a true randomized trial related to redshirting. Instead, researchers have sought out opportunities to isolate the effects on student outcomes of the two variables that by definition change when a student is redshirted: age itself and the student's age relative to those of classroom peers. Once these effects are known, one can simulate the impact of being redshirted by statistically aging a kindergarten entrant by one year, and predicting the impacts of absolute age and of relative age on his outcomes.

The research literature includes many serious attempts to estimate the impact of being one of the oldest students in a class or grade, using variation in students' age or relative age that is driven by external factors. For example, a study by Todd Elder and Darren Lubotsky leverages cross-state differences in birthday cutoff dates for kindergarten entry. In some states, a child must turn five by December 1 to be eligible for kindergarten in a given year; in others, the cutoff date is September 1. In states with earlier cutoff dates, eligible children who enter on time (and not a year late or early) are, on average, older than their counterparts in states with later cutoffs. These differences in state policy allow researchers to estimate the impact of the child's age at kindergarten entry.

Another study, co-authored by Elizabeth Cascio and Diane Schanzenbach, uses data from the well-known Project STAR experiment in which students were randomly assigned to classrooms prior to kindergarten entry. Project STAR was initially designed to study the effects of reductions in class size. The random assignment of students to classrooms, however, meant that pairs of children with the same birthday fell into different positions in their classroom age distribution by the luck of the draw.

Both studies find that the benefit of being older at the start of kindergarten declines sharply as children move through the school grades. In the early grades, an older child will tend to perform better on standardized tests than his younger peers simply by virtue of being older. This makes perfect sense-a redshirted kindergartner has been alive up to 20 percent longer than his on-time counterpart, which means his brain has had more time to develop and he has had that many more bedtime stories, puzzles, and family outings from which to build his general knowledge. This initial advantage in academic achievement dissipates sharply over time, however, and appears to vanish by high school when, as a 9th grader, the redshirted student is at most 7 percent older than his peers.

One benefit that redshirting might indeed confer has to do with grade retention and special education placement. Statistically, older children are less likely to be retained in a grade or to be diagnosed with learning disabilities such as ADHD. This may be because schools make judgments about retention and referrals based on a student's relative achievement within a grade, and by virtue of their age, older students are less likely to have very low achievement. Most parents who are considering redshirting, however, have children who are not likely to perform at levels that would put them at risk for grade retention; thus, we would argue that the slightly decreased probability of retention afforded by redshirting should in most cases be given relatively little weight.
The Influence of Peers
Both of us have stories of children who were redshirted and would likely have had a better school experience if they had enrolled on time. Larson tells the story of Joshua, a preschooler with a spring birthday who was on the low end of the normal developmental range in terms of work habits: he had trouble sitting still during circle time, for instance, and finishing multi-step projects. His parents decided to hold him back and give him an extra year of preschool. By fall, though, he had matured tremendously and clearly would have been flourishing in the kindergarten classroom. The following year, when he entered kindergarten at age six, Joshua was well ahead of his classmates and was often bored in class. Over subsequent years, he became demotivated and even developed behavioral problems. He was physically and emotionally more mature than his younger classmates and had trouble making friends.

Schanzenbach teaches Sunday school to preschoolers. It turns out that her experience in teaching college students does not transfer to good classroom-management practices for preschoolers, and the room can be somewhat chaotic at times. While some children sit on the story blanket and are engaged in listening to the short Bible lesson, others-typically the high-energy boys-tend to misbehave, goof off, and need constant reminders to pay attention. One little girl who was especially small for her age, Julia, would always sit front and center, actively listening and asking questions about the lesson. After story time one Sunday, as the kids were transitioning to the next activity, Julia walked up to her teacher, got within an inch of her face (as kids will do), and demanded to know, exasperated, "What is wrong with those boys? Why can't they just sit still and listen?"

