Educators have long debated whether to retain students who do not meet grade level standards. Until the last few years, retention was resisted because, as Ed Trust put it in a 2021 report, it is “an inequitable and ineffective response to unfinished learning.”
But lately, as early literacy has become a national cause célèbre, there is momentum in about half the states to require or allow retention of students in third grade who are behind grade level in reading. The case for retention has powerful appeal.
Research shows that students who are behind after third grade rarely catch up. And as RAND Corporation researchers Umut Ozek and Louis T. Mariano wrote this month in a policy brief for The Fordham Institute, the tide of research shows that retention is good for kids, at least in elementary school grades. That’s if it’s done right.
This good news, however, raises a potentially game-changing, yet overlooked, question: If third-grade promotion gates are beneficial, why wouldn’t the same be true of comparable gates in grades K–2 that could prevent or mitigate deficiencies that accumulate between kindergarten and third grade?
Foundational reading skills are learned step by step up the grade ladder beginning in pre-kindergarten or kindergarten. Therefore, even under the most favorable evidence, third grade gates leave many, if not most, students below grade level in reading. For example, despite highly touted retention policies, the percentages of fourth graders achieving proficiency in reading in 2022 were 31 percent in Mississippi and 39 percent in Florida.
Thus, evidence and commonsense support promotion gates as early as pre-K or K. Yet, while many states call for extra assistance for early lagging readers, only a miniscule number have promotion/retention gates earlier than third grade. Why?
For starters, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) only requires annual testing beginning in third grade (which is too bad). And third grade is conventionally identified as the pivotal point when children must progress from learning to read to reading to learn.
But that’s usually too late. Reading scientists have long recognized that students who fall behind in kindergarten or first grade are also likely to never catch up—unless they receive before third grade the kind of intensive interventions that third-grade promotion gates are intended to trigger.
In an interview, Jarrod Bolte, a reading expert whose organization works in classrooms with early reading teachers, told me, “The chance to teach children to read is often lost by the end of first grade.”
The way forward, then, is to prevent students from falling behind in the first/earliest place through effective implementation of three-tiered instructional frameworks known as RTI (Response to Intervention) and MTSS (Multi-Tiered Systems of Support). (Sometimes, RTI and MTSS are used interchangeably, but, in practice, RTI is used more often when the focus is early academic interventions.)
In fact, laws or regulations in most states and federal laws like the Every Student Succeeds Act and the Individual with Disabilities Education Act already require or strongly encourage RTI as early as kindergarten, first grade, and second grade. Experts in the field attest, “Third grade retention is a last resort if years of [prior] intervention and support have not been enough.” Ed Trust notes that money spent on the extra years of school because of retention, including third grade promotion gates, can be better spent on early RTI.
Nonetheless, the American Institutes for Research, the leading center for RTI research and practice, cannot name any state or local school system that has successfully implemented a comprehensive MTSS framework at scale. I asked Sarah V. Arden, who heads the AIR division on RTI practice, to explain this, and she wrote me, “Full implementation is extremely challenging. There remains considerable work to be done. However, there are pockets of excellence.”
Leading states include Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. My conversations with leaders in each of these states revealed ambitious efforts that were making progress but still falling short of statewide scale-up.
How can the RTI landscape be so underdeveloped, even as educators struggle to combat the nation’s literacy crisis? The picture varies from state to state, but here are the most common obstacles.
Lack of funding. RTI up front will save many times what retentions and illiteracy cost our nation. Still, it’s a hard political sell since well over half of U.S. students are likely to require expensive evidence-based tutoring in Tiers 2 and 3.
Failure to follow evidence-based best practices. Neglect of the science of reading and chronic mismanagement are currently on display as school systems nationwide fail to spend efficiently the huge infusions of federal Covid-19 relief funds. RTI has suffered for decades from similar inattention to the research behind it and weak implementation.
Guilt by association with special education. IDEA was amended in 2004 to encourage the use of RTI before struggling students were found eligible as learning disabled. However, special education advocates fear, with some justification, that poorly implemented RTI systems will delay proper referrals to special education. The issue has tended to give RTI a bad name.
Lack of evidence of effectiveness. To borrow from the English philosopher G. K. Chesterton’s famous axiom about Christianity, RTI has not been tried and found wanting, but it has been found difficult and left untried. Moreover, naysayers neglect data showing compelling proof of the effectiveness of high-dosage tutoring, the most essential element of RTI Tiers 2 and 3.
If our nation is ever to fulfill the civil right to read, these obstacles must be overcome. Policies that include developmentally appropriate promotion gates beginning in kindergarten are a place to start.
