[troutman]

I've been googling, and not finding quality studies that show a a significant advantage in redshirting.

Numerous references listed in this research article:

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/...32858415590800

http://www.slate.com/articles/double...dergarten.html

The impact of redshirting is not as clear-cut as it sounds. First, much of the research on redshirting is pretty old—some of the key studies I cited relied on cohorts of kids who were redshirted in the late ’70s or early ’80s, and kindergarten has changed a lot since then. Redshirting has also become more common over the years, although it started becoming popular as early as the 1990s. Second, redshirted kids are usually vastly different from non-redshirted kids before they even get to school, so it can be difficult to separate the effects of redshirting from these fundamental differences.

When researchers compare redshirted kids to non-redshirted kids, they’re often comparing socio-economic apples and oranges.

So, is there any research that suggests redshirting is helpful? Yes—but again, this research does not actually tell us much about redshirting. Elizabeth Dhuey, an economist at the University of Toronto at Scarborough, has published a number of studies suggesting that the older kids are in a class, the better they fare academically, the more leadership roles they have in high school, and the more likely they are to attend elite universities—pretty much exactly the opposite of what the redshirting studies show. But even though her work has been used to support redshirting, “my findings relate only to a child’s age relative to their classmates—not the act of redshirting,” Dhuey explains. “These are different things altogether.”