Grade retention
Grade retention or grade repetition is the process of a student repeating a grade after failing the previous year.
In the United States of America, grade retention can be used in kindergarten through to third grade; however, students in high school are usually only retained in the specific failed subject. For example, a student can be promoted in a math class but retained in an English class. Most elementary school grades are taught all subjects in one classroom for the whole day, with exceptions in art and athletics. In these grades, the student who fails or scores below the accepted level in most or all subjects is to be considered for retention. If ultimately retained, the student will then repeat the entire school year's curriculum.
Where it is permitted, grade retention is most common among at-risk students in early elementary school. At-risk students with intellectual disabilities are only intended to be retained when parents and school officials agree to do so. Children who are relatively young in their age cohort are four times more likely to be retained.
Mandatory grade retention of third-grade students who struggle in reading has been a critical part of the Mississippi Miracle, which has seen several low-performing states soar in the national rankings as their students demonstrate increased confidence and capabilities in both reading and mathematics.
History
Different schools have used different approaches throughout history. Grade retention or repetition was essentially meaningless in the one-room schoolhouses of more than a century ago due to limited access to outside standards and the small scale of the school with only a few students in each age group, was conducive to individualized instruction. With the proliferation of larger, graded schools in the middle of the nineteenth century, retention became a common practice and only one century ago, about half of all American students were retained at least once before the age of thirteen.An alternative to grade retention due to failure is a policy of social promotion, with the idea that staying within their same age group is important. Social promotion is the obligatory advancement of all students regardless of achievements and absences. Social promotion is used more in countries which use tracking to group students according to academic ability. Some academic scholars believe that underperformance must be addressed with intensive remedial help, such as summer school or after-school programs in contrast to failing and retaining the student. Social promotion began to spread in the 1930s with concerns about the psychosocial effects of retention. Social promotion is the promoting of underperforming students under the ideological principle that staying with their same age peers is important to success. This trend reversed in the 1980s as concerns about slipping academic standards rose, and the practice of grade retention in the United States has been climbing steadily ever since. However, in most other countries, retention rates have been decreasing.
The practice of making retention decisions on the basis of the results of a single test, called high-stakes testing, is widely condemned by professional educators and test authors alike. Indeed, Mississippi and other states use data points from multiple tests to determine if a child is to be retained or not.
Research
Academic studies on grade retention are difficult to perform and analyze for several reasons. However, the empirical benefits of grade retention have been clearly demonstrated.For example, in two similar states in the Southern United States, policies were implemented to address the problem of historically poor reading scores. Both Oklahoma and Mississippi passed similar laws to require grade retention for struggling third-grade readers. However, two years later, Oklahoma passed a new law to no longer require retention; Mississippi held the course and duly implemented mandatory retention. As a result, over the next twelve years, test scores in Mississippi skyrocketed, while Oklahoma's plummeted. While cause and effect cannot be strictly proven, the CEO of ExcelinEd, Patricia Levesque, said that "The difference is Mississippi persisted with the tough-love reform. Oklahoma did not."
Due to the difficulty of constructing studies, there is as of yet no conclusive research proving that grade retention is significantly helpful or harmful. Some existing research has been accused of being methodologically invalid due to the selection bias in the group allocation phase. The three different types of studies that exist or have been proposed may have inherent pitfalls to overcome before the resulting data can be deemed as accurate.
- Studies that compare students who were retained with students who were only considered for retention and were eventually promoted, concluded that social promotion is beneficial to the students. The students that were selected for promotion were often viewed as "better", or "less weak" than the students that were retained, and the "better" students were selected for promotion "because the school believed them to be stronger or more personally mature students", whereas the students that were selected for retention were viewed as "weaker" students and were retained as a result of this.
- Studies that compare retained students with their own prior performance seem to favor grade retention; however, these studies have been accused of being inaccurate because they allegedly do not adequately compensate for personal growth, or stressful changes at home like abusive living conditions, or drastic environmental issues such as living in poverty; all of which will have a definitive impact on the students performance.
- Studies which randomly assign a large pool of borderline students to promotion or retention is the most methodologically sound type of research of this topic. It is imperative that the research is provided with sufficiently detailed information on a large enough scale in order to provide valuable or possibly even definitive information. Although this method can potentially provide the most accurate results, schools and parents are unwilling to have a child's future determined by random assignment, therefore, due to institutional and parental opposition, along with other ethical reasons, these types of studies are not utilized.
Non-academic outcomes
International
Australia
Australia uses grade retention, although in 2010 the New South Wales Department of Education and Training enacted a policy that states that student retention will no longer be allowed at any school. For example, as of 2010, students will not be repeating eleventh grade or twelfth grade due to the abundance of post school services available to them after they complete twelfth grade, services such as TAFEs or college universities.New Zealand
In New Zealand, secondary schools commonly use a system of internal academic streaming in which children of the same age are subdivided on the basis of ability, and lower achieving students are taught in different classes, and at a different rate, from higher achieving students, but are kept within their own age group. This system has largely rendered grade retention obsolete in all but the most exceptional circumstances.In most cases where academic streaming is insufficient, additional special services are viewed as being preferential to grade retention, particularly when behavioral challenges are involved.