Not 30 minutes later, over coffee, the girl's mother mentioned to Schanzenbach that they were planning to redshirt Julia because of her small stature. Schanzenbach tried to convince the woman that her tiny, bright, self-possessed girl would do just fine despite her small size, and in fact would be worse-off being delayed, because attending school with less mature peers would frustrate her. Nevertheless, Julia's parents decided to redshirt her. Now in 3rd grade, she is bored, and frustrated by her less-mature classmates-and is still among the shortest in her class. It is likely that Julia, with her sharp intellectual curiosity and mature self-possession even at age five, would have been better-off starting school on time.

What do Joshua and Julia have in common? Because they were redshirted, they were both matched with younger peers. As the research literature confirms, the peer composition of a classroom is very important: not surprisingly, children benefit from being in a class with well-behaved, high-achieving children, and are harmed by the presence of poorly behaved classmates. One recent study by Scott Carrell, Mark Hoekstra, and Elira Kuka was able to measure the lasting detrimental impact of being in class with a disruptive peer in elementary school, suggesting that the presence of just one disruptive student out of 25 reduces the earnings of other students in young adulthood by a modest but measurable 3 to 4 percent.

Consistent with this evidence, the research on relative age indicates that being among the youngest in the class has benefits, in both the short and long term. Why? Because older classmates tend to be higher achieving and better behaved. They model positive behavior, and the younger students achieve greater academic gains from learning and competing with older ones. And two studies cited above-the one by Elder and Lubotsky and the one by Cascio and Schanzenbach-find that, with age held constant, learning with older classmates boosts students' test scores.

For the older students, on the other hand, the positive impacts of being more mature are offset by the negative effects of attending class with younger students.

This is not to suggest that students would benefit from being in classrooms with far older children. The studies finding positive effects from older peers are based on classrooms where the age variation is typical-usually a few months. These results cannot be extrapolated to situations where a child is learning alongside much older students.

But one implication is that if a handful of families in a school decide to redshirt their children, they may be doing the other families a favor by improving the children's peer group. Rather than feeling pressure to follow in their footsteps, parents may want to thank them.
In the Balance
Looking at the evidence, we advise parents to redshirt their child only in unique circumstances. Just what are those situations? Here we have less research to draw upon, but experience suggests a few scenarios. One is extreme developmental delay, outside of the normal range, to such an extent that another year's development will potentially put the child in range of his classmates. Another is when a child is experiencing trauma, such as having a terminally ill parent or sibling.

Many instances of redshirting, however, involve parents who are trying to gain an advantage for their child down the line. Parents sometimes ask us whether redshirting their child will make him more likely to be accepted into gifted and talented programs. Although we could find no direct evidence in the research literature that this is the case, we can extrapolate from the literature that older children may indeed be more likely to be placed in a gifted and talented program. This depends on how schools assign students to such programs, in particular, whether a child's eligibility is based on a comparison to other children in his grade or to other children his age. With variations according to individual talent, children's test scores increase both as they get older and as they experience more years of schooling. So, within a given kindergarten classroom, a six-year-old will, on average, score higher than a five-year-old by virtue of being older. And a six-year-old in 1st grade will, on average, outscore a six-year-old in kindergarten, because the 1st grader has had an extra year of schooling.

If qualification for the gifted program is limited to the top 10 percent of the 1st graders, then being older may give some children an edge. (We are quick to add, though, that age tends to convey only small advantages that are likely to be trumped by differences in innate academic talent, and that there are many young-for-grade students in gifted programs.) On the other hand, if qualification is based on a test that is normed by age-and therefore six-year-olds are compared to other six-year-olds no matter what grade they are in-then the advantage may tip to the relatively younger child who has been in school longer.

And finally, parents should bear in mind that redshirting can even have an effect on their child's economic future. Starting school at age 6 instead of age 5 means heading off to college at age 19 instead of age 18. (Perhaps spending an extra year with a teenager in the house is another cost to consider!) Then the student graduates from college and enters the workforce at age 23 instead of age 22. The redshirted individual will ultimately spend one less year in the labor force and forgo the returns of an extra year of experience throughout his working life. Assuming that, as research seems to indicate, being redshirted has no net long-term impacts on skill level, we can estimate the cost of losing that year in the labor force for a college-educated male who retires at age 67. Over the course of the worker's career, working full time and year-round, he can expect to earn $80,000 less.

