Many students will begin the new academic year in the same grade they did last year. This practice, known as grade retention, remains stubbornly and paradoxically common, despite clear results regarding the ineffectiveness of this approach to remediate students’ academic deficiencies and the high costs associated with it.
The enduring popularity of grade retention is an interesting example of how poorly research, politics, and policy can intersect. An estimated 5 percent to 7 percent of students were retained in grade each academic year in the 1980s and 90s. The cumulative effects of these annual rates resulted in as many as 20 percent of students having been retained by high school.
During this time period, a clear consensus was emerging regarding the ineffectiveness of retention. Most compelling were results of meta-analyses (a method of combining results across dozens or even hundreds of individual studies) that indicated almost universal negative effects of retention — compared to students who were socially promoted — on students’ social-emotional well-being and academic performance.
This research appeared to have little effect on the rhetoric, politics, and policies of the following decade in which talk about high standards, accountability, getting tough and ending social promotion pervaded political discussions and school reform initiatives.
Indeed, promotional gating policies at particular grades (e.g., third, fifth) became part of many states’ implementation of No Child Left Behind, thereby drastically increasing the number of students retained. A study of Chicago found that approximately 20 percent of third-graders were retained annually in the first years of the new promotional gating policies.
In the current political and economic climate, it’s surprising that the costs of grade retention are not more frequently discussed. For every year a student is retained, another year is added to that student’s education. The National Center for Education Statistics reported the average annual U.S. per-pupil expenditure in 2008-09 was $10,694.
Given that 49.3 million students were enrolled in public schools that year, it is easy to see how the costs of retention, whether 5 percent or 20 percent of the population was retained, easily extend to billions of dollars.
And yet, grade retention persists as a common practice in communities across Georgia. The increased frequency of testing, large numbers of retentions and new statistical methods have provided even better, more nuanced research on the effects of retention and social promotion. These new statistical methods address some methodological weaknesses of earlier retention research.
Namely, it is not possible to randomly assign students to be retained or promoted. Thus, ensuring that the groups are comparable is a challenge. However, with newer methods researchers can better “match” students in retained and promoted groups, strengthening the conclusions that can be drawn from such studies.
Results of these newer longitudinal studies, such as those conducted at Texas A&M, still don’t find positive long-term effects of grade retention. One recent study essentially found no differences between matched groups of retained and promoted students in grades 1 through 5 once the students were in middle school. Which leads to the question: if grade retention is unambiguously ineffective as an intervention for students’ academic difficulties, why does it persist? And more importantly, can’t we do better?
The promotion of students who haven’t mastered grade-level material is also unsatisfactory. Although the costs of social promotion are often delayed, perhaps not showing up until students can’t pass high school exit exams or when they don’t have sufficient reading or math skills to secure employment, the costs are very real – to the students and our society.
We must move beyond the notion that grade retention and social promotion are the only available options. In the last decade, great strides have been made in describing effective academic and behavioral interventions.
Given the costs of retention and its ineffectiveness, the implementation of such interventions – during the school day and in after-school and summer-school programs – must become the primary focus. Further, interventions should be paired with a process that includes screening for early identification of academic and behavioral difficulties to catch student difficulties before problems become severe and harder to remedy, ensuring that interventions are implemented with integrity and frequently monitoring whether progress is being made or if other intervention is warranted.