Education Next

Illinois legislators are considering a bill that would prevent parents from holding their children back from starting kindergarten, a practice known as academic redshirting. A review of the research on redshirting at the kindergarten level finds that the practice, on average, has few benefits and considerable costs.

When she served as district attorney in San Francisco, Sen. Kamala Harris tried to fight chronic absenteeism by threatening parents with penalties, but she now says she has misgivings about the policy. June Kronholz wrote a long feature story about the problem of truancy and about more effective ways of addressing it for EdNext.