Holding Students Back Fails

I published this post last week but added an addendum to the end of the article based on a reader comment.

Last week, I wrote about being told that my daughter should be held back in first grade because she wasn’t learning to read fast enough. Her teachers tried to convince me that retaining a 6-year old child improves learning and has no impact on self-esteem. I didn’t buy it. A few days ago, I happened upon article supporting my suspicion that grade retention does indeed have negative consequences. 

In 2001, Shane Jimerson conducted a statistical analysis of 20 different studies of grade retention, and found no benefit to grade retention over grade promotion. More recent studies show that first or second graders who were retained have poorer reading skills 6 to 7 years later than students with similar academic skills who were promoted, and that students who were retained are significantly more likely to drop out of high school.

Grade retention is also an equity issue, as students of color are more likely to be held back than their white counterparts. And grade retention is expensive, costing taxpayers billions of dollars a year.  

Despite the overwhelming evidence that grade retention is ineffective, biased, and costly, many states have recently adopted policies to retain students that fail standardized reading tests. A better approach is to regularly assess student learning so that problems can be identified early, and to implement strategies to get students with performance issues back on track.  

addendum: After I published the above article, a reader commented that sometimes holding a child back is the right answer. I agree. The problem is, students are often retained due to pressure on schools to ensure that all students are performing “at grade level”.

I put “at grade level” in quotation marks because it is an arbitrary metric that is set by administrators and is often judged by standardized test performance. In my daughter’s case, the bar for reading competency had just been raised, and she was only considered to be failing because of the higher bar. The decision to retain or promote a child is a difficult one that should be considered based on many different metrics on a case-by-case basis.