In sum, we find that redshirting at the kindergarten level bestows few benefits and exacts some substantial costs. Both research and experience suggest that the gains that accrue from being an older student are likely to be short-lived. Because of the important role of classroom peer effects, redshirted children can be educationally and socially harmed by being with others who are performing and behaving at lower developmental levels. Furthermore, while it is hard to predict a child's likely growth trajectory in the months prior to his expected school entry, the perceived developmental delays and immaturity that prompt parents to choose redshirting in the spring have often resolved themselves by fall.

As any good educator will tell you, parents know their children best. There are multiple factors to weigh when deciding whether a preschooler is ready to thrive in kindergarten. What research tells us about the "average" child or "most" children may not apply to a particular son's or daughter's unique abilities and delays. Families might want to speak with parents of older children about their own kindergarten-enrollment decisions and how they view them in retrospect. And then, parents should follow their own best judgment.
Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach is professor of education and social policy at Northwestern University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Stephanie Howard Larson is the director of Rose Hall Montessori School in Wilmette, Illinois.

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Is Your Child Ready for Kindergarten? Redshirting may do more harm than good - Education Next

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In his 2008 blockbuster, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell makes the case that a person's age relative to his or her cohort is a key predictor of success. That is, the older you are in relation to your peers, the more likely you are to perform at an elite level in sports, to excel in school, and even to attend college.

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When I was 4 years old, my parents faced a decision. My birthday is in late November, so should they send me to kindergarten as the youngest kid in my class? Or, wait another year to enroll me? - A practice referred to as academic redshirting.

Since I was already the oldest sibling, they decided it was time for me to experience something different. So, they sent me to school.

For me, the age gap didn't really matter until my freshman year at college, when I was only 17 and couldn't vote in the 2012 presidential election with everybody else. Feeling left out, I started to wish my parents had waited to put me in school. But, Diane Schanzenbach, an education professor at Northwestern University, and Stephanie Larson, director of Rose Hall Montessori School, have made me think twice.

The two recently published an article on the emotional and economic toll that redshirting can have on students, despite all its praise from writers like Malcolm Gladwell.

I spoke to Schanzenbach about why it might not be worth the wait. This interview has been edited for clarity.
What about your article contributes to the research on redshirting that's already out there?
I guess what I've learned is that it's really useful to put those things into terms that people can understand.

I have found since I started working in this area, every couple of months I would get an email from some random parent somewhere saying, "I read Malcolm Gladwell and I was doing a Google search of things, so I just thought I'd write to you directly." And they'll ask these really intelligent questions.

Of course, the goal of this article was to try and present more information so that parents feel equipped to make the decision that they think is best for their kid. Certainly, we don't think never redshirting is the right idea, but we did think it was going to be useful to provide additional info, especially to the type of parent who wants to understand [what the data shows.]
Even though kids won't start kindergarten until the fall, many parents have to decide now whether to enroll them. What should parents keep in mind before making their decision?
Let me answer you with an anecdote. When Stephanie and I were writing - this was back in December and January - at the time, my daughter is finishing up preschool and going to start kindergarten the next year. We were not thinking about redshirting her, but the thought crossed my mind because she was not talking. It was very upsetting that she wasn't talking, and we had taken her to speech therapy and that didn't really go anywhere. She just wouldn't talk. And between January and today, some switch has flipped in her.

Anybody who has kids can relate to that. But of course, it makes you nervous as a parent because you can't really predict what my kid is going to be like in September. Our advice is: As you're weighing these pieces, keep in mind the kid in September might be quite different from the kid in April.
What seems to be the biggest reason that parents choose to delay their kids' enrollment into kindergarten?
It really does seem to be emotional development. In the data you can see, clearly, that this happens most for boys who are born in the summertime to highly educated parents. They want [their kids] to be able to walk tall into a classroom, advocate for themselves, be an active participant in their learning.

