[Diogenes]

Throw this out there: for public schools, do you want your tax money paying for a kid to spend an extra year in your school system that is totally unnecessary and unjustified? Increasing your student to teacher ratios for no reason? That alone is enough to not justify it. In an era of diminishing tax bases and worsening schools, how can we allow kids who are due for promotion to waste an extra year of taxpayer money on a whim without any justification other than the parents want it? You say, oh, it's just one kid? What if every kid's family thought the same way?

To the other arguments i see offered here: It is frankly an awful thing to do to a child to make him repeat a grade, and coddling them until they're 19 instead of 18 doesn't do anything except increase the trend of extended adolescence we see in this country today, the one that has so many jobless 20-somethings and older living in their parents' basements. If you have to keep them in school forever in fear you will never see them again when they go to college, well, a wise man once said, if you let something go and it never comes back to see you, it was never yours to begin with. These are some pretty weak arguments for something that people are doing for no other reason than to gain some kind of perceived advantage that usually disappears when the other kids catch up growth wise in high school anyhow. And there's absolutely no reason to allow a child to play sports, especially a violent contact sport, more than one year at each grade level. Ih the rare event your kid's good enough to get a football scholarship, they'll find him just as well after four years of HS regardless. Generally, all you are doing is sending in a 15 year old to beat up on 12-13 year olds, and that is frankly reprehensible.