Today's New York Times reports on a new RAND study evaluating the Big Apple's attempts to end "social promotion," the egregious practice of simply passing students on to the next grade regardless of whether they're ready academically. I'm not familiar enough with the program to know more than what the Times describes-that it began in 2004 with 3rd graders, has since expanded through at least 5th grade, and under it "students who score at the lowest level in state English and math tests have to repeat the grade unless they can pass the exam after summer school." This study focused on 5th graders, and found that:
students who were kept in the fifth grade for an additional year showed significant improvement in standardized tests over the next three years compared with low-performing students before the policy went into effect.
These results sound (on the surface) to be consistent with prior studies showing the benefits of retention in Chicago (2003) and Florida (2006).
New York City focuses, appropriately so, ??on giving these students extra attention-e.g., Saturday classes, one-on-one tutoring. And one of the biggest concerns about retention, that these students will be emotionally scarred, doesn't seem to hold up. From the slides linked above:
??"...the study found no negative effects of retention on students' sense of school belonging or confidence in mathematics and reading over time. [W]hile the policy has not been in place long enough to address...long-term questions, the near term benefits found by the study hold the possibility of longer-term benefits as well."
??Apparently just 0.3% of fifth graders were held back in New York last year (and 1-3% in the prior years), so this may not be a solution for the vast majority of struggling students. But at least for these individuals, it sounds like the right thing to do.