I want to tell the story of Julia from our church. She was so bright and so self-possessed. And she was just annoyed that the boys weren't behaving well enough. And for her parents to say, "Oh, we're going to redshirt her because she's short." You've got to be kidding me. There's nothing you're gonna do here to make her not short. These kids are going to drive her nuts. That's the piece that I really worry about.
In the article, you write that redshirting can even have a financial effect on students - an $80,000 decrease in earnings. Can you elaborate on that?
It is only one additional year in the workforce, but it was fun to do that calculation and see, how much money is that going to be worth?

Every year, typically, you get a raise over time. You add up all of that, and [by the time you retire], you've just been in the labor force one [less] year. And that does add up. Often times when you see people talk about this issue, they'll talk about, "Oh, you should give your child the gift of time." And as an economist, I want to respond, "Actually, it's the cost of time." You're imposing an $80,000 lifetime cost on them by holding them back if it really doesn't improve their outcomes.
In that case... Thanks, Mom and Dad.

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Ready Or Not (For Kindergarten), Some Research Says, Enroll Anyway

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When I was 4 years old, my parents faced a decision. My birthday is in late November, so should they send me to kindergarten as the youngest kid in my class? Or, wait another year to enroll me? - A practice referred to as academic redshirting.

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Example Routines %26 Procedures Secondary

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Twenty-first century parenting isn't entirely illogical. Rather than trying to eradicate it, I suggest a strategy of containment: Rein in its excesses, and keep it from getting worse. Based on my own research, an unscientific reading of parenting literature, and a sample size of three kids, here are some key things modern parents should know:

Babies aren't savages. Toddlers understand language long before they can talk. This means you can teach them not to pummel you with carrots at dinnertime, making your life calmer (and your floor cleaner). "Expect more from your children, and they will rise to it. Expect less, and they will sink," Emma Jenner writes in the book "Keep Calm and Parent On."

Seize windows of freedom joyfully, without guilt. Remember that the problem with hyper-parenting isn't that it's bad for children; it's that it's bad for parents. Between the mid-1990s and 2008, college-educated American moms began spending more than nine additional hours per week on child care; this came directly out of their leisure time. The greatest insight to emerge from France since "I think, therefore I am" is that children's birthday parties should be drop-offs. The other parents get three hours to go off and play.

Don't just parent for the future, parent for this evening. Your child probably won't get into the Ivy League or win a sports scholarship. At age 24, he might be back in his childhood bedroom, in debt, after a mediocre college career. Raise him so that, if that happens, it will still have been worth it. A Dutch father of three told me about his Buddhist-inspired approach: total commitment to the process, total equanimity about the outcome.

Try the sleeping cure. Most parenting crises are caused by exhaustion. Force yourself to observe the same nighttime rituals as your toddler: bath, book, bed. When you feel an adult tantrum approaching, give yourself a timeout.

Have less stuff. Messiness compounds the chaos of family life.

Don't worry about overscheduling your child. Kids who do extracurriculars have higher grades and self-esteem than those who don't, among many other benefits, says a 2006 overview in the Society for Research in Child Development's Social Policy Report. "Of greater concern," it noted, "is the fact that many youth do not participate at all."

Don't beat yourself up for failing to achieve perfect work-life balance. The French have national paid maternity leave, subsidized nannies, excellent state day care and free universal preschool, and yet they blame the government for not helping parents enough. We Americans have none of the above, yet we blame ourselves.

Teach your kids emotional intelligence. Help them become more evolved than you are. Explain that, for instance, not everyone will like them. "When a girl meets a new person, she often automatically strives to be likable, even before she has decided whether or not she likes the new person herself," Rachel Simmons writes in her book "The Curse of the Good Girl." "Tell your daughter to switch the order: Size up the person before you start worrying about what she thinks of you."

