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This post had me wondering about how much untapped talent is out there. Is there someone who would have been the GOAT of their sport if they had been born in September instead of May? I would say probably not; at least for baseball, although there is an advantage, there's still a good number of players with unlucky birthdays: https://www.billjamesonline.com/article1191/ indicates the effect is about 20% for one year. This is substantial, but a top-tier natural talent will still most likely emerge. Of course, that also makes me wonder: how did they get all 75 to be from 1 third of the year? That's an incredible effect size. It would require mental development to be VASTLY fast and more consistent than physical development, which doesn't sound right. The link above even says
Which is nowhere near enough to get the result described. I wonder if there was any other filter in this process:
As far as solutions go, I wonder if it's feasible to separate kids into finer-grained groups when they're young. Say 4 months? Not for everything, but anything competitive or comparative ("don't make kids compete until they're 10 or so" seems like an even better solution, but I don't see any way to require that to happen). Given teacher shortages and limited participation in various activities, it's probably not practical. On the other hand, kids used to all gather together at wildly different ages, especially in low-population areas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-room_school). If children are manifestly wildly different, with few children even within a year of each other, perhaps you also avoid this problem as you can't possibly compare children to anything but their own age.
It wouldn't be too hard to implement a grade school semester system. Everyone would have to be 5 1/2 to go into Kindergarten. Kids who are 5 1/2 in July go to Kindergarten A in September, Kids who are 5 1/2 in January to to Kindergarten A in January (and the previous group goes on to Kindergarten B). And then so on for all the grades.
It would be a very small school that didn't have two classrooms per grade level in the first place.
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