Jay Greene & Marcus Winters, The Manhattan Institute
December 2004
This brief working paper from the Manhattan Institute makes a compelling case for the effectiveness of Florida's new retention policy. This policy, which began in 2002-03, mandates that third graders who cannot meet proficiency norms may not be socially promoted to the fourth grade. Before analyzing the data and drawing conclusions, Greene and Winters summarize and, more important, appraise earlier retention policy studies, most of which had deep methodological flaws. Then they evaluate the performance of two groups: all students who were subject to the policy (about one-fifth of these pupils were exempted from the policy and promoted despite low performance), and all of those who were actually retained. The second group posted greater overall gains than the first. Greene and Winters analyze student data for both the FCAT, Florida's own standardized test, and the Stanford 9, thus avoiding the possibility that gains were due to teachers teaching to the test (or worse). The gains are noteworthy: retained students posted relative gains of 4.10 and 3.45 percentile points in reading, and over nine points in math on both tests. The authors wisely refrain from making sweeping conclusions, as these data only reflect the first year of the new policy. It's surely a promising sign, though. You can read the full report here.