Transmit the Nelson Mandela rule: You can get what you want by showing people ordinary respect. When Mr. Mandela heard that an Afrikaner general was arming rebels to prevent multiracial elections, he invited the general over for tea. The journalist John Carlin writes that Gen. Constand Viljoen "was dumbstruck by Mandela's big, warm smile, by his courteous attentiveness to detail" and by his sensitivity to the fears of white South Africans. The general abandoned violence. Remind your kids that this technique also works on parents.

It really is just a phase. Unbearable 4-year-olds morph into tolerable 8-year-olds.

Don't bother obsessing about what you think you're doing wrong. You won't screw up your kids in the ways you expect; you'll do it in ways you hadn't even considered. No amount of hyper-parenting can change that.
Pamela Druckerman is an American journalist and the author of "Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting."

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Twenty-first century parenting isn't entirely illogical. Rather than trying to eradicate it, I suggest a strategy of containment: Rein in its excesses, and keep it from getting worse. Based on my own research, an unscientific reading of parenting literature, and a sample size of three kids, here are some key things modern parents should know: Babies aren't savages.

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A veteran teacher shares what she’s learned in the course of 26 years. Big picture: A little empathy goes a long way.

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The Differentiation Equation: A Tool to Develop Independent Readers

Marie Aurea Garrido

Faced with the pressure to teach more rigorous texts to meet higher expectations, teachers often respond in one of two ways:
Classroom 1: Classroom 2: Ms. Andrews's 7th grade class of struggling students are in a circle, listening intently as she reads aloud an editorial about smartphone privacy issues that relates to the unit on privacy versus security and the U.S. Bill of Rights. The students follow along and listen as the teacher connects the concepts to the unit and defines key words for them. The exit slip at the end of class shows that all of the students can explain that day's class content. The 8th graders in Ms. Jeffries's class are quietly reading the poem, "The Charge of the Light Brigade," and answering a set of questions that come from the textbook. The students, a mix of on-level and struggling readers, are having difficulty with the vocabulary and meaning behind the poem. Despite that, Ms. Jeffries is satisfied that 80 percent of the class has earned a 60 percent or higher score on the assignment.
In both classrooms, the teachers are having students read and respond to complex text, but neither instructional method is helping students become independent readers. Ms. Jeffries in Classroom 1 assigned her students complex text, but even though she knows that her students are struggling, she does not employ any strategy for vocabulary and comprehension to help them improve in these areas. This is what I call "under-scaffolding." Under-scaffolding occurs when teachers assign, rather than teach, demanding reading material. It is often given as independent work with a sink-or-swim philosophy. All students are going to have the same test, so I need to get them ready for that, these teachers rationalize.

Ms. Andrews in Classroom 2 is doing all of the meaning making for the students. Although all students were able to explain what they read together, this is an assessment of their memory, rather than their reading comprehension. I call this "over-scaffolding." Over-scaffolding happens when teachers help students through the hard stuff by chunking it into the smallest possible bites to spoon-feed their students. Students stay on the same page as the teacher and often wait for the teacher to provide the explanation or the right answer. This is too hard for my students, these teachers say. This is the only way they can understand it.

Both approaches often come about from good intentions-an effort to get students ready for college and career or to help students understand something that may be too hard. The fact is, every teacher has erred on one side or the other by either over- or under-scaffolding. It is hard to get it just right. My approach combines student data and text complexity measures into a "Differentiation Equation;" a tool to help teachers provide just the right strategies for students reading a particular text. The Differentiation Equation assists teachers in considering two variables when planning a lesson with complex text to build independence: student needs + text demands.

Student Needs

We have an abundance of student reading data in classrooms. Formal measures like standardized test scores, diagnostic testing, and teacher-made tests as well as informal measures like class assignments, exit slips, and other formative assessments can strategically scaffold reading instruction based on need. Ideally, teachers will constantly look at student work and interactions, and mine formative data related to the following areas to determine next steps.

