Nationally, about 2 percent of students are retained each year, a number that has held steady or modestly declined since the mid-1990s. There’s also lots of variation in just how often students are held back. In Florida, policymakers focused their policy on third grade, but other places, like New York City, introduced strict holdover policies in a number of grades. In most cases, students are held back after they fail to pass a test, sometimes after summer help. In Louisiana, the recent research found that retention increased high school dropout rates for fourth or eighth graders who were held back between 19. (An older Chicago paper found something similar: retaining eighth-graders increased future dropout rates, but retaining sixth-graders had no clear effects.) There were no clear effects for students held back in elementary school, according to that recent RAND study. Students who were held back in middle school were much more likely to drop out of high school than the students who also went to summer school but who moved to the next grade on schedule. The latest study, released earlier this year by RAND, looks at the long-run effects for those students held back between 20 and paints a starkly different picture. A 2013 analysis showed that retained students scored higher on state tests when they eventually reached the next grade. In New York City, the grade retention policy initially seemed promising. Each compares similar students, some who just barely earned a passing score on a test and others who just missed the cut-off, allowing researchers to zero in on the effects of being held back. The latest studies focus on Louisiana, New York City, and Florida.
Retention seems to increase drop-out rates. Here’s what else the new research tells us. And summer school, which often goes along with retention, can help students, potentially outweighing the downsides of retention policies. Holding back students when they are younger doesn’t have such clear negative effects. The research also offer some better news, including out of Florida. Michigan’s new retention law, for one, threatens to ensnare the vast majority of Detroit’s third graders. Though some places have relaxed their policies, others are adopting stricter rules. Whether retention ultimately helps or harms students remains a crucial question. “If we’re talking about a middle school policy, I would strongly suggest against that at this point,” said Marcus Winters, a professor at Boston University who studied the effects in Florida. “The takeaway from this would be that, at a minimum, we should be retaining fewer middle school students,” said Paco Martorell, a professor at the University of California – Davis who studied the New York City policy.
In New York City, the spike was startling: dropout rates were 10 points higher than similar students who weren’t held back.Ī policy meant to make sure students stay on track, then, appears to have caused more students to leave school altogether. In Louisiana, being retained in either fourth or eighth grade increased dropout rates by nearly 5 points. Now, enough time has passed to see what happened to some of those students years later - and two recent studies reach a decidedly dire conclusion.īeing held back a grade in middle school, researchers found, substantially increased the chance that students dropped out of high school. Thousands of additional students in Florida, New York, and across the country were held back in line with that theory. More time in school would give students the chance to catch up, allowing them to avoid the academic failure that could result from being continually promoted with big gaps in their skills. The idea was that the stricter standards would help students and schools alike. He introduced a policy of holding back low-performing students and fired appointees to the city’s school board who pushed back in 2004. Really?” explained Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida, where he curtailed the practice known as social promotion.įormer New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg felt the same way. “It’s absolutely insidious to suggest that a functionally illiterate kid going from third grade, it’s OK to go to fourth. To hold back or not to hold back? For many policymakers in the early 2000s, the answer was clear: it was time to stop allowing struggling students to keep moving through school.
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