Holding children back to repeat a grade in the early primary years costs the state of North Carolina more than $167 million a year. A blog post at North Carolina’s Smart Start highlighting this statistic suggests that a new focus on aligning the curriculum between those early grades could help alleviate those costs by avoiding retention.
Which raises the question of whether retaining students in those early grades is a good or bad thing. The main research on the subject of grade retention (out of Chicago) has found that students who repeat a grade when they’re younger are not harmed. In fact, it’s a strategy that charter schools employ often — many charters hold back large chunks of their kindergarten and first grade students. In the older grades, retention can be a problem, but in the younger grades, it’s not uncommon for parents to push for their children to be held back if it seems they’re not ready for school.
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at 3:14 pm
I believe that an overall evaluation of any grade retention policy must consider the benefits and costs both for students who are retained in grade, and for those students who are not retained grade.
For example, suppose a grade retention policy threatens grade retention for students performing in some grade below a certain level. Students in that grade can do extra work in that grade or go to summer school in order to up their achievement levels to avoid retention. This threat of retention provides an incentive for students, their parents, and teachers to invest in this extra work or summer work, to avoid retention.
In addition, a grade retention policy may reduce the range of student performance levels in a grade. Although differentiated instruction may allow students to learn more even with a wide range in student performance levels, it is still probably the case that a wider range of student performance levels makes teaching more difficult.
I suspect an ideal grade retention policy would : (1) be tied to activities that students can undertake to avoid retention, with plenty of notice so that students can do something to avoid retention; (2) have a low ratio of students actually retained compared to students who are notified that they are at risk of retention; (3) figure out something different and constructive to do with students who are retained.
In practice, given how American high schools work, a policy of not retaining in grade is a policy that leads to many students who were not retained in earlier grades being retained sometime in high school, and dropping out, at least if there are even minimal standards for high school graduation. You are delaying the pain, not eliminating it altogether, unless something happens along the way to help students really catch up to their grade level.