Jeb Bush goes across the nation boasting of the “Florida Miracle.” It consists of tough test-based accountability, charters, vouchers, and online charters, with plenty of profits to spur innovation.
Remember the much-acclaimed Texas miracle?
Here is a paper by Umut Ozek, a researcher at the American Institutes for Research, which debunks the value of holding back third-grade students, one of the key elements of the Florida “miracle.” It does raise fourth grade test scores when you keep the laggards out of the testing pool, but it has some awful consequences for the children.
Ozek writes:
“Test-based accountability has become the new norm in public education over the last decade. In many states and school districts nationwide, student performance in standardized tests plays an important role in high- stakes decisions such as grade retention. This study examines the effects of grade retention on student misbehavior in Florida, which requires students with reading skills below grade level to be retained in the 3rd grade. The regression discontinuity estimates suggest that grade retention increases the likelihood of disciplinary incidents and suspensions in the years that follow. The findings also suggest that these adverse effects are concentrated among economically disadvantaged students.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I’ve compiled retention research here: http://radicalscholarship.wordpress.com/2013/04/01/just-say-no-to-just-read-florida-south-carolina/
I am going to cut and paste the research I have done on retention which I have on my web site.
Retain or not to retain is not the only paradigm available to educators.
When medical researchers publish a finding, we listen; we had better or most of us would be dead by now. But when brilliant educators publish their research it is ignored. Some psychologists compare the destructiveness of retention to that to a death of a parent. One author states that leaders are betraying our children.
Children have an innate desire to learn until it has been squelched by adults.
Karen Kelly
in Harvard Education Letter Jan./Feb. 1999, stated that the retention /promotion debate follows a 7 to 8 year cycle. Once politicians realize the negative side effects, they back off.
When she wrote about retention for Harvard Education Letter
in 1999 she stated that politician viewed retention as a remedy.
’99 Harvard Graduate School of Ed. Karen Kelly published and extensive report of the harmfulness of retention.
“Retention vs.Social promotion: Schools Search for Alternatives”
“..research has shown that the practice does more harm than good. Retention harmed students achievement, attendance record, personal adjustment in school, and attitude toward school…. Retaining doesn’t solve the problem……retainees are more likely to drop out of school…..”
A study in Calif.
Lorrie Shepard & Mary Lee Smith
“Flunking Grades” 1989
“Flunking kids does nothing to solve low-achievement, and flunking is an expensive proposition.”
“Flunking kids is one of the most harmful tools in the arsenal of educators.”
In another study in 1992 by
Arthur Reynolds, Judy Temple, & Ann McCoy
with students in the Chicago area, poor performers who had been promoted, moved eight months ahead of their peers who had been retained. They found students who repeated a year were 20 to 30 % more likely to drop out of school. Students who were retained twice had a probability of dropping out of nearly 100%.
They site Chicago data revealing that retention actually harmed scholastic development because:
Using arbitrary cut-off scores on standardized tests to determine retention status is not restrictive but holds students alone responsible for what may in fact be caused by poor instruction or disruptive learning environments.
Longitudinal study of 1539 Chicago retainees did not improve their academic performance in comparison to other students their age.
Contributes to the school dropout problem- 42% increase in early drop out.
Philip Bower
in his research published in the NASP 1998 states:
Retained students rarely make significant academic progress in the retained year.
1st or 2nd graders who show improvement over non-retained under-achieving peers quickly lose that advantage. The two groups soon perform the same academically; however the retained group will develop measurable deficits in mental health.
A single retention increase one’s probability of dropping out by 21-27%.
The stigma of retention will damage self-concept and create a negative attitude towards school to a much greater degree than most educators will predict beforehand or recognize in later years.
The most common retainee is a non-white male, small of stature, from a low-in-come-family with parents uninvolved in schooling.
“Old for grade” adolescents are at increased risk for substance abuse, earlier age of sexual debut, behavioral problems and emotions distress, including suicidal thoughts.”
Mary DeFalco
http://maryidefalco.com/reading%20site%20reconnected/reading__language_arts_primary_teachers_2/29.Research__Retention,Testing,_Homework,.html
Debrorah Crockett, Pres. NASP 1998
In same publication Of NASP, Crockett states:
NASP says Social Promotion and Retention are failed p
“Retaining a child in third grade because the child can’t read is child neglect on the part of the school, and so is social promotion…. retention punishes the victim of poor instruction and that social promotion denies the worth of those children promoted without skills.”
“Research shows that these children fair no better, academically, after being retained. These children more frequently drop out of school, never earning the diploma needed to enter the job market or attend college.”
