When I spoke earlier this year to the National Association of School Psychologists, I listened to introductory remarks by Philip Lazarus, the president of the organization.
In talking about the role of school psychologists and reviewing the many problems that students have today, he mentioned that there were three things that students feared most. Number one was going blind. Number two was the death of a parent. And number three was being held back in school.
That really shook me up, because I started thinking about the deep humiliation children must feel if all their friends are promoted and they are not. Some years ago, when I was a reliable member of the conservative camp, I favored policies that “ended social promotion.” I thought it was wrong to promote kids to a grade where they were unable to keep up. I dispassionately observed debates between supporters and opponents; I knew that retention was associated with higher dropout rates, but back in those days, I was on the tough-accountability side. Make it harder, I thought, as conservatives do, and children will work harder and get better results. But like so much else that I used to support–like high-stakes testing and choice–I was wrong.
I wish that all policymakers could hear from school psychologists about the damage that retention does to children’s lives.
I recently came across the research that Lazarus was citing. It is a paper called “Grade Retention: Achievement and Mental Health Outcomes.” About 2.4 million children are retained every year, more boys than girls, more minorities than whites. Retained students are likely to exhibit aggressive behavior and to have a history of absenteeism and frequent moves. They are more likely to have large families, low parental education and less family involvement.
Research suggests that retention leads to minimal–if any– improvement of academic outcomes and an increase in dropping out for the retained students. The writers recognize that the increase in high-stakes testing was intended to pressure students to improve their test scores, but its main impact is to raise their stress levels. And whereas the original research on this topic in the 1980s found that children most feared going blind, losing a parent, or being flunked, a replication of the study in 2001 found that sixth grade students said that fear of being flunked was even greater than the other two terrible fears.
What are we doing to our children? I am speaking now as a parent and grandparent, not as a detached observer who looks at the issues from 30,000 feet and “sees like a state.”
Students who are retained have lower self-esteem (which must surely be lowered even more by having been branded as a failure and humiliated in front of their peers). Dropping out, as the paper recounts, is associated with a wide range of negative behaviors and outcomes that are bad for children and bad for our society.
Ultimately, holding kids back does not get them the social and emotional support they need. Instead, it aggravates the very conditions that led to their original failure.
We live in a time of social scarcity, of meanness, of meritocracy without compassion and without social concern.
“Ending social promotion,” it turns out, is just another slogan that politicians like to bandy about. It makes them feel strong; it makes them look tough; it wins plaudits from the hard-hearted tabloids; it allows the politicians to call themselves “reformers.” But it hurts children.
Ask the school psychologists. They see the children every day who are wounded and broken by these tough social policies. We must all begin to see them.
Diane
Diane Ravitch's blog 
In this era of test mania, how difficult is it for officials to hold back low scorers in order to produce highter test results? Scores are manipulated in many ways, why not this way?
I have retained 1 child in my 15+ years of teaching, I told myself I would never do it again. The student was miserable and performed worse the second time in 6th grade. He would ahve been better off moving to 7th and getting remedial help and intensive support.
This is one more reason why we need to have more individualized learning through the use of technology and other tools. Then students could move through their education with their social peers while having their specific educational needs met every day.
I wonder how technology will address children’s social and emotional needs.
Diane
I agree with mishshel. I don’t think technology will necessarily address children’s social and emotional needs, but it might greatly facilitate the process of children learning at their individualized optimal rate. This will make it more practical to keep kids together despite being at significantly different educational development levels. In general, I wish we allowed for more innovation with respect to things like “classes”, “grades”, etc. These rigid constructs might not be best for all times and all children.
Hi Diane. Thanks for the response. Technology can’t address social and emotional needs. But incorporation of technology doesn’t mean the removal of teachers!
When my son was five, we chose for him to skip Kinder because we felt he would be bored. Now he is in 5th grade (just turned 10), is headed to middle school, and is not socially ready for it. We made the tough choice to put him in the right place academically. (Who knows how it will turn out.)
If our school had utilized technology-based individualization, he could have received the appropriate level of academic instructional as well as the much needed socialization. As public education is currently structured, there isn’t a “right” place for our child.
