 |
Studies find retention
|
“They kept on passin’ me up, y’know . . . couldn’t read a lick . . . they just kept passin’ me up – third grade, fourth grade – and I’m like, too proud, y’know . . . nobody ever said to me, ‘Dwayne, you can’t read – what’re you gonna do with your sorry (self)?’ ”
By Lyn Jerde
Written for News & Views
What Dwayne experienced is what educators call social promotion – the practice of advancing a pupil to the next grade level, even though he or she has not mastered the skills of the previous grade level.
President Clinton wants to end social promotion in U.S. schools, and has said so in three State of the Union addresses, including the most recent one.
But could Dwayne have learned to read if his teachers had held him back a grade level or two?
There’s no way to know, because Dwayne is not a real person. He’s a fictional character in the Joe Klein’s novel “Primary Colors” – a student in an adult literacy class, who moved a presidential candidate to tears with his story of educational failure.
But Beth Graue would say holding Dwayne back probably wouldn’t have helped him, and might have hurt him.
Graue, associate professor of early childhood education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education, said educational research – including her own – shows conclusively that holding students back a grade level does not work.
“The research on retention is clearer than almost any other area of research on education,” she said. “Yet, teachers, parents and politicians hold on to the belief that it does work.”
The American Federation of Teachers’ 1997 study “Passing on Failure: District Promotion Policies and Practices,” showed that the decision on whether to pass a low-achieving pupil to the next grade level is often a case of “damned if you do and damned if you don’t.”
If an underachieving pupil advances, he may be led to believe that his school performance doesn’t matter, or that he is more prepared than he really is. But his achievement is unlikely to improve if he simply stays in the same grade next year, going back to the same academic program that didn’t work the first time.
The AFT study found that most school districts implicitly support social promotion. Typically, district policies may either limit the number of students who can be retained, limit a teacher’s authority to retain students, and/or declare retention a “last resort” solution.
Graue’s 1996 study of 8,595 3rd-graders in 47 Wisconsin public school districts showed that, of those who had been retained between kindergarten and 3rd grade:
- 62% were boys.
- 33% to 35% were children of color (19% of the whole sample were children of color).
- 60% were children whose family incomes qualified them for free or reduced-price lunches.
- 20% of children retained in kindergarten and 26% of kids retained in 1st through 3rd grades end up in special education programs, compared to 8% of children promoted yearly. This indicates that their failure to achieve may have been caused by a treatable learning problem, not by lack of maturity or insufficient time to master skills.
“The idea behind retention,” Graue said, “is that another year at the same grade level will give them time to catch up with their peers. But it doesn’t work that way.”
Graue acknowledges that many teachers can tell stories of retentions that seemed to work – of underachieving pupils who began to succeed after being held back a year.
The difficulty with that, Graue said, is that it’s impossible to know whether those particular pupils would have had the same success if they had advanced to the next grade with their peers.
Research suggests they might have.
The most reliable studies on the effects of retention, Graue said, are cross-sectional. For example, they look at a group of 4th-graders in the same school, and identify the students who have been retained. A complete study of the retained students requires more than looking at grades and test scores. It should also include interviews with the teachers, the pupils’ parents and maybe the pupils – and analysis of what other intervention was used in addition to retention, she said.
Graue said studies such as these show that being held back, by itself, does not improve a pupil’s achievement.
The difficulty with retention is that it makes the child, and only the child, responsible for success in school, instead of giving the child the adult intervention she needs to succeed.
School is the only place in society where lack of success is handled in this manner, Graue said.
“If a carpenter built a bed that kept falling apart, you wouldn’t send the bed back to the same carpenter and have him build it again, if he didn’t build it right the first time,” she said. “You’d have a master carpenter look at the carpenter’s work, and find out what the problem is.”
Likewise, educators should try to pinpoint why the child is not succeeding and address the problem.
Some intervention strategies that have proven to be effective include special education programs, “pull-out” programs such as Title I reading and math, custom curricula taught in the child’s regular classroom, after-school or Saturday programs, or summer school.
In many school districts, Graue acknowledged, lack of money is a barrier to offering such interventions.
But retention also has its costs, including financial ones.
“If you add an extra year to a child’s education and amortize that per-pupil cost out, that adds up to a lot of money,” Graue said.
Even so, if a child is not succeeding, some would support retention first, then trying intervention later if retention doesn’t work.
Graue, however, said a retained child who is chronologically older than her classmates often feels out of sync – physically, hormonally and psychologically.
Studies have shown this disequilibrium is, for many students, uncomfortable enough to prompt them to drop out of school before graduating.
Some districts have tried alternatives to retention. One such approach is transitional grade levels, such as pre-1st grade for kindergartners not ready to advance to 1st grade. However, these approaches have not been shown to be effective, Graue said.
Another common practice that studies discount – even though many parents and teachers swear by it – is delaying a child’s start of kindergarten for a year.
Like retained students, the “held-out” students tend to be boys, and tend to end up disproportionately in special education programs eventually, Graue said.
Studies show virtually no difference in achievement between students who waited a year to start kindergarten and those who didn’t, Graue said.
“But those who are held out for a year often end up in special education – indicating there was a problem that needed to be solved by something other than more time,” Graue said.
Does the failure of retention suggest that the traditional age-based grouping of pupils may be obsolete? Age-based grouping is here to stay, Graue said. But there are some promising variations on traditional grade levels, including:
- A multi-age mix in one classroom – for example, kindergartners, 1st-graders and 2nd-graders all working with the same teacher and the same curriculum.
- Looping – having the same teacher stay with a class from kindergarten through 2nd grade.
“Kids,” Graue said, “do not march through a curriculum lock-step.”
Posted April 5, 1999
 |
All
About WEAC - News
- Education Resources
|
 |