The cost of effective remediation and support for At Risk children is far less that the cost of an extra year in school.
Political leaders, in good conscience, must listen to the experts in the field and not follow their gut feelings nor be guided by the results of one test that is too often invalid. Power does not make right.
How come everything every reform type does is a miracle? Klein, Bush in Texas, Jhindal, etc.
This is a story by Dan Denvir in the Philadelphia City Paper about the sweeping under the rung of our testing scandal. When one middle school’s reading scores went up 52% in two years, then-Superintendent Arlene Ackerman hailed it as a…..miracle! Not to mention statistically impossible.
http://www.citypaper.net/cover_story/Erase_to_the_Top.html?viewAll=y
Once again it is good to see an economists working paper cited here. Perhaps folks here will become comfortable enough with the methodology to entertain the possibility that econometrically based conclusions might be correct even if they conflict with previous beliefs.
“. . . to entertain the possibility that econometrically based conclusions might be correct . . . ”
Well, yes, just as the blind and anosmic squirrel finds the occasional acorn!-ha ha!
I trust that Dr. Ravitch would not post research results if they had no foundation.
Well, Diane has posted some “research” that is very lacking in “foundation”, actually they have illogical foundations that are cracked, weathered, worn and built without any rebar. Those being the studies she quotes using NAEP scores and other supposed international comparisons to trumpet America’s (sic) supposed greatness in educating our citizenry.
See Noel Wilson’s study I have referenced below in response to wgerson as to why using those results are “vain and illusory” and therefore less than valid.
I had thought it might be interesting to take the comments of regular posters here and make a word cloud of their comments, but for you there is no need. Your word loud would have a great big Wilson in the middle.
What’s a “word cloud”? I’ve not heard that term.
Software that will track all the words in a text and through them up as an image. There more frequently a word is used, the larger the word appears in the image.
At the beginning of my large class each semester, I have my students text me a sentence describing the things they think will get in the way of them doing well in the class. I put all the responses together in a word cloud and inevitably the word myself appears in a large font in the middle.
Google word cloud and you will find a number of sites that will make a cloud out of text you provide. My guess is that there are ones that will do it in Spanish and you might find it useful four your class.
The research on retention has been clear for decades. It produces dropouts. Lori Shepherd at University of Colorado @ Boulder is an expert. Carol
There is so much endogeneity that this must be a difficult area to do research in.
“In a statistical model, a parameter or variable is said to be endogenous when there is a correlation between the parameter or variable and the error term. Endogeneity can arise as a result of measurement error, autoregression with autocorrelated errors, simultaneity and omitted variables. Broadly, a loop of causality between the independent and dependent variables of a model leads to endogeneity.
For example, in a simple supply and demand model, when predicting the quantity demanded in equilibrium, the price is endogenous because producers change their price in response to demand and consumers change their demand in response to price. In this case, the price variable is said to have total endogeneity once the demand and supply curves are known. In contrast, a change in consumer tastes or preferences would be an exogenous change on the demand curve.”
Why does endogeneity make for difficulties in research?
Lets take the retention causing dropouts, for example.
If district A has a strict policy of no retention in grade, by the time students reach high school there might be a significant number of students reading well below grade level. The high school needs to accommodate those students so it offers a large number of courses designed for students who read below grade level. These students do not get frustrated, they stay in school and get a high school diploma.
In district B there are many more retentions. Some of those retained benefit from the added instruction, some do not, but perhaps a larger fraction of high school students read at grade level so the high school offers fewer classes designed for those who read below grade level. Those that are reading below grade level get frustrated and drop out.
In this story retention policy does not cause higher dropout rates because of any impact on the student, it causes higher drop out rates because of the impact it has on high school curriculum. I don’t in fact know if this is the case in districts, but it is things like this that any statistician needs to worry about.
Indeed, but I think that the general thrust of the research that’s been done is pretty clear, and the conclusions of that research are in accord with common sense. It would be a really spectacular and surprising finding if new research, more carefully conceived, were to suggest that it’s a good idea to label little kids as failures.
I don’t know the answer to this, but might it also be harmful to label a student as successful when they are not? Might it result in students internalizing a certain set of expectations about the effort required to learn?
Would it be harmful to label a kid successful when he or she is not? Yes, most likely. It’s the generalized labeling that causes harm. The system of making blanket evaluations of students should be thrown over, along with the notion of “graduation” from a particular grade or level of schooling. Schooling/learning should be seen a lifelong endeavor, and people should have, all along, the opportunity to avail themselves of various means of demonstrating specific competencies when they are ready to do so, and there should be competition among vendors of these many highly-specific competency measures as there is among organizations that certify command of Six Sigma statistical methods for process quality control applications. In the early grades, we need to get away from the notion that learning is something so awful that one has to have external punishments and rewards to get kids to do it.