Technology addresses whatever you want to use it for – and one of its most dramatic uses has been – through the Chicago Consortium on School Research early indicators (https://ccsr.uchicago.edu/publications/use-ninth-grade-early-warning-indicators-improve-chicago-schools), that grade retention is a very, very reliable indicator of later dropout behavior. Teach ’em they’re stupid; make their friends aware that they’re stupid; and they’ll learn that school ain’t gonna make em smarter!
I encountered a high school where the Principal regularly held back 25% of his 9th grade, supposedly, in the language of a former School Committee member, “because they weren’t ready.” In fact, that batch of kids were retained so the Principal could generate the highest “gain scores” from 8th to 10th grade test! An extra year of drill and practice to the 25% lowest performers can do miracles.
Unfortunately, it also gave the school a dropout rate nearly 20% higher than anyone expected.
Once I blew the whistle on that Principal he quit; as did the Guidance Director; as did the Superintendent. Their successors invented an early warning indicator – attendance rates in grades 7 and 8 – through which they could refer “high risk” 9th graders from the beginning of the year into a peer tutoring program the school organized to pull them through. Retention dropped from 25% (which it had been for 25 years!) to less than 7% in one year.
It’s not only child abuse, it’s abuse of power, and they should be sued.
And tech has a hell of a lot to do with it – otherwise we’d never know that attendance is a better marker than test scores!
In the 90s, the end of “social promotions” was heralded by Paul Vallas, when he was appointed as the first CEO of Chicago Public Schoos (CPS) under mayoral control. At the time, many CPS teachers I spoke with were very concerned about resulting increases in elementary school drop-out rates. I shared this concern because of a relative (in another state) who had been retained and then dropped out of elementary school.
I have tried to locate data on elementary school drop-out rates but have not been able to find this info on US schools. As with other research, the NASP study refers only to high school drop out rates. Are you aware of any studies on elementary school drop out rates, as well as possible correlations to grade school retention?
Grade schools are required in most states, so you don’t have grade school dropouts – until high school. See my note above.
Ms. Ravitch, want to hear a dirty little secret? Here in NYC they don’t want to hold kids back. This isn’t because of the reasons you cited above. It’s because it reflects poorly on the school’s administration and teachers. This stupid evaluation system is to blame.
I have a son who I believe should have been held back. He didn’t have the basic fundamentals down and my gut told me that he was going to have problems further down the road if he didn’t have a strong foundation to build on. I had another public school who would try to get him seated so socially the stigma of being held back wouldn’t be confronting him. He would just have to deal with being the new kid.
The adminstrators and teachers in his current school pressed me hard to not hold him back. They said everything this psychologist said plus some. They weren’t mean or anything but I could tell that this was not the route that they wanted me to take. I finally got it out of them what the problem was. I relented and allowed him to continue.
Fast forward a number of years: My son has never caught up. And the kicker? He still feels like the stupid kid. He’s smart enough to know that the other kids are ‘getting’ the material being taught but he has to work so much harder to stay on top of everything. Plus, now he hates school.
In hindsight, I should have stuck to my gut feeling and held him back. This is HIS life and HIS education that we are talking about. Not mine, not the principal’s, not the teachers, but HIS future and HIS career.
I feel like I failed him myself by not allowing him to fail all those years ago.
School Choice and NCLB have certainly sapped the energy of teachers and whole school districts. Energy that should be going into evolving our schools out of the Factory System model and into meeting the needs of 21st C. learners. Social promotion must continue until we redesign our schools to fit the child – follow the child. The idea that because of age a student is held to a curriculum ahead or below her capabilities has to change. I am talking to the choir, but we need to know where we are going. I have spent years now figuring out what the format for discussion should be. Perhaps, as the Bush-era changes are reversed (tell that to Arne Duncan) and the focus once again places energy on evolving our educational methodologies and schools, that will happen.
edwardfberger.com
Have you seen this?
RSA Animate – Changing Education Paradigms
I have been arguing against retention since I started teaching over 30 years ago (just ask colleagues who were sick and tired of hearing me harp on it over and over).