1. Comprehension (making inferences; understanding central ideas, purpose/perspective/bias, and text structure)

2. Vocabulary (context clues, word parts, words with multiple meanings, word relationships, and figurative language)

3. Decoding (high-frequency words, phonemic awareness, and phonics)

4. Fluency (prosody, speed, and expression)

5. Syntactic Knowledge (sentence structure, grammar, and conventions)

Quantitative Factors
Text Demands
Qualitative Factors
The Common Core State Standards Appendix A makes reference to the "text complexity triangle," made up of three factors: quantitative factors, qualitative factors, and student and task considerations.

Most quantitative measures of text complexity, including Lexile, use word frequency and sentence length. Teachers are often surprised when a book traditionally taught at the high school level, such as To Kill a Mockingbird, has a low Lexile measure. They think that this book can't possibly have a Lexile measure of 860, which is appropriate for 4th to 5th graders. In fact, it makes perfect sense that a book told from the point of view of a narrator remembering her childhood is filled with common words and short, simple sentences. Other factors of the book make it a challenging read and thus suitable for a high school audience.
Student and Task Considerations
Language, structure, themes, and background knowledge necessary to access the context of a text can make it more or less challenging to read. For example, readers of the novel To Kill a Mockingbird will grapple with

1. Layers of Meaning: On the surface, the novel tells the story of a young girl growing up in the South. Beyond that, it addresses facets of racism and prejudice, heroism, and the need to be understood. These multiple layers make it more complex for the reader compared to a straightforward story.

2. Structure: With its many flashbacks and stream-of-consciousness structure, the novel's plot can be difficult for novice readers to follow. Often, complex texts have multiple text structures that students must navigate through to make meaning. Poetry's unconventional structure also challenges students.

3. Language Conventions: Characters in the book speak different southern dialects. Dialect, archaic words in seminal documents and classical literature, and technical words in nonfiction writing add to the text demands for the reader.

4. Knowledge Demands: Without knowing the history of the segregated South and Jim Crow laws, students would not understand Atticus's heroism in defending his client. The more background knowledge needed to understand a text, the more complex it is.

The last portion of the text complexity triangle considers what students bring to the text (strengths, areas of need) and what they are being asked to do with it in a given assignment. This interplay of student, text, and task helps teachers make instructional decisions for how to prepare students for challenging assignments involving complex texts.
Table. The Differentiation Equation
Sum: Scaffolds for a Complex Text

When a teacher considers both the needs of the students and the complexity of the text, he or she can plan exactly which strategies to use to scaffold and build student independence by finding the gap between what the students can do and what they are expected to do with the text. Let's go back to Classroom 1 and reimagine the lesson using the Differentiation Equation. The following table shows how I identified student needs and text demands, and aligned these two sets of data inputs to determine the most effective strategies and scaffolds so that all students in an 8th grade intensive class could access a complex text (the poem "The Charge of the Light Brigade").

We can solve the problem of exposing all students to complex text and helping them become independent readers by using the Differentiation Equation to select appropriate strategies. By design, the tool guides students to grapple with the hard parts of a text by helping teachers identify areas where students are likely to struggle, based on their needs and the features of the text. As you use the tool over time, you will become more fluent in rigorous lesson planning, and begin to internalize the thought processes behind navigating student needs, text demands, and the supports that will bridge the two.

Marie Aurea Garrido is an instructional specialist in secondary literacy in Broward County Public Schools, Fla.

ASCD Express, Vol. 12, No. 11. Copyright 2017 by ASCD. All rights reserved. Visit www.ascd.org/ascdexpress.

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ASCD Express 12.11 - The Differentiation Equation: A Tool to Develop Independent Readers

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The Differentiation Equation: A Tool to Develop Independent Readers Marie Aurea Garrido Faced with the pressure to teach more rigorous texts to meet higher expectations, teachers often respond in one of two ways: Classroom 1: Classroom 2: Ms. Andrews's 7th grade class of struggling students are in a circle, listening intently as she reads aloud an editorial about smartphone privacy issues that relates to the unit on privacy versus security and the U.S.

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