Student A and Student B both graduate from Cady Stanton High School with C+ averages and then from Diderot Community College with degrees in “Communications.” What the hell does that mean? Which of these students can use conventional editorial symbols to copyedit a manuscript for grammar, usage, mechanics, and spelling? Which can create a webpage using cascading style sheets? Which can stand up at a public meeting and give an impromptu speech that commands the attention of the audience and moves people to action? Which can write a press release in proper form and knows how to distribute it? Which can lay out a page in InDesign or edit a photo in Photoshop? In other words, what are these people’s specific competencies? Who the hell knows, but they are both certified by Diderot Community College as communicators.
And before people start objecting, no, I do not think that all schooling should be job training. I just think that certification of competency should be highly specific and that a given individual should have a great, long, unique list of such certifications garnered over a lifetime of learning.
Good old Jeb leads the pack of doctored facts…shades of what that great neo con state did in the 2000 election. How one state can garner such disgusting distinction is amazing! Leading the nation (or, at least trying their best) in racial voter suppression, stand you ground, gory gun license, and now the media’s GOP darling is “leading the nation” in how to “fix” the educational problem by fudging figures and hurting kids!
What a state, what another Bush boondoggle!
I know this will be an unpopular comment but retention is not the problem. The problem is the social stigma our culture has placed on retention. I scanned through the research cited in some of the comments above and it all related to US schools. However, many other countries have retention policies with no particularly negative effect. For example, in Turkey, it is common for high school students to take an additional year to graduate. Now to clarify, because students are set in groups that take all of their classes together, a student can not fail a couple of classes and simply retake them like in the US system. If they fail a few classes a committee of teachers and administrators is convened to decide if the student needs to repeat the year or if the teachers are comfortable that the student come close enough to passing to merit promotion. It goes about 50/50 on whether these committees pass the student on.
The same process is used at the middle school level. In elementary grades, since there is only one teacher, the committees I’ve supervised had the teacher, parent(s), administrator, and a counselor.
Students are not treated poorly for having had to repeat. No one thinks it’s negative because it happens fairly often. The students settle into their new class well. There is no social stigma. My husband took 5 years to graduate from a 3 year high school simply because he was an athlete and sports took his attention away from academics. No one accused him of laziness. No one treated him badly.
Rather than keep pushing our children on and putting them is situations for which they are not academically ready, we need to focus on changing the social stigma associated with retention. This is our fault.
Two decades ago in the MD district I led we did annual reviews of drop outs and validated what most researchers found: a high percentage of kids who dropped out had been left back in early grades. This made perfect sense since the dropout age at the time was 16 and once kids hit that age and they were struggling in school they quit. At that point these kids heard for over ten years that they were “failures” so it is easy to understand why they might be tempted to go to work where their employers valued them even if the pay was low. It was at this point that I began to question the practice of grouping kids by grade levels based on age… but 20+ years later the practice continues and is reinforced with the testing regimens imposed by USDOE since NCLB and RTTT have been implemented. I believe this practice needs to be changed ASAP…
“At that point these kids heard for over ten years that they were “failures”. . . ”
Yep, Foucault’s subjectivization at play. Labeling students, whether with grades, percentages and/or other words-proficient, beginning etc. . . is one of the most egregious educational malpractices to be found today. And it is so ingrained into everyone’s head (subjectivization again) that to challenge that labeling is seen as being an educational heretic, as quite literally out of one’s mind.
Try it sometime, tell a teacher, administrator, parent or anyone (except for those students who know that the label attached to them is not right and don’t accept it, with the consequences many times being the student drops out) that grades and labeling students is 100% pure USDA grade AA choice bovine excrement and enjoy the looks as the person tries to figure out if you’re joking-ha ha or that if you mean it, if you’ve taken leave of your senses.
And the primary causes of this mis-labeling of students are the educational malpractices of educational standards, standardized testing and the grading of students. To fully understand why read and comprehend what Noel Wilson has written in “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at:
http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A quality cannot be quantified. Quantity is a sub-category of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category by only a part (sub-category) of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as one dimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing we are lacking much information about said interactions.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. As a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms shit in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it measures “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
This author has an interesting set of working papers. They can be found here:http://www.caldercenter.org/about/UmutOzek.cfm
The constant use of the word “miracle” to describe the achievements of so-called reformers is consistent with the magical thinking that so many of their supporters have tried to engender among the population at large.