There are two reasons that I see for why people want to hold children back. First is the “catch-up” reason. Another of the comments in this section is from a parent who believes that their child should have been retained so they would have had a chance to “catch up.” The only problem with this is that, research into retention shows it doesn’t work that way. Children may do better for a year..or two, but 3 or 4 years after the retention year they are back where they were and in fact, do more poorly than students who were “passed on.” The common sense involved in this — give children an extra year to learn what they didn’t learn — just isn’t the reality. Children don’t catch up. The dichotomy of social promotion vs. retention doesn’t have q right answer. Neither helps children. Just because Moe’s child was unsuccessful with social promotion doesn’t mean that he would have thrived had he been retained. Part of the reason for this is that retention, when it is done in the United States, is done wrong. A child…let’s say a first grader…fails first grade and the following year is placed in a different class in the same school. The curriculum is the same, the teaching methods (especially now when everyone is teaching to the test) are the same and the child repeats everything exactly the same as the previous year. They do better that year…but they understand that they are a failure and the underlying causes of their failure are not dealt with. The research shows that in subsequent years they fail again.
The second rationale given for retention is the “I don’t know what else to do” reason. There isn’t enough money in most schools or school systems to give children what they need. Good maternal nutrition, prenatal health care and good early childhood programs are important to fight the effects of poverty. Once children are in school it’s too late to go back to their prenatal and early childhood lives and change things. This, of course, is very expensive, and very difficult to do. When children are in school and are behind, intensive intervention is needed to support them. This is also expensive and very difficult to do. Most schools can’t afford to give children what they need so the choice between social promotion and retention, neither of which are adequate for the child’s needs, is made.
Until the United States is willing to provide the resources needed to educate all our children there will be those who fall through the cracks. Since those children are, according to the research on retention, minorities, poor, and the hardest to educate, they get ignored by all those who don’t work with them individually. They get the fewest resources, the least experienced teachers, and the most “teaching to the test.” Despite lip service from politicians, our nation’s children, unfortunately, aren’t a national priority.
Does anyone have any thoughts on early “developmental” retentions?
As a parent I was convinced by different teachers that both my children would need an extra year (one in Developmental Kindergarden and one in Pre-First) since they were both “so young and very bright”. I fell for it even though the teacher in me had read everything negative about retention. When a teacher says “Do you want to watch your child go away to college at age 17?” that tugs at the heart strings and piles on a particular type of parental guilt.
Luckily, my children have the benefit of a roof over their head, two loving and educated parents, and food in their bellies. My children love school and are very successful as current 7th and 5th graders but I have also come to believe that they would have been equally successful as current 8th and 6th graders. I worry about what my decision has cost them but I suppose we will never really know.
I don’t believe that these teachers would harm my children intentionally but they truly believe in a developmental philosophy. In my small school, many of the students deemed developmentally not ready are struggling greatly and tend to drop out in HS.
Our governor in Ohio, John Kasich, is passing legislation right now to have any 3rd grader not considered proficient in reading held back. . .not only will this be an unfunded mandate, but it will also be based on Ohio Achievement Assessment data and not school district data. . .we, in Ohio, are hoping that this changes before it becomes law!
Segregating children by age is the culprit here. There’s no pedagogical justification to speak of, but it is administratively convenient for the adults. If schools grouped kids, say all the ones who would normally be K-2 into one group, with a clear set of expectations where they would end up,then teachers could individualize and cluster, with minimal stigma.
As our historian knows, kids have not always been separated by age. Time to go backwards…
Larry Cremin, at TC, particularly relished the story of the Quincy School, built in Boston in 1847, as the first graded school in America. The reasons it had 8 grades is that the builder – the contractor, not the district – assessed the site as appropriate for 8 rooms. There is, indeed, no foundation whatsoever – other than that builder’s bricks – for graded schools. Unless, that is, you want to reflect on what Yankee school-people expected from segregating Irish immigrant kids from their other family members in the era of the Famine.
