School Retention Policies: Every Child Left Behind?

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Research shows that students who are proficient readers by the third grade are four times more likely to graduate from high school than their peers. Reading proficiency is a priority for school districts across the country, yet many non-proficient readers are passed on to fourth grade each year. What should be done for these students? Should they be held back for another year of instruction?

In the debate over retention policies, researchers have traditionally focused their attention on the impact that retention has on the test scores of retained students. There is, however, no research consensus on whether or not retention benefits those students who are held back.

In “The Spillover Effects of Grade-Retained Classmates: Evidence from Urban Elementary Schools,” a 2013 American Journal of Education article, Michael A. Gottfried examines the impact of retained students on their non-retained peers. He finds that inclusion of retained students in classes is consistently associated with a significant, negative impact on the standardized test scores of non-retained peers.

The study links classroom data from the School District of Philadelphia with neighborhood data from the 2000 census. Gottfried tracks students from 175 public schools across multiple years. The author’s findings show a pervasive, negative impact on the test scores of non-retained students associated with the presence of retained students in classrooms. In the study, Gottfried compares students’ performance in classrooms with varying numbers of retained peers, accounting for such factors as school, grade, year, and teacher quality. Shockingly, Gottfried discovers that the inclusion of each additional grade-retained student in a classroom has more than twice as much of a predicted negative impact on test scores as being a high-poverty student.

This research has practical implications for practitioners and policymakers. Gottfried suggests that, given his findings, additional resources must be strategically targeted to those classrooms that contain retained students. For example, classrooms with more retained students might be assigned additional classroom aides and academic intervention programs to help combat the negative impact that the presence of retained students is likely to have on test scores.

The research also highlights particular characteristics that will likely make a student more sensitive to the impact of grade-retained peers in her classroom. For example, the author finds that girls’ test scores are often more negatively impacted by the inclusion of grade-retained peers in classes than those of boys, particularly in math achievement. This sort of information could benefit practitioners who are making class placement decisions. More broadly, this research provides additional insight into whether or not retaining students is a valuable policy at all. Gottfried believes that his results strongly suggest it is not.

As the debate over retention policies continues in school districts across the country, more questions need to be asked. For example, does it make a difference why a student is retained? Perhaps students held back for social and behavioral reasons will have a different impact on their peers than students retained for academic reasons. Practitioners may also wish to study the effects of retention on classrooms beyond the impact of standardized test scores and look into whether Gottfried’s results hold among wider cross-sections of students outside of Philadelphia.

In 2011, over one-fourth of all third graders in Illinois failed the statewide reading exam. How should schools address the needs of these students? Gottfried’s findings suggest that retention policies, long considered the best response to this need, may in fact leave all students further behind. As researchers continue to explore this important issue, it is critical that practitioners and policymakers take notice of these findings.

Feature Photo: cc/ (Dalla)

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