Think about Oprah’s entire career; it has essentially been based on pushing the fantasy that if you want something enough, you can have it. If you don’t get it, the fault must be yours.
“Miracle” charter schools push the same line, telling children and their parents that if they don’t measure up – whether via test scores, docility, etc. – the failure is theirs, no matter the repressive, authoritarian pedagogy the school employs.
Then there was Ronald Reagan, who rhapsodized about the “magic” of the market place.
With all this talk about magic and miracles, it’s no wonder these people are called free market fundamentalists.
“Then there was Ronald Reagan, who rhapsodized about the “magic” of the market place.”
Yep, trickle down economics or better put “pissed on” economics!
But, as much as I hate to admit it there is one good aphorism that R. Raygun used to use (in dealing with the Soviets) “Trust but verify”. Use it with my students all the time when if they say something to the effect “What, don’t you trust me” (perhaps when I am checking homework for completion and they can’t seem to “find” it.) “Yes, I trust you but I need verification, just like Uncle Ronnie used to do with the Soviets”, is my reply.
Kids differ, and they are on different developmental schedules. But here’s one respect in which they do not differ: Tell a kid, any kid, early on, “You’re a failure,” and that in itself will create a huge hurdle going forward. Some few will be able to survive this. Many will not. If we left things up to the deformers, they would be testing and failing preschool students. The seem to think that what works with kids is motivation by punishment or negative sanction. If only we got tougher, with these kids, these teachers. . . .
Sickening
I find it hard to believe that bad behavior is only due to retaining the students. Students do poorly in school because they have learning or emotional problems, they come from difficult and stressful home situations, and for many other reasons. These issues can be the cause of children acting out, or they act out because of frustration, stress and lack of support. I am a high school teacher, and though I lack research data, I have twelve years experience in the classroom. I have had many, many students in my 9th-12th grade classes who read anywhere from first to fourth grade levels. This happens in my district because teachers are required by principals to pass the students, and even change their grades in order to graduate them to the next level. This does nothing to help the students who need more attention. In fact, it hurts them because they are then lost in classes way above their ability levels, and they fall further and further behind. They did not receive the extra attention and tutoring that they needed in elementary and middle school. Regardless of whether they move on to the next grade, or they are held back, struggling students run the risk of being made fun of because they are behind their peers. The author writes, “Grade retention imposes a significant emotional burden on students as they face the stigma of being labeled as failing and the challenges of adjusting to new peers, which might in turn lead to student disengagement from schooling.” I would say that just being behind in skill levels imposes a significant emotional burden. The bottom line is that it is embarrassing and uncomfortable for children to feel like they are way behind the other students. This alone could cause children to act out.
I don’t think the author of the working paper would say that retention is even a major cause of poor behavior. It takes some very good statistical work to find the relationship at all. This sort of work is like searching for planets around other stars. There is so much else that is going on that the impact of of retention is hard to see.
Definitely
It may be “hard to see” but that doesn’t mean it’s not there.
@loiisemar3,
Do the students who are reading at the 1-4 grade level end up graduating or do they drop out?
Both. The district does what they can to move them through the system.
Does the district get them up to a high school reading level before graduation or arrange things so that reading at a high school level is unnecessary for graduation?
This is probably o/t but can someone explain why the decision was made to teach children how to read in K? Maybe that was always the case in some places, but I know I didn’t learn to read until 1st grade. If we already acknowledge that there is a gap before kids start school, why did we make K more like 1st grade? It seems like that would make it harder for kids to catch up.
Why teach children to read in any specific grade? What makes first grade the optimal time? What makes kindergarten the optimal time? Nothing…because what’s optimal for Johnny might be a year after what’s optimal for Susie. The Finns don’t start their children in school till age 7…which is often second grade for American students, yet they seem to come out reading well at the end.
Reading skills instruction (by making reading part of a child’s life) ought to start the day a child is born, just like speaking and listening skills. The difference is that, in our culture, nearly everyone speaks to their children (albeit with different vocabularies and frequencies) and expects them to listen, but too many of our parents don’t provide written language experiences in the same way. Too many of our parents have left that responsibility to school.
If a child can’t talk, parents might get worried, or correct their children if what they say is unintelligible, or incomprehensible, but since early reading skills of young children aren’t readily apparent in the same way many parents don’t go beyond, “he knows his ABCs.”
Reading aloud to children is a parent’s best option at the beginning of their lives…and it should continue daily till the child leaves home.