What does it cost to retain a less-than-proficient student and provide him or her with remediation and additional support? In a new research brief, Boston University professor Marcus Winters says the amount is lower than previous analysts, including himself, have estimated and goes on to show why.
Key to Winters’s framework is that cost accrues both to the taxpayers who fund the additional time and work and to the students who are held back, as they are likely delayed from entering the job market because of their extra time in school. Winters asserts that previous analyses did not account for these timeframes properly, as taxpayers don’t fund extra education for a retained student until she stays in school beyond her expected high school graduation date. In other words, a youngster who repeats third grade was always going to be on the school’s roster that second year, but as a fourth grader rather than a third grader. Although it is possible that she will remain a grade level behind for eight more years and thus require that extra year of taxpayer-funded education, data suggest that one of several other outcomes is likely to occur before then: catching up and rejoining her previous grade cohort, leaving that system for another (such as a private school or an out-of-state district), or dropping out of school entirely.
Laying aside the relative undesirability of some of these outcomes, the math speaks for itself. Allocating a full year of additional funding as a necessary cost of retention is incorrect. The same goes for the cost of lost wages to the student herself. Winters and other analysts include not only the first year of lost wages (due to a delayed grade twelve) but also multiple additional years of decreased raises afterward due to delayed entry. Even assuming that catching up with wage growth is impossible, a retained student is still more likely to enter the workforce—one way or the other—less than a year behind expectation. Calculations must be made accordingly.
To illustrate, Winters returns to previously published analyses of Florida’s third grade retention policies. A study that looked at the first cohort of third graders retained in Florida in 2002–03, on which Winters was an analyst, indicated clearly that students who remained in their schools through graduation were only delayed by 62.8 percent of a year. Yet the cost calculations assumed a full year’s delay. Rerunning those numbers with the proper delay factor—and even including the full reported cost of interventions intended to boost student achievement—yields a taxpayer cost 34 percent lower than originally estimated. Lost wages were similarly overestimated in the previous analyses.
While there are adjunct costs to holding students back, the benefits could easily outweigh those costs. Yes, a retained student might spend a few less months in the labor market, but the career earnings potential of being able to read fluently (as opposed to being illiterate) should easily surpass those fleeting losses. That’s what retention—and robust support—aims to do for students who are struggling to read.
Retention policies should go hand in hand with a robust set of supports in place to make sure that those who are off track can make up ground as quickly and simply as possible. While there are adjunct costs to holding students back, these have been exaggerated in previous research and can be minimized even further by a focus on boosting student achievement. Future discussions of the merits of retention policies should proceed from this more realistic assessment.
SOURCE: Marcus A. Winters, “The Cost of Retention Under a Test-Based Promotion Policy for Taxpayers and Students,” American Education Research Association (AERA) Journal (December 2022).
