COLUMN: A year’s wait can make all the difference for your child
We here at The Dallas Morning News do not, traditionally, consider it our role to dictate the details of your sex life.
But if you want your next spawn to rise to the top of his or her class, here’s a bit of advice: Listen to the mistletoe and snuggle up to your loved one some time around Christmas Day.
That should put your kid on track for a mid-September birthday - and a vastly improved chance at being high school valedictorian.
Confused? That advice is based on a little experiment I did recently on the connection between a child’s birthday and academic success in school. But it has larger implications.
In Texas, kids are supposed to enter kindergarten if they’ve turned 5 by Sept. 1. Individual school districts are allowed to sneak in younger kids, and parents can choose to hold their kids out of school for an extra year. But the vast majority of kids start school in that one-year window.
How do those kids turn out years later, when it comes time for graduation?
The News publishes a list of the area’s valedictorians. I pulled all 207 of this year’s into a spreadsheet and used driver’s license records to look up their dates of birth. (I found 165 of them.)
Lancaster ISD still lags behind; TAKS scores are higher since ‘03, but increases among D-FW’s smallest
When Superintendent Larry Lewis faces opposition to his financial management of Lancaster ISD, his response is to point to the academic progress in his district.
“I can give you data to show that where we were in ‘03 and where we are today - that we’ve had tremendous academic improvement,” Dr. Lewis said Friday. “When you look at what we’ve done with students of poverty, of ethnic minority, we’ve seen tremendous growth since we’ve been here.”
But while Lancaster’s TAKS scores have improved, the increases have been smaller than those of almost every other area district.
In 2003, shortly before Dr. Lewis took over as superintendent, Lancaster had the second-worst test scores of any district in the Dallas-Fort Worth area - slightly lower than those of the Wilmer-Hutchins schools.
The only district to score worse than Lancaster was the tiny Masonic Home district, which taught students at a Fort Worth orphanage. Both Masonic Home and Wilmer-Hutchins have since been shut down, following years of academic struggles.
But in 2006, after three years of testing under Dr. Lewis, Lancaster’s scores were still the lowest in the area.
