FAILING TO EDUCATE?

February 1999
		The Clinton administration has proposed a ban on social promotion. Should failing students be forced to repeat a grade?

What about skipping grades? International attitudes towards retention? What is the evidence for and against keeping students back? How can teachers identify and help failing students?

Bob Brunk of Los Angeles, CA, asks : I have a son and wonder if some day he will be held back a grade. What should a parent do if an educator proposes such a drastic measure? I was held back and I never truly recovered emotionally, even though my grades did.   Lorrie Shepard, University of Colorado, responds: If an educator proposes that your son be held back, you should inform yourself about the research findings on grade retention and then insist that your son be given the kinds of academic help that are known to be more effective than retention. The most up-to-date summary of research on grade retention is provided in a 1999 report by the National Academy of Sciences called High States: Testing for Tracking, Promotion, and Graduation (J. P. Heubert & R. M. Hauser, Eds.; http://www.nap.edu). Contrary to popular belief, retention does not help students academically in the years following the repeated grade. Out of 63 matched-control studies reviewed by Professor Charles Holmes of the University of Georgia, 54 showed overall negative effects of retention on academic achievement; only 9 studies found positive outcomes. In addition to being an ineffective treatment for improving student achievement, retention has serious side effects. In the controlled studies reviewed by Holmes, retention had a negative effect on students' attitude toward school and on their social and emotional adjustment. Using in-depth interviews Professor Deborah Byrnes at the Utah State University documented that "flunking" is indeed a traumatic experience for many students. Moreover, being retained in grade dramatically increases the likelihood that students will dropout of school later on (again see the National Academy of Sciences report). Researchers are not sure why retention does not improve achievement. Some speculate that it is because of retention's negative effect on student motivation that it also has a negative effect on learning. Others think that effects might be negative because repeating a grade still does not address the specific learning difficulties a child may be having. Tutoring, after-school programs, summer school, and intensive reading programs are all more effective interventions than retention for improving academic achievement. These "treatments" have all been documented to have positive effects in the research literature; they can all be more focused and targeted for specific learning needs than repeating an entire grade level; and they can all begin immediately, as soon as a student begins falling behind, instead of waiting for the dreaded end-of-year notice of failure. More than any other single problem, students who are failing in school need help with reading. If your son is having trouble learning to read in first grade, or if he is in a higher grade and still cannot read fluently enough to comprehend grade level material, then ask for help from a reading specialist. Work with the specialist to find out what particular problems your child is having. Some children can sound out words perfectly but have never been encouraged to think about the meaning of what they are reading; other children have not mastered decoding, either because they were not taught enough about letter-sound correspondences or because they could not "hear" what was being taught. At the same time that you and your son's teacher formulate a plan to work on his more serious learning problems, I also encourage you to identify his strengths and what he likes best about school. See if you can think of ways that his interest in football, computer games, or whatever, can be used as the context for practicing school skills that he typically avoids. Karl Alexander, Johns Hopkins, responds: Bob, I’ve done research on grade retention and feel as though I understand a bit about the practice from that perspective, but research tells us about what happens to children in the typical situation or “on average.” That’s not good enough for making placements in the individual case, as each child’s situation is unique. It falls to parents, teachers and administrators together– those closest to the child-- to decide what is the best course, and that depends on a good, firm understanding of the nature of the child’s difficulties weighed against the available options. Children who are candidates for retention by and large are far behind academically and many have difficulty complying with classroom routines. These are problems that need fixing, and for that reason I’m not at all a fan of social promotion, which doesn’t fix anything. But traditional grade retention, in my view, should be a last resort, and then only when there is reason to think the extra time is what’s needed. Let me explain why I feel this way. My research in Baltimore does not find that retention is positively harmful, as some critics of the practice contend. Indeed, my colleagues and I conclude that repeaters’ school performance improves some as a result, and we don’t find evidence of emotional scars (again, in the “typical case,” which might not be anything like your experience. Almost half the children in our study were held back in the elementary grades, and I suspect the emotional fallout is different– maybe more severe– when retention is less common). At its best grade, retention costs children a year and is expensive (schools have to educate children for an extra year), and even then it generally doesn’t bring children up to the level of performance we would want for them (rather, what my research shows is that it helps them catch up to other poor performing children who were promoted). We should be able to do better than this by our children. Not all children struggle at school for the same reasons, or in the same way. I should think that you, as a concerned parent, would want to find out from the people at school who have been working closest with your child: exactly what kinds of problems your child is experiencing; what they think is behind those problems; and the corrective alternatives that might be recommended. Assessment and evaluation is key-- if you don’t have a good understanding of the problem, I don’t see how you can have much confidence in the recommended solution. The procedures for deciding the best course in problem situations vary greatly from school system to school system-- here in Baltimore the teacher or a counselor typically makes a recommendation to a Promotion Committee, which reviews the case, confers with the parents, and then makes a recommendation to the principal. Parents must agree if the recommendation is to retain. As a process, this seems about right, but I’m not convinced that the quality of the information that feeds into the process is as good as it should be, and in Baltimore the range of alternatives short of retention unfortunately is quite limited. In terms of information, I’m impressed with the assessment protocol that Jim Grant and Irv Richardson have developed in their “Retention/Promotion Checklist.” It’s an intelligent approach, that incorporates research-based “best practices.” For more information, they can be contacted at the Society for Developmental Education, 603-924-9621.