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Grade Retention: A Solution for Turning Failure into Success

by Jennifer Hill (International and Public Affairs) and Christopher Weiss (ISERP)

Grade retention is a practice in which a student who has completed a particular grade of schooling is compelled to remain in that same grade in the subsequent school year. Grade retention rates in the United States are generally high, and though there are few estimates of retention for the national population, sources place the figure at somewhere between five and ten percent of students retained annually. Retention has been promoted by its advocates as the antidote for "social promotion"-the practice of advancing students even when they do not meet the required skills of their current grade. Why, proponents argue, let failing students continue to the next grade where, absent the requisite skills, they will be even more likely to fail? Critics counter, however, that there is no evidence that grade retention helps students in the long run and only mixed evidence that it helps even in the short run. Moreover, grade retention is one of the more expensive educational policies available and may come at significant cost to students' self-esteem and educational trajectories.

Grade retention has received significant attention from researchers and policymakers alike, though little research on this topic has rigorously examined its causal effect. Although most data on retention suffer from selection bias, few studies have used appropriate methodologies to address this bias. Yet much of the policy rhetoric around retention makes causal assumptions about the potential costs and benefits of increasing the likelihood of retention and the presumed consequences of such a policy change. Moreover, not enough work has been done to examine retention's effects in conjunction with other compensatory policies such as tutoring or remedial classes. The topic of grade retention and its effects is thus long on rhetoric and short on rigorous causal analysis, yet major policy decisions continue to be made by politicians citing this very evidence. In this proposed research, we will shed new light on the effects of grade retention by applying innovative statistical methods to rich datasets not used before this research question.