Grade Retention and Social Promotion in Texas 1994-99: An Assessment of Academic Achievement among Elementary School Students

To make schools more accountable for the performance of students, many school districts as well as entire states have proposed more rigorous standards to help ensure that pupils have the basic skills necessary to be successful in school. Many public and private sector decisionmakers have criticized the common practice of social promotion; that is, allowing students to progress to the next grade level without having already learned the material required for the current grade. The public in general views the practice of social promotion or grade placement as detrimental to low-performing students who are promoted without requisite skills because such students are presumed to fall further behind their more academically proficient classmates. Consequently, some states and school districts have proposed or adopted strict policies of retention that require a low-achieving student to remain in the same grade until meeting a specified level of proficiency. ¹ Although these newer standards for promotion may vary across different educational boundaries, a common mandate is that students would be allowed to proceed to the next grade only after the retained pupil has demonstrated sufficient understanding of the material appropriate for the present grade. The goal of ending social promotion, although not necessarily replacing it with retention in grade, especially when students return to the same curricula taught in the same manner, was endorsed by President Bill Clinton in 1998 and by the U.S. Department of Education in 1999. ²

However, unlike many public officials, most educational researchers concur that grade retention practices are ineffective in remediating the academic performance of low-achieving students. For example, Panayota Mantzicopoulos and Delmont Morrison state, "Unlike mixed empirical evidence on other educational issues, research on elementary school nonpromotion is unequivocal. It supports the conclusion that retention is not an effective policy." ³ Some critics of retention policies even contend that retaining students in the same grade will only harm their later academic achievement. For example, Lorrie A. Shepard and Mary Lee Smith argue that "retention worsens rather than improves the level of student achievement in years following the repeat year." ⁴ Publications in which the intended audiences are educational administrators and practitioners often contain articles highly critical of holding students in grade an additional year. ⁵ Likewise, a literature review for the National Research Council contends that retaining students another year in the same grade will not yield anticipated educational benefits. ⁶ The claim against the effectiveness of grade retention is generally based on a few often-cited studies and reviews of research literature that are interpreted as being conclusive evidence that holding students back one year in the same grade will impede academic achievement. ⁷ More recent analyses of a moderate-size panel of at-risk students still indicate that requiring poorly performing pupils to repeat a grade does not lead to greater academic achievement. ⁸ The perceived negative effects of grade retention are so entrenched among educational researchers that C. Kenneth Tanner and Susan Allan Galis believe reporting on school retention is often biased and misleading. ⁹

Nonetheless, some published research supports the position that grade retention allows low-achieving elementary students additional time to remedy low levels of academic performance. ¹⁰ To rebut findings supportive of retention practices, detractors of holding students back a year in grade offer various reasons that such findings should be dismissed. A major criticism is that reported gains among retained students are only temporary; failing students who are promoted to the next grade do as well in the long run, they contend, as the retained students. To illustrate, after reviewing studies on grade retention, C. Thomas Holmes concluded that, among low-achieving students, those...