This is such a challenging issue for me. I work in a middle school with students of low socioeconomic status who are achieving well below their grade level. Students are rarely retained as a general rule, and students know that; therefore, they write off any consequence for not putting forth effort and continue to meander through their school year without producing much of anything. The bottom line is that they come to me with varying sets of skills that are all over the board. John, I have always thought that using age to determine grade level has been the culprit, too. That would solve so many issues. So many. I guess I just struggle with knowing which poison to choose: retaining a student knowing what research says about that or sliding a student right through school knowing that he does not need to lift a finger or form one thought to graduate to the next level. When encouraging intrinsic motivation in middle schoolers such as mine does not amount to anything, what other alternative do we have other than a conseqence? In the real world, we do not continue to earn promotions without having to work for it. And, while it might hurt our self-esteem and pride to not earn a promotion, that is the way of it, unfortunately. Does our current system set up young people to be entitled?
Prof W’s question about grade retention in Chicago has a much more substantial foundation than he might guess. In the 1980’s, the city decentralized its system – eliminating a remarkable amount of hierarchy between the principals and central administration. At first this was a response to Malcolm X’s brother, who was regional Commissioner of the state Department of Education, and who mandated “desegregation” for this, the largest predominantly black district in the nation. At that point there were no less than five different formats for report cards, for example, that produced remarkably complex tracking and let lots of kids fall through very large cracks indeed.
In the course of decentralizing, the system created standard definitions for such things as grades, attendance, and tardiness. This, in turn, created the largest, and most searchable database of past and future student behaviors, and, it is through the Consortium on Chicago School Research that we have the best data on the best predictors of dropout, later failure, and later success correlated with grade retention. We know, for one example, that grade retention in grades 7, 8 or 9 has extraordinarily high predictive value of later dropout and school failure: Chicago proved that if you teach kids they’re dumb, they’ll be dumb.
I was reminded of this by my local school system, in Somerville, Massachusetts, a few years ago when I discovered the (then) high school principal routinely held back the lowest 25% of his 9th grade, supposedly because “they weren’t prepared.” In fact, he would also brag that his school had the highest “gain score” from 7th to 10th grade on the state’s test – demonstrating, once again, an “unanticipated consequence” of the testing psychosis. I blew the whistle, and the principal, superintendent, guidance director and my own school committee member all found reasons to retire. Their successors created a 9th grade tutorial program for any student with a problem with attendance, tardiness, or grades in 7th, 8th or 9th grade. This reduced retention from 25% to less than 5%, as well as offered two seniors an extraordinary opportunity to develop tutoring skills under a teacher and guidance officer, which resulted in higher placements and financial aid in college. So much for rationalizations.
As a mom to triplets boys (turning 6 in December) in kindergarten, I am already being told that one may be retained. I cannot imagine two going to first grade and one repeating kindergarten again. Any wisdom and insight as to this option our school wants to do?
That is a terrible idea. It will harm all three of your children. Fight for your kids.
Very interesting article but also confusing as to why this needed to be brought down to a liberal/conservative issue of taking sides. You usually see that when an article doesn’t have enough merit to stand up on its own. You made some excellent points, but where is your solution? You don’t believe that retaining works and you offer what as an alternative? I feel for the mom above who has to make a choice about retaining one of her triplets. What is worse for that child, constantly struggling to keep up with their siblings in the same grade and always comparing themselves to their siblings, or the humiliation of staying back in Kindergarten?
As the former Principal of a Junior High School in the South Bronx I can tell you of my experience with mandatory social promotion. After about ten years as Principal with rising reading and math scores my Superintendent instituted a policy requiring that 95% of the students be promoted regardless of achievement. Up to that point only 85% were promoted. However I met with each held over student and promised that if they achieved an 85% average at the end of the first marking period with no mark below 75%, they would be promoted on trial. The majority of the holdovers did just that. In the years following the mandatory promotion policy achievement plummeted and when we held an awards assembly the achieving students were booed by the other students. We had to have our Honor Society ceremony in the evenings.
I am a first grade teacher at an inner city school. I believe retention does work if it is done early in kindergarten or first grade. Many of my students do not come to school with the language, skills, and background knowledge they need to be successful. If I retain a child, I explain to them that every child is different and some children need more time. Society seems to forget that learning to read and write is developmental. In younger grades, child can recover emotionally from retention. Parents and teachers have the power to reassure children and build their self esteem. I have never regretted retaining a child because they left my room reading and writing. Children that feel bad are made to feel bad by the people that surround them. Adults that are illiterate often have very low self esteem. The US needs to invest more in quality early childhood education programs so students from low SES backgrounds start school ready.